A Killer Ecosystem by Joseph Lubin (Devcon4)

[Music] [Applause] the decentralization ethos arose over recent years due to a backlash with respect to the operating structure of the financial world loss of trust and centralized institutions like national governments and the hypothesis that top-down command and control may have served humanity well when communication and decision-making were slow and expensive but now we have global instant comms and can make decisions together within 15 seconds on aetherium even if up to half half of the actors on the network or malicious this makes decentralization as an organizing principle viable for all sorts of systems hierarchical organizational structures are often rigid not agile or responsive they suffer from decision making near the top far from the situated awareness managers and hierarchies tend to silo information to keep power decision-making is often slow because the authority to do so is layers above creative problem-solving and innovation don't tend to thrive or survive in rigid hierarchy it can be soul-crushing for most in a corporate pyramid experimenting with decentralized architectures holds much promise these systems can be flatter more fluid and more effective we and our many cousins in the decentralization ecosystem have much to explore together the theorem project and community are dedicated to radical decentralization as much decentralization as is practical the theorem governance in forward progress of the platform is proceeding in a decentralized fashion as it always had with many classes of actor core devs devs researchers security auditors miners pools exchanges hardware manufacturers software firms the vocal community industry pundits regulators and even legacy finance industry experts with no familiar familiarity let alone understanding of the facts all weighing in when the bigger decisions are being made I know real if you're watching thanks for taking time to do a bit of research Vlad's governance 101 post recently kicked off a new round of fruitful discussions we have all much work to do on this front fortunately it's proceeding in a decentralized fashion as an aside and before I dive into the talk I would like to call it Vitalik s-- leadership it is leadership by doing an example never by Fiat Vitalik has remained in the background with respect to various issues at a time intentionally out of concern that his words might be weighted too heavily this is what I think of as leadership in the area of decentralization I don't think anything can begin significantly decentralized and aetherium certainly started in one man's cranium but Vitalik from day zero has been doing his best to empower people and to continuously open the project as many as have many others of course but if we consider the responsibility the world has heaped on his shoulders and the that the trolls and the idiots on the interwebs sling at him it's one of the most historic stories heroic stories I know with integrity with integrity genius and grace Vitalik goes about his business doing a job that even a decentralized army of crypto heads have trouble keeping up with similarly consensus started one in started in one individuals head but decentralized rapidly since the beginning we've been threading the needle between practical forward progress and decentralization our goal always is to build better systems and we believe that decentralized architectures will usually win out more so as the technology matures and scales consensus is dedicated to building appropriately decentralized systems but also to walking the walk working to decentralize ourselves throughout we started as a venture production studio intending to build taps wrap them in companies and put them out for investment we spun out a few projects and continued continue to do so but we've also been able to be patient with many more we consider consensus of fluid mesh of projects and companies all sharing some DNA and internally we refer to it as the mesh early on necessity drove infrastructure invention Tim Coulter's work on DAP store led to a set of scripts that evolved over time into the truffle suite on month on Monday night a go truffle on Monday night the truffle team was gathered as the counter flipped over on the 1 million full download huge congrats to the team Baron Davison later Dan Finley and the meta math team rescued us all from having to tell users to go download and sync death before add app can connect to the network they remain on the bleeding edge of the technology but labored tirelessly to ensure that nobody gets hurt deep respect to the team for always choosing the safer path for the end user yet continually breaking new ground for the ecosystem as we see in the 15-second Mobile meta Mass new wallet import Stephane George and Martin Kopelman of gnosis began with the dream of enabling liquid financial markets for all of our issues and decisions they piloted the prediction market technology and they've built and they've also built core infrastructure the multi-sig wallet which protects billions in value gnosis safe and Dutch X an exchange that removes the ability for a centralized party to corrupt the fairness of token exchanges in 2015 the in Fuhrer team Michael wheeler more easy Peter Zack in eg Galano and now so many more helped out some consensus projects by consolidating our internal test Nets by DEFCON 2 they had externalized the service and offered it to the world by DEFCON 5 we expect to have an open inferior protocol that enables anyone to get paid to run nodes that bundle different protocols these and so many more infrastructural elements are helping to rapidly mature a theorem and turn it into a foundational element of the decentralized world wide web these are some of the reasons that ray Valdez while at Gartner estimated that the etherium developer community was 40 times larger than the number two IBM's fabric community viewport should probably be in that infrastructure list as well the U port team is dogged leaks florid identity and reputation since early days at consensus when we realized we needed an identity construct they would not just enable access to apps via a single sign-on but also present the world with an alternative to the exploitative business models that are enabled because the web never had a native identity construction you port iterated solutions over the years collecting constraints and concerns and whittling its offerings down to a minimal yet sufficient decentralized offering one that doesn't even need a blockchain but can certainly benefit from one and in turn provide great benefit to a theorem the airport team is a founding and steering committee member of the 56 company decentralized identity foundation whose mission is to build an open-source decentralized identity ecosystem for people organizations apps and devices where decentralized identities like you ports are anchored by blockchain IDs linked to zero trust data stores like three box for instance and are universally discoverable on a theorem and other platforms interoperability across platforms as an essential goal and self sovereign identity and personal information should be fully under the control of the individual as we turn web to business models upside down and architect web 3 services to be user centric you port in three box personal data Locker facilitate interoperation from the perspective and to the benefit of the user please check out you ports new developer libraries version 1.0 just released last week theorem is emerging is one of the foundational components of a world computer a web 3 flavored constellation of inter operating protocols web 3 the decentralized worldwide web would consist of many decentralized protocols for trusted transactions automated agreements smart software object storage bandwidth heavy compute identity reputation proof of location legally enforceable agreements certificates resources and asset tokenization like for kilowatt hours and equities and real estate synergies among various projects on a theorem are more easily achieved than in the web to world as the platform can be considered a single execution space interoperation within a theorem or across protocols is what will enable us to move beyond siloed walled garden approaches on the web and in the business world leaving the us-against-them ethos behind in making collaboration standard across applications within sectors and industries and along value chains like supply chains or content creation and sharing the new trust foundation enabled by the radically decentralized that they're in base layer is what is facilitating this evolution towards collaboration it is trustful collaboration even with those who don't know even with those you don't know or with whom you compete that will enable a world of decentralized actors to thrive as they no longer have to depend on the embedded intermediaries the music companies the banks the law firms insurers brokers and existing sharing economy companies who currently provide necessary trust and from that privileged position suck up much of the value in their sectors in these early days the ecosystem is being built out by the builders largely for the builders yes we've attracted financial and speculator types but mostly it is about devs engineers entrepreneurs and cybersecurity professionals these are the people who are bidding in maturing the components in the standards elements like different styles of tokens swap protocols and exchanges data feeds markets IOT protocols registries name services legally and automatically enforceable agreements and certificates hundreds of components like these are composable into a compelling app because the theorem is all about easy synergy and standards that ensure exchanges while it's swap protocols and other tools can interoperate with what is built the theorem is where standards are being forged while protocols that consensus have a high degree of autonomy we emphasize rich communication collaboration and Inter operation among teams as much as possible the standard bounty bounty smart contract integrates with git coin so devs can easily fulfill open source bug bounties air swap plugs in stalkers prediction market Meridius tokenized real estate platform and offers browser so users can swap ERC tokens instantly bounties maker dower working together to verify ocean cleanups aragon Dharma Zeppelin and several other projects share technical docs on the Kauri knowledge network and encourage their communities to contribute tutorials and help one another so that we can build together faster Carrie get coin and bounties Network are enabling us and others to get more work done better and faster these platforms enable dynamic workforce assembly enabling us to have smaller focus teams and bring more global and often specialized talent into our projects and for the developer bounty hunters on those platforms they can work on what they want when they want enjoy diversity of projects get paid at higher hourly rates if they choose to work faster and work from anywhere in the world in both parties that they like each other can choose to solidify the relationship into a long term employment consensus builds protocol-based open platforms that represent collections of people and businesses inhabiting various collaborative roles in a network of services we expect this approach will unify in flat in many industries enabling smaller groups to interoperate with one another to get the same work done more effectively than current monoliths in industries like financial services entertainment and law the protocol-based open platforms can be stacked upon our interoperate with one another an open music industry platform like you Joe enabling artists to directly interact with their consumers or with other artists can reside on aetherium an open event management and ticketing platform can sit on or alongside huge-o enabling artists to coordinate gigs directly with venues a blocking platform can link to music on you Joe and get paid for curation and an insurance platform can provide a parameterised insurance policy that protects the band pushing more and more functionality into these open Network business platforms will enable more people to connect to these systems with their self sovereign identity so that they can have an inter mediate 'add agency on all of these platforms enabling greater satisfaction in their livelihoods and broader wealth distribution pundits attacked our space with accusations that there have been no killer apps I disagree file sharing platforms could be considered the first killer app of the decentralization space while piracy is a problem these systems pioneered revolutionary approaches to distribution and disintermediation great value accrued to the Pirates since then Apple and Spotify have shown that if price points and ui/ux are good people will just pay for the music rather than stealing it now we just have to build platforms that enable artists to directly access consumer so that content creators can disintermediate the entertainment companies and get directly paid last night Oh Joe music crested 1,000 artists on its creator on its content creator portal the second killer app has to be crypto currencies themselves with millions around the world benefiting from better ways of transferring or storing value especially in developing nations the third killer app is the creation issuance distribution exchange and management to so many different kinds of crypto assets pretty much all of which is happening on aetherium projects are being funded and infrastructure for a next generation natively digital economy is being built to the tune of tens of billions of dollars that clear and settle on a theorem every day but the pundits don't notice because the benefits accrue in a decentralized fashion pundits are having trouble recognizing these killer applications because they don't reward existing intermediaries or pile stacks of value into new intermediaries but many lives are improving in referring to the lamenting over lack of an obvious killer app Vitalik said the killing will be death by a thousand cuts decentralization is the killer organizing principle it's ushering in the web three world watch chains are the killer automated trust foundation promoting synergy and collaboration and a theorem is the killer ecosystem an ecosystem that will transform global economic social and political systems and of course there will be killer apps on a theorem that the pundits will recognize I expect with the many independent layer to scalability breakthroughs that are coming online every day we will see one or more in 2019 applications in gaming journalism law supply chain financial products journalism music and other Nicias will breakthrough into the consumer space the user user experience once in a game for instance should be excellent but blockchain UX in general might be a bit clunky to start just as web 1 and free web experiences were to address this the consensus Design Group is developing a design system and language called Rimbaud similar to Google material but with many new elements unique to web 3 we're in the early era of decentralization looking at our wheedies centralized yet.com a theorem is in the lead with nearly 20,000 public nodes Bitcoin has nearly 10,000 q2 nearly 5,000 and - or 7,000 in - nearly 5,000 34 percent of ether is held in the top 100 accounts 19 percent of Bitcoin 75 percent of queue time and 15 percent of - as more dabs come online the ether number should shrink faster than the others Chinese miners dominate Bitcoin mining but this is not the case for a theorem I've seen lumber numbers as low as 13% for a theorem when proof of stake arrives the low barrier to entry and lack of efficiencies of scale will strongly decentralized validation of transactions on a theorem if theorem is foreign the lead as a viable candidate for the base trust layer and it may be a few years before our ecosystem achieves profound decentralization in the base and higher layers that's ok we can grow into a radically decentralized future as we have lots of adoption use case exploration and definition and ui/ux issues to take care of which will keep us busy for a few years one near-term killer app that started to gain traction is open law the business model of many law firms is to create irrelevant issues as much and as much detailed friction as possible and charge their clients by the hour to handle it the trillion-dollar global legal industry has enabled us to be more civil for a few hundred years but it has evolved into a pay-to-play manufactured gatekeeping function open law is a platform for blockchain based legally enforceable agreements the protocol ingests agreements and turns them into structured computable living objects embedded into agreements embedding into agreements variables that can be assigned values like names numbers and other complex logic that populate the document in these agreements one can tie the smart contract code to a real-world agreement which renders the entire transaction legally enforceable open law is developing a library of smart contract components that can be easily plugged into any arrangement clauses or agreements can be assembled like Lego blocks for example a party can grab a standard open law based escrow agreement and embed a smart contract test grow money tokens or other blockchain based assets actions can be triggered when conditions are met based on timing or injected or data evidence of agreements and the counterparty signatures are time-stamped on the blockchain while the plain text can be published or kept confidential open law enables peer-to-peer digital contracting our legal team worked with open law to create an aetherium based NDA generator accessible by all our teams as we are integrating open law solutions into many of our processes huija music for instance will soon use open law to enable artists to attach usage policies to their music for instant purchases of licenses for download streaming public performance synchronization or derivative works Rocket Lawyer a service with two with twenty million users is embedding various aspects of open law into its platform as we speak open law just released its library and API David you're out there to enable developers to build on top of open law it's converting tens of thousands agreements into blockchain compatible contracts and surfacing them through api's and agate lat github like platform type open law into youtube to see demos of decentralizing the deal or blockchain based lending or the end-to-end the purchase of and sale of real estate property it will be a holy moment for you the journalism industry is on life support radio TV print have been rolled up and are owned by a few holding companies or funds and are being milked the local news industry has been gutted we get our news today in sound bytes and snippets on hyper stimulating social media promoting basically binary views subtlety of issues and measure discourses lost in such a context how can we adequately govern ourselves healthy governance is breaking down in the face of overlapping exponential technologies that are being wielded by central powers we have these emerging tools self sovereign identity blockchain based transparency cryptography based voting systems liquid democracy and quadratic voting to experiment with but they're useless if we can't access information we can trust a project that is breaking through as we speak as civil a platform for ethical and sustainable journalism there are already 30-plus newsrooms on the platform websites and podcasts exploring topical or regional news it had a token sale for a consumer utility token there was the most and least successful token sale we've run most successful and that it attracted far more interested parties into the top of the marketing funnel than we had yet seen by an order of magnitude but the sale failed to reach its target for ui/ux reasons because these were normal people not crypto heads and because we made it a rigorous process forcing people to pass a test ensuring that they knew what they were doing and they were technically accredited to purchase tokens so the conversion rate of people actually able to unboard to the system was low but the platform will launch anyway and we will get know-how and tokens into the hands of the interested parties one way or another civil has a constitution in a foundation run by the former CEO of National Public Radio in the US newsrooms of Professional Journalists have formed written a charter and can soon attach themselves to a token curated registry by staking tokens if they act unethically their audience can challenge them and perhaps have them bumped them bumped off the platform The Associated Press and Forbes have committed to operating on the platform and more announcements are in the offing violent our supply chain track and trace product and team is reimagining a world where trust and transparency are incorporated into the goods we buy every day this summer the team working with the World Wildlife Foundation served yellowfin in albacore tuna that etherial participants in New York could trustingly consume able to track the journey of the fish from bait to plate via an app very soon you'll be able to experience the same as this technology rolls out to consumers buying tuna and retail stores the vayan team is applying the fundamentals of the bait to play technology to bring transparency to other consumer products imagine the ability to scan products from store shelves and get the origin purity etc from raw material through manufacturing to the end product all this verifiable and anchored on aetherium consensus invests in our product teams education and events and we Co venture with existing companies our ventures arm has made 30-plus investments in a theorem and related startups we're working to build out the token economy from defining standards and evolving legalities globally to the creation issuance exchange and management of tokens we see all of this as the evolving democratization of Finance yesterday we released the covin or Co venturing project Kovan is an open platform for venture capital investment on Kovan prospectors proposed companies for possible investment subject matter expert experts can diligence these projects facilitated by a staking game and investors can either challenge and capture the stakes or invest in the projects I expect it will improve access to capital while greater expertise is brought to bear to diligence projects and good projects get broader exposure and to end stakeholder ship consensus makes monetary investments but like all of you out there our dearest investment involves the heart and soul that we put into our work we're constantly working to apply our approach and our tools to our own internal prop organization and processes consensus endeavors to be a flat organization and we've developed novel software and processes to help us in that regard so bold I owe is a project that used to be called TMNT traditional management nullification tool we had to change the name for obvious reasons so ball dot IO is a cross between a corporate intranet LinkedIn and kill management software like systems designed to support holacracy teal organizations are or governance and day-to-day operations the teal paradigm envisions the company as an organism with various functional organs and lots of measurement processes and feedback loops designed to keep the organism healthy without traditional org charts and managers everyone can log into their Sobel profile from there you port we can see how consensus is organized as circles within circles with each having its own identity vision mission values operations and lifecycle people are associated with different projects and their percent of attention to those projects is depicted ok ours and KPIs can be defined for people in projects and soon an agreements tooling will be offered so that two people and people a person and a team or a team itself can Forge the operating agreements yes using open law by which they pledge to interact consensus members self-organized nobody tells anyone what to do we do we don't do 20% time at consensus we have 100 % time we as we prefer that everyone work on what they are passionate about as a result our organization requires new ways of taking responsibility and assuring accountability we're working to put processes into place that enables autonomous or decentralized governance and decision-making as much as possible each of our functional groups service circles like finance or legal product teams or companies it's a budget that is allocated often via peer driven process and it's free to chart its course for the most part which includes defining how it conducts its day-to-day and long range business we're working to have each of these groups wrap themselves in public api's so that others can know what is available and we will soon use open law to place SLA s on each API so a consumer of an API knows the terms under which the provider offers it with such living agreements available if a product team makes use of an offering from the marketing team data can be sent into the agreement that memorializes and conducts that interaction in compensation from the product team can flow to marketing based on measured performance we're in the early days of exploration of exploring what a decentralized company can be but the vision emerging is one of many autonomous units each operating as though they're embedded in an efficient free market the consensus mesh is a hybrid organization in various ways part software company our professional services consultancy part VC it is a hybrid in that it maintains structures required to operate in the legacy world especially in our finance HR and legal groups but it is also mapping out what we might what might be possible with respect to operating in the decentralized future as we get better in articulating api's and SLA s for our various functional groups we can imagine that even marketing HR finance and legal will be able to offer tools and services not just to our internal groups but to other companies as well our marketing group has recently started doing this under the catalyst brand legal we have some coders on the team is building software tools designed to protect consumers better in the new token economy with respect to dynamic workforce assembly Oppel is a project that we're close to enabling professional employment organizations to serve our ecosystem will evolve these into decentralized employment organizations so that many small companies in our space can band together to handle human resources needs and issues like get coin and bounties Network up lists will enable an increase in the velocity of work and enable individuals to engage in self sovereign employment balancing the power the developer with that of the organization that she develops for as many of our groups externalize their offerings and as we all evolve towards greater decentralization soon it won't be hard to imagine companies using our various services and effectively permissionless lee attaching themselves to the mesh one last item consensus believes investing in the ecosystem is critical perhaps now more than ever as this experiment that we've been privileged to be part of is moving towards usability by consumers and towards becoming globally systemically important we're also passionate about open source get coin and code fund enable open source developers to get compensated for their important work our protocol and systems engineering group Pegasus just released Pantheon a new Java based a theorem client that has synced to and running on main net now the code was open source on github a few days ago and released under the Apache 2 license we welcome Jim Jagielski to the mesh a few months ago Jim is one of the original eight Apache group members this evolved this evolved into him co-founding and directing the Apache Software Foundation and serving as a core developer on several several ASF projects at consensus Jim is our open source guru helping our projects with their open source strategy and mechanics a decentralized future is one worth imagining and investing in so we're excited to announce the new consensus Grants Program soon we'll be unveiling a $500,000 fund that will be dispersed in amounts of ten to twenty five thousand dollars successful projects in this round will be eligible for follow-on grants the Grants Program is an effort to encourage the growth of the etherium infrastructure layer with bounties and grants for open source projects grant awards will focus on infrastructure research interoperability usability and developer tools the cooperate with get coin in the Bounty's Network for some of the dispersals more information including categories and application process will be coming soon learn more and sign up for more information at this link consensus net / crap thank you very much [Music] you