Building Web3 | European Blockchain Convention

foreign [Music] hello everyone thanks for coming today we're going to be talking about uh building web3 I am an old sword I'm the CEO at games for living and today we have here Justin from Estella as well as Anthony from rf0 so it's after a really great if you give an introduction to yourself and your company sure I my name is Justin rice I am the VP of ecosystem at the Stellar development foundation we are a foundation that supports a layer one blockchain technology called Stellar Stellar's been around for a while um since 2015 which makes it ancient for a blockchain and to date it's really been you know sort of launched with the limited repertoire of transactions it's really been focused on payments um it's designed for to make it easy to issue assets to convert assets is really used a lot for cross-border payments and crucially it has really good on and off ramps so people issue stable coins and then there are all different ways to sort of like actually deposit in order to get those stable coins onto the network some of those on and off ramps actually include MoneyGram all the MoneyGram locations are many MoneyGram locations you can walk in and actually put cash on the counter and get onto the network via cash which is pretty amazing but in terms of building web 3 what is now happening is that Stellar which has been around for a really long time which processed over a billion transactions in the last quarter alone we are now adding to it or building out a new smart contracts platform called sorbon so we're going to take what Stellar has which is these great on and off ramps this great tooling this history of reliability and uptime and this ecosystem of different projects that are actually making payments happen and we're going to add to it the ability to actually build D5 protocols to actually build web 3 through this new smart contracts platform soroban and so a lot of for me what I'm excited about what how I'm think about building web 3 has to do with right now when we are trying to bootstrap an entire ecosystem around the new smart contracts platform that can plug into those on and off ramps and so that's kind of what I'm here to talk about right how do we do that by supporting people like you to actually come be first to Market in a brand new sort of Greenfield smart contracts ecosystem awesome thank you Justin so Anthony please if you go introduce yourself and your company yeah uh hi everyone my name is Anthony Zolciak and I'm with olive zero um similarly to Stellar we're also a layer one um and also about to launch our smart contract so that's the fun part um where we focus though in most of our efforts though is privacy and especially programmable privacy so we combine zero knowledge snarks with um secure multi-party computation and then want to make it in a purely software based fashion without trusted execution environments and what that means is that essentially the capabilities of that platform should be a bit broader and then when it comes to the sort of General General next steps we're about to launch our ecosystem funding program to support developers builders and yeah just start with pushing the adoption of the protocol and the network um the olive zero Foundation was incorporated in 2018 we launched the mainnet in 2021 um so we're not you know um haven't been as long around as long as Stellar but very excited to see what's coming hey thank you Anthony so uh regarding building web 3 one really key part will be uh the content itself and the quality of the content that will drive uh adoption and that will drive users uh to the uh all the new technology of web3 now it will be great to know uh what you guys are doing in order to help on this uh quality content coming to web3 yeah I mean it's interesting when you say the the content is what web3 needs I mean in a lot of ways Stellar as a layer one is is actually infrastructure that people build products and services on and so if you kind of think about the model that we're using it's almost like an app store right like we are creating a platform we are trying to get third-party developers to actually build the applications the protocols the tools that are necessary to create the ecosystem that makes that platform work um and that makes that infrastructure work right so in a way I think the model that we have is kind of like the DAP store and right now or any kind of app store I I I I I guess it would be dapps but more like an app store um I I think that right now the question for me is not so much how do we the foundation create content it is how do we create an environment incentives tooling and resources that allow you to third-party uh developers to actually build the apps that create a robust ecosystem and fill out what is essentially like a whole Suite of products and services that make people excited to actually use an interop operates so that it's all kind of working together uh yeah but just um you know both I think stellar and Us in opposition to like standard app stores that you know from the mobile world there's no like 30 cut or anything it's a more of a foundation driven grant program where um the the funds are given to developers to different projects to experiment with the network to bring traffic to the network and to build out the tooling and the ecosystem and uh broadly speaking like what we saw that's somewhat lacking in the market on the on the sort of within the funding programs of different environments was that um not a lot of um sort of projects go beyond um funding and go beyond this initial support so we thought that it might be a good idea to to try and set up a sort of like a 360 support program where we go from um you know interjections and support of on the legal and operational side to marketing to Business Development to also funding and just going from very very early stage where there's just like two or three people trying to build something new to actually going to Market and then scaling further I'm so very excited to see where that goes cool I just want to say I think that's a really good point that like app store charges you 30 percent in both of our cases you'll probably get paid right yeah it's like it's literally the other way I think you guys now there's always been this debate since I started on web3 there's always all this discussion about centralization the centralization and look at friends of mine and I asked them I have a minority that bought a crypto not using a centralized exchange and then a manager it did update through a centralized exchange when it comes to nfts there is a lot of traffic going in a centralized platform so we see all these coexisting of the both walls uh in the in the world of web3 what is your take on that in terms of your platform your good Envision for present and vision for future Anthony sure so I I think this starts with the this age-old ux debate where centralized platforms are just more convenient and more intuitive and whether that's you know an exchange or an application or a wallet is just easier to use something that is centralized you just provide your email or your phone number or something like that and um yeah you're squared away and normal users oftentimes oftentimes don't think of the risks associated with that as much as they don't think about counterparty risk when um when using different centralized tools um so I think we as in generally as an industry have a still you know it's it's getting in insanely better like over the last like a year and a half two years but we still have a long way to go as far as usability of decentralized products and raising awareness of what that really means and then in the context of building a layer one um and bringing it to actually you know becoming decentralized like properly decentralized uh we're on our way uh we're on we launched a validators program around two months ago like an external validators program so we have over uh 100 of them 117 to be exact um and there's so there's there's that um the sort of holders of the underlying token are also um fairly distributed there's over 45 000 of them uh which foreign network is quite good um so yeah like um right now what we're looking into heavily is uh social recovery on the wallet side account abstraction as well um so very excited how I'm very much looking forward to see how the wallet landscape actually is going to look like um after the zero knowledge technology becomes sort of more well known and adopted cool thank you what about you Justin sure yeah I mean I think that what's interesting is that the I believe there always will be a place for like centralized um services for consumers as well as decentralized services and and and and I think that what's crucial is that consumers are people people in general should have should have a choice right they should be able to say do I want to trust some third party do I understand who they are and I want them to assume like sort of the risk and I believe that that's the right move or do I want to own everything myself and I think that like it is there are it is true that there needs to be a lot of improvement on the decentralized side especially in terms of applications in order to bring them to parity with centralized interfaces I don't necessarily think it's vital that all Central all centralized interfaces all centralized resources go away in fact I think whether or not like even before there's parity in terms of the actual consumer experience I even think that centralized uh entities that are using back-end decentralized infrastructure like blockchain networks can get certain advantages right so in the example of Stellar by having a decentralized network infrastructure that actually connects to different on and off ramps it even allowed centralized entities to provide consumers oftentimes better cross-border payment experiences especially if you're going to locations that don't necessarily have great connections to correspondent Banks right like so I think even decentralized infrastructure even with centralized interfaces offers advantages in terms and that consumers should be able to choose between the two but ultimately I definitely agree with Anthony that like on the decentralized side it is really important to continue to work to improve user experience and by doing things like the account recovery or account abstraction that he's talking about on Stellar there is a thing called recovery servers there's this open spec sep 30 that like sort of explains how to set it up and the more that we can come up with innovative ways to sort of bring mirror the the good things about the centralized user experience on the decentralized side I think the more that decentralized decentralized like options will become real for most end consumers thank you so another another question that I have for you um regarding um building web 3 is to my experience when I left loads of new markets that grew massively that comes go from uh when the internet appeared then we had web 2 with Facebook then we had the apps all of those growth went to a hundreds and then billions of users when I've seen all of that there is mainly two drivers one is of course the continents we're pointing out but another one is the business models and that continuously evolves as well as the content and that drives more traffic in terms of business models uh Justin what are you uh guys providing or what what's your vision especially for this next year and the next coming years uh on what what you can guys help on on web3 on building web 3 in this in this sense yeah sure I mean I guess I probably said this like 25 times now but one great thing that Stellar offers is its access it has great on and off ramps that includes cash in Via MoneyGram locations right so now imagine when we add when the smart contracts platform launches suddenly for Builders there's the ability to like sort of come up with innovate come up with novel Solutions even copy solutions that exist in other ecosystems in this new like sort of saurabhan which is the name of the smart contracts platform in the new saurabhan ecosystem the advantage there is that those applications will have access to all of the on-ramps that Stellar already has so years of building connections to real world infrastructure now suddenly the ability to create novel um sort of defy and other Financial Solutions and governance Solutions via Smart contracts put those together like what happens when you add cash to D5 like what is the outcome I think that it gives Builders like the opportunity to launch project products and services that actually reach consumers that we're not currently reaching right sort of this underrepresented cash economy of consumers that suddenly will be able to actually use D5 protocols it will actually get like that will actually get get the benefits of financial inclusion so I think it's you know smart contracts plus access equals something awesome perfect what about you Anthony yeah uh sure so um as you know we're we're I would say where where Stellar is also a general purpose platform but focuses on cash to defy uh we're focusing on the what private on what privacy brings and what new sort of use cases can be utilized um thanks to this this technology stack um and then from the applicants to the to the you know ecosystem program what we're seeing is a lot of focus on for instance decentralized sorry uh privacy enhanced voting or decentralized private governance um which is quite interesting um then different uh SSI and decentralized identity products which can be then sold both to you know they have a standard web 2 business models uh you just build out a software as a service platform uh so we're seeing more and more um like uh products mimic mimicking the business models that we already know that are building on top of on top of lf0 and as for like the the both stellar and our business model per se it's it's literally just transaction fees and it's a token based economy so it's sort of hard to compare that to to what's uh what's out there in the web to world oh yeah it's it's definitely different but we have a lot of like in our case we're working on business models and we came up with a solution for gaming because as you know gaming is going through a lot of trouble lately uh but we are really confident we came up with a solution that improved the original model one of the expertise that I have myself is uh opening new markets for gaming regardless of what the platform is we did it with.com then with Facebook then with the app store and then we went back to the content to the App Store because the micropayments were not available in the App Store at the beginning so lots of cycles and and I I see a lot of opportunities and you'll see some of that when we release the the games ourselves and you'll see so many approaches to business models and I think we're going to see a lot on the gaming space we'll see a lot of growth in the next a year uh like starting on on Q2 this year now um regarding the overall topic which is like how uh building web 3 uh as a general Vision what do you see it's going to are going to be the key things like the key Milestones are going forward especially in your spaces and your Platforms in the next like two years or so uh Anthony sure so um well definitely finalizing the the Privacy side of things so the zero knowledge part on our side is is pretty much done obviously still requires some some work um then by the end of the year maybe beginning of the next our CTO is sitting there so maybe he won't kill me but we we're hoping to to release the MPC uh MPC part of things um and then like just focus on building this out like we had a discussion by I think in December where we were planning out this year and we set out to to enable sort of 50 different teams to build on top of Alf zero and you know we focus on how can we get there then we had this um also idea that five to ten of them should be strictly privacy focused and utilize what's actually the USP of the platform beyond the scalability scalability side of things so um really we just want people to use out of zero and we're doing whatever we can to make it happen um so that's pretty much the goal for the next two years three years and then probably the next you know couple years as well hey thank you Justin yeah it's always good to make promises about a technical roadmap when you're a CTO is sitting in the room gotta hold them to it I don't think it's going to end up um I think yeah I mean for for Stellar I think that the actual technical achievement that will happen I promise is that we will launch sorbon this year probably in the towards the end of the first half of the year so soroban will bring smart contracts to Stellar but between now and then we're like really trying to hustle to bootstrap an ecosystem we don't want to launch a smart contract protocol to the cold we actually want it to be launched to what I I picture as a minimum viable ecosystem so I want one of everything at least one of everything right so every tool every protocol every dap every educational resource that exists in a thriving defy ecosystem and a thriving smart contracts ecosystem I want one of each of those to be ready for launch and that means that to do that like we are really we have created a super accelerated grants program the Stellar Community Fund which you can apply to right now at communityfund.stellar.org the idea is that we're going to give away a lot of Grants all around the hundred hundred fifty thousand dollar range to basically build out in a few months some sort of initial take at one of these things that exists in another ecosystem that doesn't yet exist in sorbon so if you want to be like first to Market in whatever it is that exists you can literally go there say okay I'm going to build this on sorobon and create the first one goal is for people like you we actually arrive at that date of mainnet launch with a vibrant ecosystem and start from day one with like capitalizing on the utility that you get when you combine cash with D5 right Justin Anthony thanks a lot for your time it was great having you here today and sharing your reasons on on building web free thanks a lot thank you everyone [Applause]