Rebuilding the Crypto Economy through a Decentralized Workforce by Adam Jackson

okay so our next speaker um happens to be in the same industry that I'm in which is uh kind of in the future of workspace so this whole conference stuff non-conference stuff The Innovation festival stuff is my side hustle actually um so the future of work is a really important topic and it's a it's really the one use case that touches everybody so whether you have I mean if you're not interested in nfts or D5 yeah fine everybody's got their stuff but work everybody does it so without further Ado the founder and CEO of Brain Trust Adam Jackson hey everybody thanks for hanging in there for me I have a couple slides what I'm going to talk about today is rebuilding the crypto economy through a decentralized Workforce so first of all who am I you guys probably don't know who I am uh my name is Adam Jackson I'm uh I love pain and torture so I'm a four-time entrepreneur um co-founder of a digital asset fund called Cambrian uh also co-founder of a decentralized talent Network called Brain Trust uh active investor in the space since probably 2016. uh and we also make some wine uh every bottle comes with an nft you don't need to do the nft you can just open and drink it but we just bottled that it's called asymmetric so I'm going to zoom out and just kind of start with painting the macro economic scene this is going to be a little gloomy at first but I promise it gets better so you know right now we have low unemployment but interest rates are rising and the FED has said they're going to keep Rising until demand is gone housing crash is on the horizon is it technically a recession I don't know but it's getting painful so what happens in recessions Mass layoffs interest rates go up Capital dries up it becomes harder to fund new projects and employers rotate out of full-times and move out to contractors obviously everybody in this room knows Tech and crypto are really taking the brunt of this there's been almost 300 000 Tech layoffs in the last four quarters I was astonished to read there was more layoffs in crypto in January than there were in November when FTX went down uh as predicted big Tech is rotating out of full times and into contractors and startups are going under because they can't continue to get funding so it's a tough time at the bottom of the cycle here with tech so is it a recession I don't know we got layoffs High rates Capital drying up uh contractors coming in to sub for full times feels like a recession oh and The Regulators are here and they're pissed uh so there's bad news good news here bad news you know as Joe Lubin was saying you know there's this continued lack of clarity the the stablecoin fight is kind of the latest one that's a little bit scary regulation via enforcement makes it really hard to run a business uh and then this operation choke point is is clearly working uh you know signature or uh silvergate just going down uh this week that's Cod hope signature doesn't too uh but there's good news uh the opaque offshore fraud business model is now unfundable I'm sure we'll get all kinds of new regulation thanks to SPF uh but I don't think it'll matter because if you're doing thing everything off chain and you don't have any risk management and you're hiding out offshore Sequoia and all the other big funds you know have kind of learned their lesson and are going to do more diligence next time uh and so that really the silver lining of this is it pushes a lot of this off-chain offshore stuff unchain it was a you know a a really kick in the butt for this whole industry I think and uh and the good news is code is still law so crypto needs regulation so let's make the regulator's job easier I was pausing for Booze there you can save them to the end if you want um but look I mean to be honest the space can't grow without Common Sense regulation and enforcement to force out the Bad actors and good actors people those of us building actual things that don't involve fraud will be helped by good regulation um so the antidote here obviously is transparency via Smart contracts and open source code so how bad is it for crypto right now and how bad will it be next year I don't know look I think we've kind of seen all the Carnage we we can get knocking on wood as long as I think coinbase hangs in there and tokens aren't completely banned in the US I think we'll be fine I spent a fair amount of time in DC there's still a lot of bipartisan support for this industry Senators Jilla Brandon lummus put something forward last year that won't become law but there's there's a lot of lawmakers that still really believe in this space uh even after the FTX crash um and so I think look after this purge this nuclear winter we're living through last year and probably probably more of this year uh crypto will be the best position it's ever been to survive recover and really build amazing stuff so getting back to the recession I actually think crypto will help the macro economic recovery while helping itself so like how do you get out of a recession first is you increase productivity so like how could I have a presentation here without mentioning Ai and gbt and all that but Brain Trust is a really large developer Network and we actually hold our Engineers uh over the last couple weeks and ask them like do you use code you know AI based tools to help you I was shocked actually it's like 78 use some tool chat GPT was the most popular one and then something like two-thirds of them say there's like a real meaningful efficiency gain so that's awesome right I mean it's like I don't know about like chat GPT tricking reporters into committing adultery or cheating your way through college those are like fun use cases but I don't think they're going to help us get out of a recession this will though so how you know how what else you need to do to grow out of a recession increase opportunity so it used to be you had a slog to a cube farm and sit in traffic and show up you know wherever the employer wanted you to show up uh when we started Brain Trust which is a network that connects Tech workers with clients that need them is it you know it's owned by the talent we started in 2019 we were pitching this to clients and they were like yeah remote work yeah maybe that'll work but you know we really want people in the office after March 2020 became the new normal so lucky break there um and then finally this is like the crypto part this is the part I get really excited about is getting rid of the middleman building user-owned networks that replace corporations when forming capital and allocating resources like the Dows we were just talking about all the other decentralized networks we talked about this week this is what blockchain is built for right we replace the corporate middleman's margin with a user-owned network that gives the value back to the users I'll get more specific here so you know Talent is really the primary driver in this recovery I think so kind of just breaking it down like old Way new way the old way corporations of Warehouse talent and underutilize them while torching them in a cubicle Farm I've been there big consulting firms will rent out talent to their clients at a monster markup I'll just give you like a real like set of data points that we've seen at Brain Trust is we can't name the firms but like we'll have a very large Bank we'll come on to branches and say we need talent and then we'll we'll have a consulting firm that used to Service uh that bank with you know let's say Java developers and like developers will find out about Brain Trust and come over and say like wow that's what the bank is paying them like the actual numbers were uh the bank was being charged 425 dollars an hour for Java developers and the developers were making 75 an hour but plus health care right and like steady work so that's quite a spread right for just being in a consulting firm and so that's where like a lot of growth branches is seeing is actually those contracts flip over and then the bank will pay a little bit less but the developer will get way more and then there's that Healthcare piece too right that's important so we're getting to that so um that's the old way the new way is decentralized Talent networks eating up this margin and connecting these two and getting rid of the middlemen so replace the high fee middlemen with software and smart contracts their margin is our opportunity so Brain Trust is a network I work on that does that get coin is phenomenal Network that you know connects bounties uh with people who can who solve them in a decentralized way uh tawali is a decentralized network of knowledge workers like accountants uh and then the healthcare piece which you know if you're American you know how painful it is to get health care as a independent and uh um standing on obelis's stage right now but Brain Trust integrated them last year and it's really popular so you know I like pictures to make things a little simpler poor Milton so the vision here really is what we call kind of unbundling of corporate America knowledge workers and hopefully soon gig workers will get to leave their corporate jobs join a user-owned decentralized talent Network and work when they want for whom they want get paid more because that piece the middleman was taking now makes their wages higher and still get access to Great benefits brought to you by crypto not just for scammers anymore that's all I got thanks guys [Applause]