BBW25 - Day 2 - Government Applications: Civic Participation

Hello. Hello. Okay, we're going to have a great conversation around government applications of blockchain, specifically civic applications. Um, so please join me in welcoming Michael AF who's the founder of Star Seed Technologies, Raone Perez, who's the executive director of the digital democracy project and Foo Styles who is an ambassador with Stand with Crypto and founder of the AI crypto council. This conversation is going to be led by Jonathan Murray who is a XDC network ambassador with the XDC community.

Thank you very much. [Applause]

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Perfect. All right. Well, thank you, Ian. Uh, great show so far. Uh, proud to be here.

Uh, for this segment, as he mentioned, we're going to do government applications with a focus on civic participation. Uh, my name is Jonathan Murray and for about two decades, I've been developing custom products and systems for largecale companies, government applications. I hold a patent on industrial automation and large-scale edge computing for uh power industry. And when it comes to blockchain, hi. When it comes to blockchain, uh I I guess I'm fairly new to the industry.

It's only been four years. Uh Fu here I guess has been a decade or so. So exciting. Um I started as the head of operations at the XDC Foundation. It's a layer 1 blockchain.

And today I focus on helping community members build their applications. And so I'm excited about this panel uh to talk about applications. All day even yesterday we've been talking about and listening to governments and how government and blockchain is changing um engaging in crypto companies going public the Genius Act for stable coins. All of that's been discussed today, but there's been very little conversation about civic participation, right? How do we get the people involved?

And so there was one piece of news uh during my evaluation, which was that the US published uh recent GDP data on chain. That's it. And so our panelists today are here to really focus um and advocate for awareness of civic participation. And so let's dive in to get to know them. Uh, first let's meet Foo Styles.

Foo has been in the crypto industry for I called it eight years but I guess uh Bitcoin since you know 2012. So uh Foo's been around as a founder adviser investor and today she stands up here with us as an advocate for stand with crypto. So uh welcome Fu and can you give us a quick intro on your mission and uh stand with crypto? So um earlier this year uh standard crypto and Coinbase asked me to do some roundt talks uh with uh some house of representatives and um uh legislators and um I was able to convey to them why we needed to pass the Genius Act, why we needed to pass the Clarity bill. And so it happened.

So that was really cool. The Genius uh Genius Act got passed. So, I went up to Capitol Hill quite a few times already and um the main thing about I think this particular uh panel was that I'm just a regular person, a founder just like you and I was able to talk to my representative and make a difference. And really, I wanted to convey that it is all of our responsibility if we really believe in the work that we're doing in blockchain that this is possible and you can impact uh legislation. So,

awesome. Thank you. Uh, next we have Ramon Perez. Pronounced right? Perfect.

Uh, founder of the digital democracy project, bringing mobile voting apps and accountability systems to people. This is really the application, right? This is awesome. Can you give a quick intro to yourself, your mission, and just about the project at a high level?

Yeah, certainly. And um, appreciate uh you guys hosting. Um, we our goal is to empower voters to weigh in on legislation as it's being debated. So, we're using mobile voting software. This is real election software that's now being used in several states to let people vote on their phones.

It's on blockchain uh provided by a company called Votes based here in Boston. And we're just using it for a different reason. We're using it to let people weigh in on legislation and tell their legislators how they want them to vote on bills that are being debated in Congress. Before a vote is cast on the floor and then after that vote is cast, we compare what voters wanted in the app to how legislators actually voted on the floor on the same bills. So you get an apples to apples comparison to see how often are legislators actually doing what voters are asking them to do.

The Genius Act was one of the bills we carried, by the way, which was which was a cool I think. Yeah, absolutely. Um, but that's the basic idea. You know, we're we're trying to bring the a blockchain based and highly secure apparatus for binding elections where we verify voters, we find them on the voter file, we verify their identity and all that. Um, and just deliver a a 21st century adaptation of writing your congressman a letter, something to that effect, but doing it in a scalable digital way on blockchain.

Yeah. Awesome. Uh last we have Michael AF. Now I must admit we all joked about this when we were talking like it's Michael AF you know uh but seriously the founder of Star Seed Technology and a dev right he's an architect of the state OS a sovereign grade in uh infrastructure system built for public finance and so Michael tell us about yourself state OS and how you're uh enabling civic participation

uh sure thank you so uh I'm I'm a data scientist and uh at heart a reverse engineer. Um got involved with uh state politics uh about 20 years ago and recently about about six months ago got to learn more about the state incentives from uh tax credits, rebates, vouchers, so forth so on. And the biggest thing with states uh is they they find themselves with economic leakage. And so based off uh the data science, fintech and also blockchain uh it led me to creating a solution at the state level. Right now we have a LOI uh with Louisiana and the goal of it is is to take these uh state credits or these state incentives tokenize them geoence them and uh they must barter within the state.

So based off of our framework, we now uh have 17 patents, seven trademarks that um it would actually add to the GDP of the discretionary funds that gets distributed. So we're looking forward to our test net. We are pre-revenue, but uh plan to have the proof of concept by uh December.

Awesome. Well, welcome all. Uh Fu, let's kick this off. So, you've seen the evolution of the crypto market uh and you're out there advocating, talking to Congress all the time. Can you share a success story where Stand with Crypto has influenced safer or more private civic participation?

Uh well, I can I have actually a lot of uh metrics. So, we have uh actually over 2.3 million crypto advocates that joined our movement. Um, and we raised uh or we have over 200 million in donations. So, that helped with uh last year's election.

So, we're uh not bipartisan. Um and uh we have made over 800,000 policy maker contacts and we registered over a 100,000 pro crypto voters in five key states. So, that's a lot of work and success.

Yeah, that's awesome. And uh can you just give us a brief overview? So, I know right now you're pounding the streets and you're going to talk about the Clarity Act. Can you tell us why it's important for the people? I know we've heard about why it's important for banks and stable coins, but why is it important for the people?

Well, for the everyday user and also I'm going to say for builders, um there's it's just such a gray area here, right? And so, like being able to like I I don't know if I can invest in this or invest in that. So they're putting in uh clear regulation so that it's safe for AML KYC for Americans to invest in things and for builders. You know oftent times like I myself uh went abroad to Asia because I didn't think the regulatory framework here was safe to be building anything. So uh we want all these companies to build in America.

You know there's so many cool things that are happening and we don't want it to go offshore. We want it there. to that. I think those are the two most important things. We need market structure.

We need clarity. So

great. So we had a pre-talk and I was doing a little bit of research on on your project digital democracy project and I think even talking with Fu we're like a voting app makes so much sense on blockchain right and then but obviously in the US there's no regulated ID there's no national standard but we talked you're like well go look at India. So I did and I couldn't believe it. They have a a national blockchain technology strategy. They have a remote voting system, the digital rupee, their land records are on on the blockchain and just the list keeps on going on.

It was wild. And so I want you to dive into some of the advancements and obviously the obstacles that we're faced with uh with seeing the adoption in digital identification uh specifically. Yeah, I I I mean the India stack is really impressive and you know it begs the question, why don't we have an America stack, right? Why aren't we why aren't we leading on this on this issue? And in a lot of ways, why is our government so far behind in I mean Brazil just did a huge participatory democracy uh test where millions of of participants were able to verify their identity using their uh digital ident identification framework.

um weigh in on uh on public uh ideas that were being floated by the government, determine what they want to prioritize and had millions of u particip participants and then used AI to kind of do some topic modeling and summarize what and and prioritize based on what people's interests were. Um, and that was all using open- source, um, using using decentralized technology. And, and it begs the question, why can't we do that here? And a lot of my motivation for coming here and talking to this crowd is to find people working on pieces like that because I've been um, working with a lot of folks in the deliberatives space around something like an America stack. How do we get to a national deliberative infrastructure, which I I would like to see a we're currently using the votes blockchain, which is built on hyperledger fabric.

That's a commercial blockchain that's permissioned and all that, but I would like to see us get to a public blockchain for voting, right? That can still respect the secret ballot and then and the need to protect my private ballot, but still authenticate me against a voter file in a digitally cryptographically secure manner. So, um, that's where we really need to get to. And I I also just want to state really quickly, I don't know if you guys saw the news, it's been going on right now, but Charlie Kirk was shot at an event today. And whether you agree with the man or not is irrelevant.

The fact that he was shot for stating an opinion.

Yeah.

It tells me that like the level of political violence in this country means we have lost the capacity to talk to one another. And so much of the motivation for Digital Democracy Project is when when you take people out of that two-party system where they're like constantly pitted against one another in a tribal fashion and you give people a chance to actually just weigh in on the issues, you find that we're just not that far apart. There's a lot of gray area where people want to participate and a lot of these tools can make that possible in a way that our sort of traditional election system and two-party system has failed to do.

So, two questions, I guess. One would be um how are you currently looking at ID? How did your platform like manage the ID? And then the second one is

some people don't for the reasons you just explained don't want their vote known for

anonymity reasons, right?

How do you solve those those problems?

Yeah. ID is basically the same way that you see kind of PayPal and Venmo doing it where you where you upload a photo ID, you match it against a selfie scan, you have to do a livveness check. um then it finds you on the voter file for your respective state. But you know honestly it's that whole process is clunky and should be replaced with a tokenbased identific you know cryptographically secure identity token and and nobody's really got a good sol that is the best solution in the market currently but it's it's fraught with challenges obviously people move they don't update their address their vote their driver's license no longer matches their registration blah blah blah blah and so that's a challenge um the second part to your question I'm I'm Sorry.

Uh,

oh, it's a secret ballot. Yes.

Right. That's that's one of the reasons we chose to partner with votes was because they were designed as election software specifically to protect the secret ballot. So nothing goes on chain that is not uh encrypting PII. Um, and actually even that is, you know, they've been trying to design to be sort of quantum safe in the expectation that a lot of that the cryptography will be broken at some point. So even limiting what PII goes on chain so that it's really just a a vote token that goes on chain and can be decrypted once it comes off chain to verify for auditability purposes.

Sounds like some ZK sync needs to go on in there. Um, sorry, Fu. Uh, any idea on how, uh, stand with crypto, stand with crypto could amplify like this participation in voting and onchain or anything you're seeing on the on the ground that could bring this?

Yeah, I mean, we're all about uh getting people to use your stuff. So, we would love to I want to create a meeting with you immediately. What you're doing is incredible. I mean,

likewise.

Thank you. Thank you. But um yeah, I mean we can get you people numbers and we'll get them to use this.

You heard it on stage.

I mean why not? I'm just an ambassador, but I'm going to go talk to the people at the top. So

I mean I believe it's going to take all of us as a community effort. I mean this is what we actually did this as a nonprofit. You know, votes is a for-profit selling to supervisors of elections. That's their main market. We did this as a nonprofit because of the belief that not only do we need to be nonpartisan, but we need to design a community of effort if we want to save this democracy from the forces tearing us apart.

I mean, we need to be honest about the threats that we're under right now because again, look at what happened with Charlie today. Okay, political violence knows no part, you know, partisan it it's coming for everybody. We got to be, you know, so we as developers and designers in this community have a real part to play in in building the infrastructure and tooling that can bring us a 21st century version of democracy.

I mean, you just segueed. I you could have read my notes. Um, I want to switch over to Michael. So, Ramon is building this application, right? uh for voting, but it doesn't come without transparency to make your decisions and what you're doing at uh state OS.

It's just awesome. So, can you walk us through the types of data that state OS will be able to provide for financial oversightes for like public funding and and help make better decisions?

Yeah, sure. So, uh the biggest thing as these dedications go out, uh the auditability is is like a six-month delay. So some of these policy makers, lawmakers, they're dedicating funds, but it's like six months of manual audits. So with the blockchain technology, distributed ledger technology, you're able to get real-time auditing, real-time traceability, immutability um to help from any manipulation. So, uh, from the standpoint of having this, uh, tokenized funds at at a state level, uh, allows for lawmakers and policy makers to make better decisions in real time.

And, and I think that's the beauty of this technology. Uh, it's obviously got, uh, you know, more developments as we go. Uh but from our standpoint is once we're able to show the proof of concept on our end, I I think the policy makers are going to see this as a an open lane to start adopting. Uh more so ahead. I was going to say uh having talked to policy makers that there is so much information that they need help with and um as a community advocate trying to put working groups together to help educate them.

I think this would be very helpful. So

yeah, I want to pile into that too because I think it's amazing work because what we do at Digital Democracy Project requires people who are out like you creating data that we rely on. Um, for example, just scraping public websites just to tell us which legislator voted on what so we can pull that into our system. We've always wanted to do participatory budgeting, but getting actual budget data from the state level and seeing how appropriations are done is very difficult. Getting that data is hard. So, I love the fact that you guys are basically putting it on chain because it makes it so visible, right?

So to be even a able to say as a as a voter what are we would love to be able to put it into an app and say what are your priorities for spending and then match that up against the actual appropriations how money gets how money flows happen. So I think that's super cool.

Oh thank you and and a few other features as well is going to be AI components. So the policy makers and lawmakers from the you know data collections and aggregations that as they're building their next proposal that uh it would have you know some machine learning to be able to assist as well. So

and what are you going to need for your proof of concept just if I can help?

Yeah we we'll get together on that.

I mean she's already bringing people over there so she can bring you something too. Uh he did he stepped over it though but I want to step back a little bit. 17 patents. Holy smokes. Um, I found it fascinating uh that you're looking to recapture the uh local economic velocity.

And can you bring me through the technology that assist us?

Sure. So, um, you know, I I've been on different sides of the financial space, the ups, the the downs, rounds and rounds. Um, and so anyways, I just dove into learning more about it. uh how can technology advance my learning and understanding. And so seeing how banks functions uh how bering systems function uh how these dedicated funds work uh that if we if states are able to utilize their existing funds without raising taxes and able to barter them geoenced uh the magic number is seven.

Seven cycles gives an economic velocity rate before it offramps. So right now with the states uh their economic leakage is about 90 to 100%. So it's a straight expense. With our system with state OS uh it actually reduces that down to 40%. And so uh then it can offramp.

So with that is uh from the state I'm from, Louisiana, the teachers have been wanting a raise for for for years. And so based off that, the lawmakers are saying it will cost $200 million annually. Well, that would be a straight expense. Uh that would have to be increased taxes. With our system, they could actually budget it out, allocate it, and it would pay for itself in four years.

Wild. And you talked a lot of AI bringing that uh functionality to the people. I I you know looking at your platform reading some of the fine print.

It talked about using AI to sort of take a bipartisanship translation on the on the bills.

And so I want to ask you know how are you making sure that truly is bipartisan? How are you training the AI? Like bring us through So, when we started, we actually started um I'm I'm a Florida boy. I grew up in Miami and we actually started with the Florida legislature because it's a shorter session. We were reading the bills and summarizing the bills.

So, I had a Republican, a Democrat, and an independent working together to read these bills and summarize and check each other. But like the volume of legislation was just the ones that get voted on, you'd have anywhere between 50 and 100 bills in any given session. you're talking many thousands of pages of legal ease. It was a lot of work. Um we couldn't even keep up with the the volume of it.

And so we actually almost like mana from heaven AI sort of dropped in our lap and we're like, "Oh, we should use this to sort of accelerate our process." And we still keep the human in the loop to check the outputs. But now the first draft is basically um at this point we're at a GPT4 implementation for the summarization. And I could talk about the the latest five implementation, but GPT4 implementation for reading the the legislation and giving us a a human summary of what is, you know, esoteric legal language, um, as well as uh finding, okay, so breaking down what are the pros and cons of a given bill, how does it affect me, why should I support or oppose this bill, who are the organizations that have support or opposed this bill, a lot of that stuff would have taken countless less research time and now has been incredibly accelerated by by AI. But yes, you do have to keep human in the loop.

One, hallucinations, you kind of sometimes just get garbage. So we put lab layers of checks where multiple models will check each other. Two is the we do maintain vector databases of of prior legislation or vector databases of our kind of internal site and and that kind of stuff.

Do you use your own models sort of cross?

So we do not um we do not custom train models. These are out of the box models that are that we're using rag implementation. So it is it's a ve vector database of all of our prior documents that have been uh written the way we want them to written um the prompts designed the way we want them to but it is just a rag implementation not a fine-tuning of of one of the large models.

Gotcha. Um it feels like we were matchmaking up here today with voting and and statebased apps. Um, how might the tokenized incentives from your application uh reward civic participation and encourage more people to sort of vote?

Well, at the end of the day, I mean, the voters have the voice. So, uh, you know, they they obviously want transparency. I mean, you know, witnessing some of the waste, uh, especially at a state level, much less a federal level. um you know vote just voters able to know where the the money is going. Um you know one of my biggest goal is to remove income tax.

Um and so one of our features is a a DFT a digital fair tax and so it pays upon consumption and so with that that to me that's a huge incentive. Um so I think between technology and and just voter participation that the people's voice will be heard um to know where's the money going and so it it's a downstream effect uh but with the real- time auditability and traceability I think gives the value. So

yeah I guess I'll reframe it a little bit for you.

Um can you gamify your

That's what I was gonna say. That sounds cool. I was like, man, it would be great if you could essentially get uh tokens based on civic participation, right? I mean, that would be amazing. Like, you're basically reducing your tax burden by participating in in various forms of of civic engagement.

That'd be amazing.

Would you participate?

Of course.

Oh, man. All right, we have five minutes. Um, let me sort of open it up to to all of you. Maybe we'll start with Fu. Um, how will digital democracy tools uh using blockchain and AI technologies simplify the access to government services for everyday citizens?

Um, well, the idea of using DIDs in biometrics to me are like the pinnacle of what we need in today's society, you know. Um I I have lived in um Shenzhen, China for a year and saw that they were already doing these things and it was just like so easy to move about my everyday life from payments to doing everything and I was just like why don't we have that in America? So I think that's what we need to get to and you know like now we can do finally payments with the QR code but we were doing that like 10 years ago in Asia. So

yeah,

I'm excited that you're, you know, you guys are putting this technology together so we can finally do this

remote.

Uh yeah, I mean I do feel like we're behind in so many ways which is mindboggling giving given the level of expertise in this country. Um but so much of it comes to our sclerotic political system where a lot of innovation goes to die. I mean just being honest. So, a lot of that's why we're having to do it outside of the political system um and and find friends and allies working in this space to to kind of build these things ourselves because we can't guarantee that that the government will we actually did have uh government sponsorship for our work, a bipartisan appropriation in the Florida legislature um that we spent a lot of time working on with a lot of you know senators and members of the house of both parties. and then it was line item vetoed by Ronda Santis.

So you like you can't you can't guarantee that that government will step in and and take and push this innovation forward. So we really have to take the use cases to government and hopefully they'll see the value in it enough but ultimately once enough voters get on board it's almost like government is forced to adopt realistically.

Yeah we can go to Michael here. I mean you are building the technology for people to use right and you have a LOI with Louisiana like what's the life cycle going to be of adoption there?

Yeah so the the way to get the adoption it's going to have to be public private partnership. So um you know our goal is to lock in 10 20 year contracts. So this is building the digital infrastructure of the road streets and bridges of how states function you know from finance from data just how anything moves within a state level. So, um, with that approach is you need you need folks to take a chance, be visionaries. Um, it's just a matter of time.

It's happening. Uh, we're witnessing. We're seeing it. It's at a rapid pace and, uh, I think that there are there are state leaders that's willing to take a chance. Um but I think it's it's a collective and and once uh you know the meeting of the minds happen the results are going to showcase and it's going to be a downstream wealth effect.

I I think it really will and so that transparency is going to add cost savings uh reduction of waste and just total overall welfare improvement.

Awesome. Well, we have a minute left. Um thank you all. This has been a pleasure. Uh, even meeting you guys, it's been fun backstage and talking on stage, too.

It's been great. Uh, any final thoughts or or words for for the show?

Um, I'll reiterate the point that, you know, I hope I hope that that Charlie pulls out of this today. Um, because again, nobody should be shot for expressing an opinion,

right?

Well, Yeah. So, um, you know, it's, you know, these are solemn reminders of why we do this work, why we do this work, why we are here, why we put in the work, why we build, why we continue to try to find our community. Because if we don't solve this problem, it's just going to get worse. All right? And it doesn't matter your political persuasion.

The reality is like people are losing the capacity to talk to each other and solve problems together. And that's what we have to fix. Um I'd like to really make it important part that you know everybody's voices here needs to be heard and you can talk to your legislator about what you're building anytime and if you this is why actually I started the AI in crypto council. So, if you're building something and you need some advocacy, come and talk to me. I will happily represent you.

But, um, if you can't speak for yourself, but I would love to work with everyone who's building something.

Any closing thoughts?

Um, I I think going back to it, it's a collective. We're we're all human beings trying to live out this human experience and uh match it with technology and and just able to make better days. And uh so anyways, I'm I'm just happy to be here. Um and and truthfully, going even back to the whole political realm, uh on top of that, mental health is obviously a big deal. So, um I'm a I'm a I'm a witness of that.

Um and as I stated, I'm just happy to be here. So, thank y'all.

Thank you everyone.

Oh, and uh they have really cool tattoos if you guys haven't noticed.

Yeah, I feel out of place. I don't know what

Thank you everyone.