Why Web3? Why Now? To Fix the World | Matt Cutler - Blocknative

[Music] all right we're almost there we're almost there thank you Jill um please welcome to the stage our next speaker um founder and CEO of block native Matt Cutler and uh his topic is why web 3 why now to fix the world so round of applause please thank thanks everybody you made it it's uh 6:10 p.m. on a Friday thanks for sticking around this is going to be like a super fast crash course on basically how to talk to your Normie friends and family about crypto where it doesn't sound like it's a scam okay it's going to be a pretty fast talk and it's going to hopefully be fun uh here but like why are we here I can't speak for you I can only speak for myself I've been building an ethereum ecosystem for coming up on 7 years now when I started I was 6'6 on didn't have gray hair it's been quite a journey but I came to this space to solve big problems and by big problems I mean like Global GDP problems and how big is the global GDP it's 110 trillion per year it's actually pretty hard to wrap your mind around and so breaking it down and this is a little bit of an eye chart is this top one is pretty interesting the single largest component of global GDP is financial services it's 34 trillion or about 31% of the global economy goes to the money and that should make you think I'm going to talk about this in a little bit before I do I'm going to draw an analogy to this one down here this is the media and entertainment industry it's 12th on the list 2.8 trillion which is still a huge number but it's less than one 10th the size of the financial services industry and we have witnessed I am of generally a different vintage than many of you who are here we've witnessed a massive transformation of the media and entertainment industry over the past 35 years and that kind of shows the way about what might be possible for us up at the top in financial services so this is me my first day of freshman year at MIT with my mom in front of Lobby 10 at MIT this is a summer of 1991 and when I got to MIT we did a lot of classwork our homework in workstations like this it's called the Thea cluster they were a you know uh there were Unix workstations highspeed internet we were at school that's where the classwork was you could they were connected to each other they were connected to other campuses and we didn't know any better and it turned out this was the internet we'd never heard of it before we didn't know any better and it looked kind of like this this is a protocol an application called gopher which was kind of boring um but then in September of 1993 the Mosaic browser was introduced and that really changed things it felt different it was visual it was easier it was more approachable and websites started to pop up and things like Yahoo were formed where each day you can see which new websites com you can go check them out and at this point I started an internet company back in 1994 the internet was so small you could fit it in your hand you could read all of uset in about 15 minutes you could see all the websites that had come online you could watch as stuff happen and what was interesting was those of us who were in the internet then it was really obvious what the future was going to be cuz it was just better in every way but if you were outside the internet which the whole rest of the world was in 1994 it was not at all obvious what the future was going to be and it might be really romantic to think about building an internet company over these years but I can tell you it was pretty lonely cuz no one really knew what it was no one really thought it would amount to something there were all these big companies that said they were going to do this stuff and it felt like you were kind of this rag tag thing until about '98 and 99 when it really blew up now that seems like not very long but in real time I went from 21 years old to 26 years old that was a long time and by 2000 it got huge it was a.com boom and I took my company public at that point it was crazy and after about 2007 when Apple introduced the iPhone online actually consumed the offline world today we live in a world which is entirely online if we want to go offline we got to go someplace to the frontier to the edge to get away from Self Service which is a crazy inversion when you think about it but it also had much more practical implications like how we consume media we started in the Blockbuster era I wonder how many of you have ever been in a blockbuster but to consume media you had to like get in your car and go to a store and there was a limited collection of physical tapes and if you were looking for a hot movie you probably wouldn't get it and you had to you paid for that and you brought it home and watch it then you had to rewind it and bring it back it seems pretty archaic compared to that which we know today Netflix and YouTube think about how different that is think about how much bigger it is think about how much more efficient it is all driven by the Advent of Internet protocols broadband and mobile and I shared this with you because it's really hard in the Blockbuster era to imagine what YouTube would be it stretches the imagination but as we think about the financial services sector today we are living in the Blockbuster era the financial rails that the world works on were invented decades ago and we can't even see the possibilities and so when I talk with my Normie friends normies no coiners not not you who are here of course I ask a very simple question how often do you get paid and everybody says the same thing I get paid twice a month and you go awesome but how often do you work well I work all the time you go wait a sec isn't that strange you work all the time and then you get paid twice a month like what if you got your salary seamed in real time wouldn't that be better wouldn't that be fairer and why doesn't it work that way today and every Norm I've ever talked to is able to say the same thing which is just too expensive it's too slow the system isn't built for that say yes exactly because uh the financial system we enjoy today is decades old and what we are doing in web 3 is building modern Financial rails that will enable in fact two already today enable streaming salary and enable uh cash discounts using digital assets and enable all of these things that seem like fantasy it's here right now just not evenly distributed right and so this is the journey when I talk to normies where they go oh yeah that's interesting they say hey look I started my onchain journey in 2017 metamask looked like this it was in the era of the original uh crypto kitties but it's gone a whole heck of a lot slower and we're all here at ethen basically saying when is it going to blow up when is it going to be is it right now when are we going to be in this world is it soon that everything will be onchain and the offchain world will be very small the trend seems very similar but the timeline seems quite different it's harder it's more risk and the regulatory environment hasn't been that great but the evidence is already here this is from uh a recent earnings announcement from Robin Hood it costs us roughly an order of magnitude less to operate a cryptocurrency business and for exchange of assets than it does on the trafi side so this is an existing big business it's oneth the cost it's a th% more efficient and so the objective that I have in web 3 is just to make the existing Global Financial Services industry 50% more efficient 50% not not 10x and what would that get us it' get us 16 trillion of GDP per year by the way that's the size of the entire Global manufacturing industry 16 trillion and all we have to do is modernize the protocols and drive adoption what could we do with 16 trillion per year we could scale up carbon sequestration and address global climate change we could accelerate fusion power generation so we put less carbon in the world we could have nextg Therapeutics that would massively improve quality of life we could ensure a line agis that would accelerate all of this which may to be happening right now and we can even start building off-planet habitats basically we could fix the world that's what we're doing here we have this opportunity to face the existential challenges facing Our Generation with a similar degree of optimism that prior Generations have faced their existential challenges and it seems crazy it's just code but really this is it we're right here we're at the cusp so in summary I try to draw the analogy between the transition we went through from web 1 to web three from Blockbuster to Netflix and YouTube we are standing on the precipice of that in Global Financial Services you are here we are here to build build in accordance with the St the values of our ecosystem trustless permissionless composability open source shared governance this is what we do at block native we're building a new thing called the gas Network which all about the web through transaction pricing with all of those principles and I encourage all of you here and all of you at home to investigate and and and invest in these principles we're here to fix the world that's why I'm here and that's why I hope you're here too and I wish everybody an amazing eth Denver it's been so great to be here have a great rest of your day have a great hackathon for all of you hacking and thank you everybody good night cheers [Applause]