Open Conversations: Reclaiming Crypto for Public Goods (David Casey)

Funding the Commons is an organization that brings together funders, builders, academics, and public sector folks as well as institutional philanthropists around the theme of exploring how we can better fund public goods and commons. And that can consist of both the mechanisms that we use for funding as well as the infrastructure, the governance, etc. Hi, I'm David Casey, director of funding the commons. Funding the Commons brings me back to some of the original reasons that called me to get involved in the crypto industry. The way that I first touched crypto was while running my first startup in Latin America and we were coordinating merchant payments in over 80 countries, many of them in the global south with very poor banking infrastructure.

After trying almost every fintech solution that existed in 2013, we came across Bitcoin and it worked instantly. It's like email for money. You send it, it gets there. For me, it solved a very real tangible problem. It also enabled participation in the global financial system by people around the world who otherwise wouldn't have been able to access it.

And I thought this was such a beautiful use case for crypto and very practical for me. It solved a real problem in 12 years ago. Over the years, I haven't seen so many of those tangible practical solutions uh for crypto that actually make a difference in normal people's lives. For me, funding the commons is an opportunity to highlight and advance and accelerate and incubate those use cases. The builders make it real by implementing the mechanisms, building the infrastructure.

Only with a strong community of builders can we really get this technology out into the real world and deploy it have it function at scale. So we are looking for builders of all stripes that desire to build the commons infrastructure for the future. [Music]