How to Decentralize Without Going Broke (or Worse…) | Parker McCurley - Decent Labs

Curley from decent Labs hello check check hello everybody eth Denver 2025 how are we feeling today woo yeah um so my name is Rachel I go by Rachel on chain um I'm joined today with uh my CEO of decent Labs Parker McCurley and to give a quick introduction I've been in the space for several years I lead Business Development efforts at decent Labs uh some of you might know me as doing onchain media podcasting Twitter spaces throughout the years I'm a big proponent and huge fan of eth Denver I've been coming this is my fourth year now um and yeah just so excited to be here today with you all and uh yeah excited to kick off our fireside chat so uh Parker do you want to take a moment to introduce yourself yeah uh my name is Parker I'm the co-founder and CEO of decent Labs um yeah since 2017 I've mostly been focused on uh decentralized application development and Design and uh also this is I've been coming to eth Denver since before covid so I don't know if it's five or six or something times now but really excited to be here as I always am every year yeah uh he he's a veteran you guys so really excited to finally you know hear from Parker here at eth Denver and uh Parker I'm curious if you can kind of dive into what crypto means to you yeah um yeah I mean crypto and as a derivative of Open Source technology it really represents opportunity to me um crypto really changed my life and it's really important to me that uh the technology remains accessible to people who need it so you've been active in the space for a really long time Parker so you're like what going on eight years almost a decade in the space um so just curious like what was the Catalyst that brought you here to this moment to decent uh Labs yeah so in terms of um my exposure to crypto I mean I've been working in the industry for about eight years now um but I first learned about Bitcoin in high school uh I grew up in Cleveland Ohio and during the financial crisis uh my family and a lot of people in my community uh were like just really struggling and going through extremely hard times and I was doing everything that I could to get by and a friend of mine told me about the Silk Road marketplace and uh I started reading the Silk Road forums and a lot of the you know early adopters were uh kind of uh proposing Bitcoin as a solution to the financial collapse and to prevent that in the future so uh yeah I have a much more Nuance take on the 08 financial crisis and economic collapse now um but I do think uh for me as a teenager that who was in a lot of pain it was really um I don't know validating and and uh enlightening for me to read this yeah so um is there a particular moment or experience that galvanized your belief in decentralization I mean everything you would do at decent uh you really believe in the ethos and lived the ethos of decentralization what made that belief so strong in you yeah I mean so so something I've realized this week it's that everybody I know who's a builder in this space has had an experience that has caused them to be attracted to the principles of crypto and those principles are generally uh you know maybe some people might call them paranoid but I think usually have to do with experiences that we've had with uh authority figures so you know in terms of like my belief in decentral ization um I guess like that started with you know my experiences with institutions like I'm sure everybody has whether it's with hospitals or the education system or the court system um I think a lot of the most vital institutions that provide for everyone um aren't designed in a way that really uh holistically aligns the people that are providing those Services the people that need those Services um so so there's that kind of just lived experience that I think everybody shares um when I started decent and I learned about things like accredited investor uh money transmitter licenses Money Services businesses and more it really kind of made me feel um at the time I felt that regulation was designed to cut off access to opportunity for poor people that's how I felt about it um and again my my take on regulation has become a little bit more nuanced over the years but finally the thing that made me convinc that our industry would wouldn't survive without decentralized organizations was my experience working with Celsius okay so in uh when decent was an agency we worked with tons of clients but the proudest the proudest day of my career was when we closed a web development deal with Celsius which at the time was the largest consumer brand in crypto um and for a year later for me to wake up and read in the news that the company that we had play a very small but proud role in was a fraud um and then of course what happened with FTX and three arrows I kind of became convinced at that point that if we're dealing with the risk and volatility of digital assets then uh we cannot rely on a central Authority or or technology infrastructure uh to contain it well I'm curious so you were mentioning how uh a common threat in this space is people experiencing hardships issues with authority I'm curious with the hardship that you experienced early on with you know uh coming into contact with Celsius how did you come back from that yeah so that was a really 2022 was a really hard year for me and a really hard year I think for a lot of people in our industry um we had just gotten done with a few years of kind of growth and I think kind of feeling like like with Defi and with you know the social Dows and nft stuff happening it felt like crypto had finally sort of reached this I don't know if you want to call it mainstream adoption or or recognition but it felt really good um and towards the end of that bull run I it started to smell quite a bit like 2017 and there was a lot of overvalued projects a lot of hype uh so I went out to raise venture capital for the first time because I wanted our business to be able to continue growing through the kind of writing on thewall be Market um and yeah it was about two weeks after we closed our round that the three arrows Capital kind of domino started and uh I mean yeah I I honestly I didn't want to be a part of the industry anymore at that point I I was depressed I was you know I felt like I had uh signed up for a lie and that I had kind of been like rugged by the philosophy of crypto um and yeah it took me a really long time to kind of recover from that and figure out how can I align my work at desent yeah with the impact that I wanted crypto to make in the world and uh that that ended up leading me to mcon which uh is a meeting of out Dow enthusiasts and for the first time since 2017 2018 I found myself in a room full of weirdos that saw the world the same way and I decided that that was the path that we were going to go down at decent I love it um okay so at what point I'm curious you decided to turn decent into a dow uh what was the Catalyst for that moment yeah so um I'm sure most people here have probably heard of Eric Vorhees the founder of shape shift in Venice um but he was one of my earliest Inspirations in crypto because basically had massive balls and decided to just be a central Anonymous exchange before Unis swap existed so um the the the 20177 kind of Ico bubble really blew up after shape shift came out and that infrastructure uh existed so lucky enough um as I was fundraising and sort of feeling disillusioned by crypto uh I met Eric and uh I had a chance to talk to him about turning shape shift into a dow and about how I always wanted to have a token at desent and I wanted desent to be a decentralized organization um but instead I was the CEO of a 30 person company in an industry where I was espousing decentralization as a solution to all of these problems so uh yeah I had that talk with him and I got really excited and I went home the next day and I told everybody that they're not employees anymore and we're decentralizing and I'm not the CEO and we're becoming a DA and it was a disaster okay well okay so you went from that to deciding to build an operation platform for Dows so uh I think the common thread for your story is you've always cared about decentralization so can you kind of share a little bit about why you've decided to create a dow operations platform through Dent yeah so I think um you know going back to crypto being opportunity for me and for others and I want decent to provide that opportunity for others um when we when we first started looking at the Dow model um we were really thinking about decentralized execution and versus decentralized governance and I think a lot of people that they they sort of have this attachment to the vision of decentralization they they sort of naturally think this way because if you look at Bitcoin or any other validator network or decentralized organization that relies on its uh contributors to function um you know those systems really inspiring because it's sort of like hey like come one come all here's this protocol that you can contribute to or that you can be a part of and the incentives are such that this thing will continue attracting people and it will continue growing and those systems are very resilient and they're really interesting but I mean if you look at Bitcoin right like I was pitched Bitcoin as a 50-year plan um and I think for most startups you know we're trying to accomplish uh maybe slightly less impactful things but on shorter timelines so um you know the first thing we did was like to try this decentralized execution we like got rid of our slack and we turned all of our company conversation all of them into public channels that anyone could read and we sort of like open sourced the company we did everything in PL sight and our expectation was sort of like a if you build a they will come and by seeing all the cool stuff we were building and what we were up to that all these other like really talented and capable people would like show up and like help us and that totally didn't happen um when we think about decentralized governance you know where we're talking about uh token holders having transparency so having you know as equal awareness of what's Happening as a coure team uh when we're talking about uh organizations operating on chain so that there's not the types of security vulnerabilities that we can't tolerate in crypto that we've seen from you know the Celsius of the world um and also yeah like just the the the whole idea was really attractive to me that people could just find decent and start participating and and grow their careers and their knowledge through it but that really didn't work out for us well I mean uh where I'm coming in now I mean being around for eight years I feel like decent really had a chance to mature uh the product the team everything I feel like I'm I'm so grateful to be coming on at this time uh where everything's you know they have eight they've had eight years to build this out and it's been uh really beautiful to come on at this time um and I'm curious I mean you don't get there overnight obviously I mean has anybody here been in the space over five years over okay we got some veterans okay so Parker and decent they've been around for almost a decade you guys so like uh yeah I mean I just have so much respect for for those of us here that you know continue showing up cycle after cycle uh we've been punched and beaten down over and over and just keep showing up so I think that's absolutely incredible um so I'm curious like what are some of the early mistakes you made at D and how did you learn from those yeah well I'm going to I'm going to focus on decent Dow just because this isn't like a entrepreneur focused talk but when we first started the Dow I mean like I said our first problem was we confused decentralized execution for decentralized governance and we focused on creating this like you know Network effect driven uh like contributor incentive structure and uh at the end of the day I think I think uh it's it's fairly provable that uh fairly homogeneous small teams are really effective at building things and getting things done um and so now Dent operates like many uh Dows or protocols do where you know we have a core team that's developing a software product and they're extremely focused and this is all that they do and this is what they're here for um and they are beholden right to a dow uh to a token holder control treasury that you know funds us and uh gives us strategic uh uh consent and and input um and and elects leaders into the system so that they can be held accountable by token holders awesome um can you explain more of the difference between decentralized governance and decentralized execution yeah yeah so I mean as I mentioned right I think the best example would be looking at something like a validator network where you're relying on other people working in a decentralized format to contribute to something working um or governance where it's more about um disclosure transparency and financial control uh given to token holders awesome um okay so going into the next question couple more mistakes to talk about oh yeah okay sure yeah yeah so like so like another one when we first started building decent um and this kind of taught me how powerful composability is uh we we built all of our own smart contracts like our team have been slitty Developers for many years so we built our own treasury software our own governance software um and uh when we went to Entre orgs to try to sell it they were like why would we move $100 million from this contract to another for any reason right uh so we ended up building and this is a lesson I think for any developers in a composable way where our UI connects many many very popular and heavily tested smart contracts like oie Governor safe savier hats um and provides them in a single user interface um so I think building where you're uh relying on the momentum of the open source ecosystem that's developed in crypto is extremely important abs absolutely um so how do you approach decent operating structure uh today yeah so I alluded to this a little bit but um we have a core team that operates in the United States and the EU uh they're contractors to a us-based LLC um and we operate like any other startup like I'm the founder and CEO uh so I do you know fundraising product strategy BD um and our team is mostly focused on growing the product and building the product um the the Dow uh which is a foundation in Cayman Islands um is operated by a completely different group of people whose job is again managing the token the token holder Community the decentralized governance and resource allocation for desent and holding our team accountable for continuing to build good software and acting in the best interest of the protocol yeah um and I do want to comment uh as we are getting close to the on of time here yesterday we hosted the onchain legal Summit at the Biddle Hub and uh Parker here has been really putting an emphasis on structuring things legally and compliantly with decent labs and decent Dow so Parker um the blockchain association joined us yesterday from Washington DC I know you're really paying attention to the current regulatory landscape and doing things legally and compliantly why are you putting so much emphasis into legally structuring this Dow um and yeah can it sounds extremely complicated and expensive uh how are you navigating that yeah so uh on a personal level the reason for this approach is because want to live in America have a token and sleep at night and doing all three of those things at once is really difficult um so you know when I go down this path and design process of becoming a Dao our thought is um okay you know how do I how do I do this in a compliant way well compliance doesn't exist in the United States for digital assets yet although quite soon um and so I looked for jurisdictions and landed on Cayman that have more mature digital asset regulations and my mindset here was when us-based regulation occurs I can point back and say look I was an entrepreneur doing the best that I could we were completely legal and above board in the jurisdictions that support that and now we're ready to you know do whatever we need to to you know continue uh scaling and growing in this new regulatory environment what's really exciting to me is that not only has our industry began uh or become efficient at building both the onchain and offchain systems for true decentral IED governance and organizations uh but but the game itself is getting much easier so I mean as of you know the last two months effectively uh the SEC has been giving first of all uh for the first time direct guidance on uh its plan to lesson it's a tax on tokens um and it's a tax on Builders um so yeah I think we don't have a framework in the US to do this yet in a in a way that's nationally or federally recognized uh but I do see thousands of Builders right now and thousand of projects and thousands of tokens that are going live this year that I'm so excited about um because people feel empowered to do so uh using the offshore structure that most protocols uh take advantage of absolutely and I just want to say if you're a Founder if you're a builder if you're anyone that's interested in learning more about decent Labs give us a follow at decent Dow um and come connect with us after the talk we'd love to hear about your projects and hear how we can support you there's also a QR code up here if you guys want to scan this you can hop into our telegram drop a GM come say hello come connect with us we'd love to have you guys in our community um and yeah Parker I'm curious final question here uh what do you see for the future yeah um well I think even especially after this weekend with the bybit hack I think Reliance on Central dependencies be it people or software is going to become increasingly unacceptable for our industry it's just not safe um anything that can be hacked in crypto will be hacked um and also I I really want to get to a point where forming a dow in a safe way that protects its members is cheaper than forming an LLC in the United States uh that's part of our mission at decent is this accessible opportunity um so yeah if you're interested in launching a dow or a token or an nft or anything cool and you're a little bit scared about it feel free to talk to me I've uh navigated that path myself yeah uh so yeah we are at time here you guys so yeah let's give a round of applause for Parker McCurley decent Labs uh and yeah if you want to connect with us we're we're going to hop off the stage come say hi and uh we'd love to hear about your projects