How Crypto is Missing its Biggest Opportunity - Ashley Taylor

my name is ashley taylor i'm a co-founder of a project called resource i've been in the space since 2014 and when i originally read about the ethereum project i immediately started thinking about adoption what does adoption really mean and today i still think we're in a space where we are missing our biggest opportunity because we're not thinking about adoption we're not thinking about what does it mean for a person who's not fine financial or technically minded to want to get inside the space and therefore the space can't grow because of that so i think there's some implicit assumptions that we have that need adjusting we have these assumptions that everyone wants to learn finance that everyone's motivated primarily by money that everyone has time to learn finance which is the biggest one for me and that everyone has capital to participate in finance and i think there's some reasons why we have these assumptions number one there's just a lot of amount of there's a lot of money to be made in the space right so it's it's easy to get caught in that cycle of developing things for that purpose alone in the short term and not thinking about the long term it's also the rational economic basis that we have inherited from the past which is oh people are rational actors right so they'll do what's rational they'll come participate in the space and earn currency and we're motivated ourselves we're part of the space we're the ones here so we're assuming that everyone else is like us so why should we address these assumptions because our target audience is really limited it's limited by the types of people that think in this way which we know is not most of the people in the world and so defy and crypto the space really can't grow until we start to address our assumptions about our target audience so i think that what crypto thinks about accessibility today if we really think about what that means we have okay someone holds crypto as an investment that their friend told them about we have even fewer people that hold any crypto that's not on a centralized exchange so if you're launching a project and you're thinking about growth and it's only on a dex which is fine you have to understand that the usability of a dex is so complicated these days that there's no way for your audience to grow without starting to address some of the fundamental usability and accessibility there and so what that really means is they're not there's not a lot of opportunity today for someone who's not financial or technically minded to really participate and build wealth which again i think is really important to understand because the whole point of the the blockchain space in the first place was about decentralization of wealth and access and i think we're doing a pretty bad job um i think that i put computer here because we have things like axia infinity now which i think are some of the best uh examples but it's still limited to a very uh a particular type of audience we need to expand those models more so right now we can say what is the audience of people that can participate in crypto in terms of an accessibility mindset so what's the reality of this not everybody wants to learn finance not everybody wanted to go work on wall street not everybody wants to come work on defy that's fine they're motivated by things other than money and that's also fine finance can start to serve people who want to do things with their life that are different and that's what we should be doing as a space so here's just some ideas around shifting our mindset where value creation is the result of new economic activity that we're creating with protocols it's not the means so here's an example of developing a platform for issuing a custom nft of a record that's what we've seen so far versus building a platform for communities who can actually bootstrap their own record labels or what about a platform for selling custom nfts versus developing a platform where you're connecting nft developers to communities who don't know how to get into the space to help create new business models and platforms that address people who don't actually have any extra cash or time today and introduce them to crypto so now i'll take a second and talk about my own project so resource is a way that small business owners currently in the us can grow their business without using any money so it's basically a marketplace where once you join you'll get customers that come and buy from you and they're going to pay you in resource dollars which are different than us dollars and the reason that a business would want to join is because with those resource dollars they can buy things that they were usually spending their us dollars on which means they now have more us dollars and we actually have testimonials and stories of how small businesses are starting to grow their business because they're saving their us dollars and being able to spend them on things like rent for a bigger space we're currently live in asheville austin los angeles and we're basically building this as a protocol where anybody could launch this type of a marketplace in their own community and what's important is they don't need any existing fiat to get started so the way that it works is you apply you offer your products and services you earn the resource dollars and then you can eventually start becoming a stakeholder and earning the underlying cryptocurrency of our network so what are some other ideas about how we can move beyond thinking about just d5 natives so i think for every protocol every project in the space investing in education but investing that education and someone who you're not targeting as someone who's going to become a d5 native figure out other ways that people can participate in your protocol that aren't about them participating in the financial backend side of the space when you're developing learn to earn challenges what else could people be learning about that's not necessarily about them participating as a staker in the back end what else could they be doing to help grow the protocol and the ecosystem so an example of this for us we have a role called an ambassador so an ambassador someone who brings businesses to a resource network or a network launched on resource that's a real world activity they don't have to know about crypto they're just saying oh this is the best restaurant in my community i want them to be part of it um they on board them and when they do that they start to earn source token which is our underlying cryptocurrency so that's a way that someone who is participating and building the crypto ecosystem and isn't doing it from a computer screen and staking and i think that these types of models are super important to start to experiment with and i also think it's how the space will grow so some key principles if you're applying these blockchain incentives to non-finance people because the most key exciting principle of blockchain i think is the ability to incentivize incentivize things like decentralization of wealth so look at a target audience and what's their primary motivation beyond money like what's the musician's primary motivation i want to be on stage and share their art and build a community around their art and be able to do that for a living and so i think that thinking about how a protocol can incentivize these primary motivations in each industry are really the next frontier of where we can go at the space and then you as a crypto economic designer can be the one who really empathically understands what are these motivations and then design incentives that empower that so some takeaways let's stop competing for the same limited user base and let's think longer term about growing the space and of course the market and recognize these implicit biases in our own protocols and our own tokenomics and ship them and so for last um we are starting a winter proof alliance which is basically for projects that want to integrate more in the real world we're hosting the first event tonight with maker dow and centrifuge and teller finance so you can find that on our twitter page resource underscore phi or you can also ask me about it and that's my email and happy to be here thanks for listening [Applause]