Colorado Culture: A Web3 Dream - Kent Barton, Shannon Ewing, Willy Ogorzaly and more...

i love you uh mike check one two okay cool uh austin said it's hard to follow it's also hard to follow uh austin because he's a badass so hi everybody i hope you're having a great evening i am kent uh i founded the youth community in 2014 um and now it's turned into this uh with the help of so many uh contributors uh so thank you for coming uh these days i do tokenomics and shapeshift so the the topic of this panel is uh very core i think to the heart of what a lot of us are trying to do here we're gonna be exploring some important questions um what about what we're doing here in colorado has made it such a fertile environment for for crypto innovation and for for web 3. why are we here in denver instead of cleveland or something uh and based on that you know this isn't designed to be like a cheerleading panel the idea is what lessons can we can we take in order to spread the virus so if you live no matter where you live what can you learn from what we're doing here uh we have the perfect panelists lined up for this so we can dig right in glaria hi hi how's it going good quick intros yes um so i got into the crypto space about five years ago um met kent here in denver uh at eat denver or eath meetups and um consecutively ended up working in new york uh on spreading the news about ethereum for consensus thereafter at parity for polka dot and most recently been working in the polkadot ecosystem and just moved back to colorado so excited to speak about the colorado community here welcome back and glad you're here thank you really thanks ken everybody my name is willie ogarzali um actually moved to colorado back in uh 2010 for school sco buffs um ended up starting a company there dropping out it was web 2 legal tech did that for about five years and then started bitfract um bitfract got acquired by shapeshift i was working at shapeshift um until we transitioned to a dao now that shapeshift is a dao my new role is head of decentralization at the fox foundation it's a not-for-profit foundation set up to support the dao in achieving its mission of achieving full decentralization so our mission will be achieved and we can all fire ourselves and shut down the foundation and transition full control over shape shifts to the fox token holders hey everyone i'm annie phillips from irl art and we've been the art stewards of east denver since 2019 this is by far the biggest art gallery and craziest amount of displays we've ever done there's like 126 artists from 15 different countries we also run irl underground which is an nft and independent music venue in denver and i'm also an artist and stuff and awesome i'm shannon i am also a co-producer of eath denver we're really stoked to have you guys here um i've been helping do ecosystem growth in crypto for about five years now so just hoping to bring all of you awesome people together so that you can go create some magic so thank you everyone for joining us thank you shannon so i'll do some individual questions we'll start down here and come back uh but shannon so you've had a front row seat to how this community has scaled being so involved with the denver over the years and uh you know this is this is a testament to yet another year of insane scaling you know maybe next year we'll have like 50 000 people but based on your experience uh what do you think eath denver has gotten right in terms of community building and what would you maybe do over again or change that's great um yeah for for those of you that are new joining us this year this is typically this has historically been a 2 000 person event and this year we're closer to 11. so this is huge for us we're like a 5x factor of what we've normally seen so watching the community grow is totally scaring us to be quite frank but really exciting and one of the things that i've always loved about the ethereum community is the focus on building i was telling a story earlier today about coming in here in 2019 when the price was in the gutter and everybody was saying that crypto was a scam and everyone that showed up to eat then for that year had their head down was building the tools was not phased by any of it they were really optimistic and they were focused 10 years into the future they just knew that these tools are going to help the world be a freer place it gives me goosebumps to watch these people's commitment to making sure that we're all in this community together and it's such a for us by us sort of build so one of the things that i love is watching all of you new folks come and join us and come and gather around this ethos of helping the world be a freer place some of the things that i think we can do better is making sure that that message is spread very widely because right now we have a lot of noise around nfts and a lot of different ways that people are coming in and it's our job to make sure that everyone here knows there's an ethos behind this it's not just about investments it's not just about money grabs it's about us curating community tools together amen to that thanks for the answer um next so annie and let me just briefly uh i i want to i want to pimp out annie's nft gallery because it's colorado's first nft gallery and it's amazing it's in rhino it's called irl art uh it's next to osaka ramen and it's so cool guys go check it out if you haven't been there um but annie you're in a very interesting position of you're living at the nexus of crypto and sort of like art and culture um because these nfts all of a sudden the blockchain isn't just some like nebulous ephemeral thing it's like you're looking at this beautiful art right in your face and like um you've also cultivated a really cool environment there at irl uh my question for you is what advice would you have to anyone else who's trying to build their own kind of like crypto centric space yeah so we've had a lot of uh success putting in proposals to dowse and you know that's that's where i would start if you're looking for funding to get a creative project off the ground and we actually open source all of ours so they're in our discord i always share you know how we presented whether it was successful or not and i encourage people to just take our template and create your own proposals for dows and always happy to give feedback and we always joke also about finding low-tech solutions to high-tech problems so you know for a lot of our displays we're literally just putting usbs into tvs or literally for our crts uh our vintage tvs we use dvd players we just recently upgraded to these cool like mica devices that use usbs but you know it's really not rocket science we we play a lot with projection mapping and that's been really fun because you can really you know projection map a lot of different surfaces and so we've been having fun with the vintage frames because i think for the last year incubating nfts in a gallery setting we've been really trying to be very literal about presenting it as art so we got these you know vintage frames and projection map that so it looks like art but i'm looking forward to getting more into like installation and stage design and i think there's a lot of creative and physical installations that you know could really benefit from creativity and lots to lots to come cool thank you um okay sort of switching gears now over to daos this is kind of the the almost opposite sort of thing we're talking about meat space real life in the dow context we're talking about something is more ephemeral something that um many many taos exist maybe purely as global entities where the contributors are just a bunch of you know anonymous cartoons on discord hanging out and um they're not necessarily uh meeting in real life um this is something i often think about as as somebody uh also at shapeshift alongside willie it's a challenge um so my question for you really is what what sort of advice would you give um dows that are or really any sort of crypto culture that exists primarily online that um you're trying to create like a vibrant community and culture but you don't necessarily have that um that sort of real-life interaction that might come with like typical um you know ground ground uh or grassroots communities on a local basis yeah i think step one of building a vibrant community is uh you got to have some dank memes right um you got to be able to distill what is what is the purpose of your community what are you guys doing why should me as somebody who's not part of your community come join your community if you get the date the memes right and they're super dank then what you'll find is that people who see these memes and align with your memes your vision the purpose of your community will be attracted to it and that's one of the cool things about dows is that it's not just a core team a small startup it's you're there's no barriers between you and the community so these people come in and then the next step i think is to i'm a product guy so i think about user experience how can you make sure that these new community members who are coming to check out your community can have a good experience in the user experience it's not just ui and buttons and stuff it's the whole experience and so from the moment they land on your discord you know are they is it a smooth experience to get onboarded do they see cool information and like ways to get started are there welcoming community members who are there to say hello and meet them and answer their questions and are there opportunities for them to get involved right like it's one thing to come in and just like say hey guys gm how's it going what's up but like if you can give these community members opportunities to contribute and then ideally reward them with some of your governance tokens so now they're really invested i think those are kind of the two key pieces to building a strong vibrant community and if you get those right then your community can help you figure out the rest amen thanks valeria so we're going to pivot a little bit now um you know at ethereum denver at east denver we try to be very crypto agnostic we are the opposite of maximalists here um valeria is actually from the polkadot ecosystem which has seen a lot of interesting innovation and on technology that differs uh you know sharply from ethereum in some ways and also the the community is different so my question for you is kind of having a front row seat to polka dot is um what do you think it does different versus ethereum and what could aetherians learn from the polka dot ecosystem yeah so dot is a meta project um it's a layer one so it does not compete with ethereum um it's future proof as well um the main differences that um i'd like to mention today are um polka dot unlike ethereum has on-chain governance so the decisions are made in a clear and transparent fashion um on chain and they're usually made right um the other thing that polka dot has is an unchained fund so 80 of all the transaction fees that are generated go to the on-chain fund and if for some reason parity technologies or web3 foundation were to go away the unchained fund would continue funding awesome projects regards to advice to for ethereum so i would say it'd be great if ethereum would be more experimental we have something called kusama which is a canary network and it has real value bearing assets on it which allows for a much more vibrant testing environment kusama is something that i am not afraid to admit i got totally wrong in terms of its adoption i figured it's just another test net in ethereum we've had tons of test nets but lo and behold that sandbox idea has proven to be really useful and compelling for people building on it so yeah maybe there's a lot of um maybe there's lessons there for ethereum based projects or the blockchain itself thank you um so i don't want to get too like specific with questions um i want to create some spontaneity here but i i did want to at least touch on one more uh general question and this is just a a air ball anybody can can take this if you want but um again you know what the reason we're doing this panel is to hopefully impart some lessons to everybody out there in the broader community the crypto community um i think we can all agree that we get crypto right here in colorado we've done something um we've done something right over the years and uh you know it's growing um what like how can we propagate this to um the rest of the world like how can we help the virus spread to other other communities and other other localities throughout the the globe well i like to think that dow's help a little bit with that and especially if you think about like startup culture too and compare web 2 startups to web 3 startups to be a web 2 startup like a lot of the action happens in san francisco right and part of that a big part of that is because that's where all the funding is locked up but that creates a ton of barriers for people who don't live in san francisco to get involved and to build something awesome but with web 3 like those those barriers are gone and the capital pool can flow from anywhere and the talent can flow from anywhere so i mean if you're watching this from afar and you're like you want to get involved join it down and uh you know you might not be hanging out in meet space immediately maybe soon we'll have some cool metaphors stuff and you guys can like at least like put on a vr headset and feel like you're together but you can hang out with the community you're aligned with you can build cool [ __ ] with your internet friends and get rewarded and you can raise money from people all over and i think that's that's pretty disruptive uh in terms of just like the startup ecosystem um with web3 relative to web2 well and something that you and i have talked about a fair amount is what happens from the grassroots layer up right then when when we start at the bottom and build up into communities then you make it unignorable right so when you have the dao communities when you have this community coming together with a lot of 11 000 people like obviously governor polis has been supportive of us for a long time but this is unignorable we are speaking with our boots right now and so i think you're totally right the more that we build community around it the more that it becomes a force to be reckoned with yeah one thing i wanted to add is especially for people coming over from web 2 especially because we're currently in somewhat of a still a bull market i think it's really important to share the values we share as a web 3 community and this is not a quick financial gain uh that we're here for like we're trying to change the world and um this you know the philosophy of web 3 is uh quite important in terms of building um what we're doing here and so people who are coming over from web 2 especially and they see like you know the high prices flashing on the news like this is not this is just like a side fringe benefit of what we're doing here i agree we'll say and just to add on that and this is building on something governor polis was just talking about but i think with respect to values one thing colorado has always done or the the community here in colorado has done well is always being a big tent the idea of not having gatekeepers is such a powerful thing the the notion of a decentralized blockchain is we don't have and nobody can prevent you from publishing code and uh when it comes down to the community or the cultural level knowing that you can be yourself whoever you are let your freak flag fly do what you want and nobody's going to tell you you can't do it is incredibly powerful and i think that's been reflected with all all the panelists on the stage embody that in their own way so that's been so cool to see um kind of in terms of like looking further ahead um another question is like where do you see the crypto scene in colorado in five years which is like 50 years in crypto time um so i mean we've made a lot of progress but as things become more mainstream like you know what's what's possible where could we uh where could we head i'll direct this one to you andy because you've already been sort of like right on the cutting edge of bringing crypto to the mainstream uh with your your irl yeah um i think for us i mean we've we've had ira underground now for about a year um but we're wanting to expand that into a maker space and like an innovation hub so really creating this ecosystem of you know the art gallery the music venue and then this maker space and i i hope that that's the future you know having spaces where we can all meet and build together year round and be able to really um you know make those doors easier to open and like those conversations more fluid so that we can yeah just create safe spaces where people can ask questions a lot of artists are really visual tactile learners and so i think having you know maker space and these kinds of spaces would be really helpful to be able to find different pathways forward for different people to engage with the tech and so you know and i think that could even happen sooner it's hard to think like crypto years right it's like every day is a year crypto in five years shoot like we're going to be on hoverboards and stuff so in a sense you're kind of borrowing from from what successful communities have done in other areas like the idea of maker space that's that's not new to crypto that's been around a while and and flourishing like artistic spaces so that's an interesting point we don't have to like reinvent the wheel here we can in some ways we can copy what other successful like creative communities have done and other other cultures um curious to get uh everybody else's thoughts on the same question in terms of looking ahead and where you see uh the crypto community specifically in the denver boulder area down the road i kind of want to hear your answer what's that i want to hear your answer um oh you're you're asking the moderator the the ask the mod portion has arrived um so i honestly see this event within three to five years taking place at mile high stadium um i'm not being facetious here or [ __ ] around like to see how this is scaling and to see how much the um how much people love the environment we've created here and how how how nurturing it is for the mind body and soul and how liberating it is to just be able to be like you know what i can do what i want this is empowering and i'm surrounded by people who think outside the box it's a perfect antidote to like the awful polarization that that the media sells us a bunch of [ __ ] [ __ ] about wars and you know trying to put us in different boxes like here we're just all building cool stuff and it's not utopian it's actually happening right now so i think i'd like to think that this vision is very compelling to people and it's only going to grow we're an existing hub right now so i think we'll see a bigger east denver a much bigger east denver in the future i also i would bet on this i think we will have um at least five very noteworthy crypto companies and or dows that are primarily based in the denver boulder area we will be the silicon silicon valley of web 3 and crypto [Music] and you guys can in five years we'll see how we're doing but i'm gonna i'm gonna put my my mind body and soul behind that one so we'll see how we do um so did you have any thoughts on that tv no i just wanted to add i mean colorado is so great i've lived on both coasts and it's it's incredible because um it's not so you know egocentric in a way that uh people could be sometimes on the coast it's the people here are much more approachable um and uh another thing i wanted to say about colorado i mean it used to be somewhat affordable to live here um but it's still it kind of is it used to be or uh i believe it used to be called the fitness capital of the world as well so there's like a great life work balance here and um the 300 days a year so 300 days a year we have sunshine so you guys probably experi experience this yourself even when it snows and it's freezing cold it's beautiful and it's um does so much so much for the mindset because you know for example like living in berlin it gets dark at four o'clock and it's dark and gray in the winter even during the day so the sunshine is a huge plus for colorado it could a couple days of shitty weather is fine but once it's like three three months of gray you start to go a little bit crazy um yeah i can touch on i've got i think three minutes left by the way um i'm excited to see kind of how the regulators can support us uh because i think there's such a big opportunity here and colorado we really have we're blessed to have guys like jared paulus and phil weiser who are very pro crypto and really understand it so there's a lot of opportunity and especially these guys to get dows and there's still a big gap between dallas can do a lot of things that centralized organizations can't do which is awesome but there's still a few things that daos can't do that centralized organizations can do like have a bank account and sign contracts and that boring stuff and i'm hopeful that you know i that the guys that understand it can help come up with new rules that can enable dallas to do all the things that centralized organizations can do and more and that's just one example but i think you know the builders are going to keep building right but we need all the help we can get and i hope that um guys like jared paulus and stuff i'm glad that guys like jared paulus are helping us out amen thanks willie i think we got about four minutes left um last this turned into too much of a fist pumping cheerleading conversation i do want to touch on like okay you know obviously we're doing something right here are there any downsides to building crypto in colorado yeah i think you know as an organization that is you know working on like city state level institutional level projects that also wants to launch a token and become a dow you know i worry about regulations i think it's kept me from like taking the plunge but ultimately like i think that colorado is the place to be and we're figuring it out and i think that that's like the one downside is that the government is like holding us back from like really having clear paths forward for organizations um that want to to engage but um you know i'm probably just going to full send we're fortunate to have a governor that's in a state government that's not that's much better on that point but the federal level it's it's a lot tougher really you had some thoughts yeah i completely agree and i think there's a lot of uncertainty right now but colorado is not necessarily any worse than any other us state right but the cool thing is is that like you start at dao in colorado i mean don't go don't go start it down in wyoming and actually incorporate an llc unless you really know what you're doing because you might actually not be getting that many benefits and you might be giving up a lot and one of the great benefits about dao is is that right now there is no jurisdiction when you launch a dao it's it's global and it's not clear which regulations actually apply to you so yeah we're in colorado i live in colorado we're fully down it and i'm not too afraid because i think that these regulators are they're it's going to take them a while to catch up and you know actually put some laws in place right now it's just not clear what laws or what jurisdictions apply to to taos and i think that by the time any of these regulators catch up if you're down at right by the time they catch up you're going to be fully decentralized like unless you're denver dao hopefully you have people all over the world and enough people that it's not any individual that's that's liable for what your dow's doing so so yeah there's that would be probably the maiden downside but it's not it's not limited to colorado and i don't even think it's that much of a limitation although i do hear you it's uncertain and it'd be much better if we could just have full send and like approval to go full send jared paulus if you're listening please give us that approval well and as john pauler the founder of eat denver likes to talk about crypt or colorado is actually the co-op like the delaware of co-ops in the country we actually have some of the best co-op laws in the nation so if you're founding something like alao and you need a legal entity this is a wonderful state to do it in so i'm not answering your question because now i'm just pumping but there's a lot of room for colorado to be a big mover cool thanks for the answers to that because honestly i racked my brain and i can't think of any downsides it's awesome to build here so i think we're about at time so thanks for listening guys um i will reiterate my prediction in five years we're going to be doing this in sports arenas in a non-hypey and non-douchey way we're still going to keep it real as we scale and uh colorado is going to be the silicon valley of web 3. thank you [Applause]