Scaling Ethereum and Real-World Adoption of Web3 | KBW2023

and here I'm going to hand over my microphone to Lee thank you um hi my name is H and I'm founder of Lei Korea and Salo Korea it's like um a nonprofit Collective focused on evangelized Lei in web3 or web 2 and hi Lun U welcome to Korea and can you briefly introduce yourself yeah hello I'm my name is Renee I the co-founder of uh cell it's a blockchain is looking to advance real world use cases and uh longtime fan of Korea um I lived here studied abroad here so it's great to be back yeah um l so when was the last time you in Korea and what's the purpose of the this trip yeah this is actually the first time since the pandemic so remember back in 20199 we came out I think we came out twice actually uh in February we hosted our first Community Meetup still before uh yeah mainnet launch and yeah the network has been up and running for over three years almost 300 million uh transactions processed uh so yeah lot has happened since yeah Salo is known as the home of Lei Lei means leg generative Finance with over 10,000 project in more than 150 countries Alo also works with an impressive loster of Partners like Google Cloud a recently announcement to l validator u tell us more about this partnership yeah and I think I actually have a slide let me see if I can go to that um yeah so Google Cloud recently announced they're going to run validators uh for the cell network which is um the first time they're they're doing this for an evm chain so it's really big uh announcement and you know I think exciting for the cell Community to see that uh we've always had a very active validator set with many you know Grassroots smaller validators all around the world but then also big organizations like do Telecom for example which has been running validators for for a long time time so yeah that was that was a really uh great announcement and you know we're looking to partner with them on on a bunch of different initiatives um including around refi which Yeah you mentioned yeah um during ADCC in Paris uh there was even a lei day as Sal's co-operate event with the chain link what do you think about Lei is there a future I believe um Le is the future U yeah no I uh I'm glad you bring it up so I mean for those of you who don't know refi refi stands for regenerative Finance it's kind of a mashup of regenerative economics uh principles and decentralized finance and uh if you want to explain it to a friend over over drinks the the easiest way to do that is to basically say Hey you know imagine a financial system uh where there are positive externalities um you know it's everything you do for for either the planet or your community or maybe even the individual um and that's that's been a really a core guiding principle for um for us working on cello even before the term Rea itself um was was sort of a you know a term people were using to refer to the space um and uh it's fascinating because there's a long history of you know um yeah sort of different experiments and you know economic theory that falls sort of broadly in in that category and for a long time uh these things were kind of farfetched dreams and they're now becoming a reality and you know we can maybe give some examples to that in this talk oh thank you um can you explain the Salos Pion because the Salos Pion is really not it's core so yeah oh yeah I actually had a slide on that too sorry uh no no it's uh yeah so really the idea was to say Hey you know this technology is so powerful in you know and I think a lot of people who came into the space from the very early days right saw this as a way to really democratize access to financial tools to to Really the economy digital economy and in reality that that Red Road has been harder um and not necessarily because we're um we were waiting for some crazy new zero knowledge uh technology but because stuff that you know happens in the real world like cash in cash out right the ability to seamlessly as a regular person to actually use the stuff that we're building um and so guiding sort of nor stuff was was always okay let's Design Systems that are inclusive and you know really this kind of building for all and um building with purpose um sort of cell itself is a a asper word and means a purpose um and we did that on purpose as I like to say yeah oh yeah um what are the Le word use case that you excited about actually brought a couple of examples with me um uh this one is is pretty fresh uh so for those of you who spent time uh or actually there's there's a bunch maybe like taking a step back there's a bunch bunch of different have been a bunch of different experiments uh involving Community currencies all around the world even pre- Bitcoin and uh will radik and the team from grassroot economics have been working on community currencies for I think a decade maybe more um and it's really interesting because they started with paper vouchers so imagine you're a business and you're maybe let's say you're you run a car mechanic shop um and uh you know you're trusted in the community people know you're you know you do good work uh why not uh write on a piece of paper like oh here this is worse 5 hours of my of my time of my work and then hand that paper to someone right I mean that someone has a car problem they can come to you and redeem the paper and you actually have ability to get some cash now for a service you do in the future and in fact the person you give that piece of paper to they may actually give that piece of paper to a neighbor right to buy something else and so you could imagine these vouchers circulating in a community and really creating liquidity in a way this is Mutual Credit right and so uh beautiful Concepts um in terms of also a community powering you know itself and kind of keeping the wealth that that it generates within the community but in reality very hard to implement especially at at a a large scale and so over the years Grassroots you know as they were building their their systems you know went from from paper vouchers to databases to you know private blockchain and very recently deployed on on cellet public you know public blockchain infrastructure and is really powerful because now that really unlocks the next stage of growth of you know imagining something happening in one Community happening in other communities liquidity pools between different communities and sort of at an aggregate each Community can take all these vouchers and effectively have something that resembles a community currency where I'm happily trading sort of an aggregate voucher that represents the services of the community um so if you want to play with that this is a live dashboard uh where you can go in and sort of you know if you click on on the lines here these are transactions so they take you directly to the block Explorer and you can see when you click on the dots right each voucher how many vouchers are outstanding you know is that car mechanic you know has he sold 10,000 vouchers and is that going to be a problem maybe when uh when all those cars break down at the same time um that's a joke but uh but yeah there's there's some cool stuff in terms of you know really seeing directly the benefits of uh these kind of products being deployed on public blockchain infrastructure and with it uh the ability to scale but also facilitating how this plugs into the existing economy right for example uh allowing people to offramp their Community currency to uh Mesa right this is in Kenya so uh yeah really interesting and uh one aspect to me of sort of you know this if you take regenerative economics right a great example of of implementing that in the real world think of a few more here good dollar um has done a fantastic job they've they've built a community of over 500,000 members that are once a day claiming a daily dividend or you know basic income if you want um and obviously the individual amounts are quite small but to me actually that's that's only almost like a side point of of their product what they've done is they've created um you know really a Bottoms Up identity layer because now other projects protocols can can go to them and say Hey I want to you know uh you know I want to expose my product to your community and uh we know these are real people because once a day they come in they claim their um their their daily their daily good dollar um and uh in a way that's uh that's really powerful because users can sort of opt in into how what what they share right what they what they what they what they want to participate in and it's a very it's kind of a building block in a much bigger um public goods infrastructure that um ultimately contributes to this regenerative ecosystem uh let's see impact Market a very interesting started um similarly as um a platform or you know decentralized platform for Distributing Ubi the idea here being that we all here could pay money into a smart contract and that that smart contract distributes those funds to individuals in the community and not just one Community but you know communities all over the world many markets um and do that according to some criteria right and so you have if you think about this from a cash transfer funding perspective you you you really have a transparency that is unheard of in sort of traditional giving but more importantly also this you know is is creating an identity layer that now impa Market labs and some of the products they're building around this um are providing even more value to uh to people participating here they've they've started to do microcredit with some pretty amazing success in terms of repayment rates and um just you know money kind of flowing in the community and that's really encouraging because these are uncollateralized loans right so these are not your uh compound loans but um these are folks that for the first time you know ever now have access to credit at very reasonable interest rates and um it's happening in you know communities all around the world particularly in global South so um yeah another really exciting project um I give one more example let we go back to the questions uh this one you know I think sometimes people are like oh impact you know it's like okay there's like there's impact and there's all the other stuff but I actually I like it best when those kind of Worlds melt right and and here FC Barcelona did something really clever they um they said hey we know there's a lot of people using plastic bottles at the games and kind of feel bad about that and we want to do something to start changing that um and even creating awareness for for that and and shifting maybe Behavior over time and so for folks you're familiar with carbon offsets right you could imagine a very similar concept to a voluntary carum credit like almost like a voluntary plastic credit this is in this case it's a it's a um it's a a certificate that has monetary value around one ton of plastics being recycled um but to make it fun uh PL the Plastics team actually let's see if I have it here yeah um uh basically had these certificates tied to um a picture of a cute um animal so nft and effectively Barcelona fans were buying uh nfts that um had real world purpose real world impact right by um actually creating a monetary um yeah kind of a price for for plastic recovery um so so really cool to see sort of those World worlds worlds melt and um yeah personally I'm a uh I'm a fan of solutions that kind of really reach a mass audience and that can allow people that you know where that may not be pron and center right to take positive action for their Community or positive climate action right for the planet um with their everyday action nice um the other big news of edcc in Paris um solos proposed migration to on ethereum layer to what does this proposal enta and was Salos pafic t strategy to win in Layer Two yeah it's interesting um I I think about it less of like winning but rather like how do we create even more momentum uh around refi around how do we scale that real world impact um let me see if I have um I have some slides on this too somewhere here in here um actually this one is this one is interesting um there are many questions like you know why are you doing this and you know my my favorite answer here is well you know if ethereum um you know six years ago when we started working on cell if ethereum had been then what it was what it is now right um yeah I don't know if we would have chosen the path um of of a standalone layer one but at the time this was really the the right path to um have the kind of performance the kind of features that enable these real world use cases and um it's it's interesting to see a lot of the things that um you know we kind of initially built uh or sort of the way we modified um you know kind of the GU as as we forked it uh have now become much more widely adopted and by other um uh yeah by by sort of other other things that have launched and even ethereum um and I think a lot of that is now we're now at a point where we're like okay you know there's a lot of applications a lot of people in the in the broader ethereum um ecosystem that share our values and that that actually you know are rowing in the right in in the same direction and so uh to me I really think of this um much more as a homecoming um moment um and uh the architecture too is I mean the the core team has spent a bunch of time thinking through the design and thinking about okay how do we actually do something that keeps all the benefits all the things that people love about cell and when I say people really people building applications on Cell but ultimately also the way it's impacting end users for example through Subs send fees and the ability to pay for um yeah to pay for for gas was was for example stable coins tokens on on Cell right these are important features when you think about the end user experience um and then most importantly you know we have a very engaged validator set we mentioned Google joining as a validator um which is which is awesome but then also around the world really a lot of um very strong teams and and companies that some of them have been with us since pre mainnet and so as we were coming up with some of these ideas for what this could look like it became clear to us well they could actually play a really important role in um basically becoming sequencers and you know having sort of a design here that has a uh decentralized sequencer um so yeah for everyone interested like to learn more about that I know we probably don't have time to go into all the details else here but there's a there's a forum post on the cell Forum um we uh Court team PR announced it at at ECC and then after that there was a temperature check vote that uh was passed was like you know really record uh participation so uh our whole like Community is really excited and I know many people in the ethereum community also very excited oh yeah yeah um as mentioned by HF from d fly Capital oelo has impressive user and transaction growth what is driving oelo activity um yeah and nonsense chain products also show that Salo has among the highest growth on monthly basic for activity addresses more than polygon optimism and arbitrum so what do you attribute this two yeah I actually yeah sort of preparing for this talk I I went and actually looked at the nans and dashboard and I pulled the latest numbers um and it's it's really interesting because um this is for the last six months it looks similar if you go last three months um or or other other time frames um but what's interesting here is you know cell still in terms of active addresses is behind you know other uh other ecosystems like arbitrum optimism but the the active address growth um especially in this time frame during this bare Market has been really strong um and I I looked in i c like okay what are the applications that are driving this and and where I kind of landed was okay this is this is really driven by um by applications such as you the ones that I showed you like good dollar and others that that actually um you know are are in the communities that where there's some real world utility whether it's microcredit or or micro payments and for the most part where um the the people using these products don't actually care in that moment whether Bitcoin is at $25,000 or $50,000 right so it's it's not uh you know I think the the sort of macro um sort of numbers you see often for the space in terms of the waves of adoption right they're they're often very much driven by by you know defi Trend nft Trend right and people coming in trying out something new but this is much more sort of steady growth kind of like more similar to what you would see from a traditional SAS product right that sort of is just growing week over week months over months um and to us it's very encouraging because I think that for the builders right is um it's kind of much easier to calibrate right they can look what's working and tweak it a little bit make it just a little bit better right um and and ultimately um I think as a community that's that's very much the the Mantra right like looking at okay what is how can we more utility to the users that ultimately should get a benefit from this um so that's I think the that's really the the secret behind this growth and it's also when I look at where for example at the sell Foundation where I sit where we spend our time um it's really talking to to the builders um that are that have built some of these applications that are driving this grow and understanding okay how do we unlock more Grows Right how do we help folks be more successful okay there's for example there's a country maybe where the on the on-ramp uh kind of experience is is too expensive right it doesn't make sense for people to cash into tokens because they're they're just losing too much on that right and okay is there a way for us to support them help in the ecosystem find other partners that can bring down the cost right so that's a that's a typical thing that I for example spend you know time on um but it's it's these small tweaks that ends up having a big impact whether someone uses a product or not um and and that's maybe also for builders in the room something to uh to know and just be aware of um as you're as you're building in web stream okay um it's now uh why do you think Korea is important well first off big news uh Salo Korea uh we just um you know was kind of through a onchain proposal and funding was was launched and um yeah thank you for for proposing and and actually starting uh the effort here um I think so I'm I'm a little biased personally as I you know spend time here like when I was when I was much younger studying here and uh even then I was I was just so impressed by uh you know how much technology is embraced and um I feel like every day here you just walks through the streets and you can you can see something new that you haven't seen anywhere um and there's a lot of appetite to try new things and um yeah very kind of Technology Savvy U population but also and this is I think where Al you know we've talked about refi earlier um I think it's one of the countries where at the company at the corporate level ESG is is is top of mind for for many leaders and it's something that I think is is already a boardroom conversation where in many other countries it's not yet right it's something that like some shareholder brought up and okay we have to talk about it but here it's really something that people want to uh think about um and then at an individual level right the willingness to um to support others right the abil like the the willingness to give right being among the biggest kind of uh contributors um to organizations like UNICEF right and I think just generally sort of a culture of supporting each other I think um yeah fits really well with the c Mantra but also I think makes for a very interesting community right to have to not just think okay what can we do in Korea for Korea but how can Korea have an even bigger impact on the world um and some of the solutions that are being built um and and yeah so I'm personally planning to spend uh a lot more time out here going forward now that the pandemic is past us behind us um and and yeah I'm excited for everything that c Korea is doing oh thank you um the next question is almost the same we you continue continue to focus on Korea as a hope of Asia 100% I mean one thing I've also like even just at this conference um had some really interesting conversations with folks from for example Thailand Vietnam and I think there's there's really um I think each market has sort of its own characteristics but um I do see compared to yeah when I came last to the region uh four years ago pre pandemic um there's really um yeah the questions are okay what kind of applications can be built what kind of applications can be used in market like how do we use this for for payments or allowing people to get access to work so the conversation really has been shifting towards real world use cases so I think um as a whole I'm I'm hoping to also bring some of the learnings from other markets and uh I think that can be sort of nice to have Builders uh in Asia pollinate with maybe builders in Africa Latin America what's happening in Europe in the US and um I think that's the power of this of this industry as well yeah yeah thank you oh every question is done oh anything else no thanks thanks all for coming I know this is the last last session so yes thanks for showing up um and uh yeah happy to stick around for for a few questions after thanks guys thank thank you ladies and gentlemen it's a long afternoon session for thanks for staying and once again please