[Music] And for this one, I'd like to bring on Yanife to tell you all about what they've been working on for the last couple years on the Geo browser. So, please give Yian a big round of applause. Hey everyone, it's great to be here. So yeah, I'm Yian. Uh I founded the graph back in 2017 and I've been working on helping to build web 3 uh ever since.
The last uh four years been working on this thing called geo um to really continue that vision of building an open composable and verifiable web. So, I love this idea of the infinite garden, right? We want to enable infinite games, right? For pioneers to come in and go to the the frontier, play long-term games with long-term people, right? And right now, DeFi is doing really great on Ethereum, right?
you can actually see how you know stable coins and tokenization and you know bringing this kind of money to more people um you know has a path to becoming mainstream um to grow into you know trillion dollar markets. So you know DeFi is going great. What about web 3, right? Like where are the applications right? As great as DeFi is, if all we have is DeFi, it's just money betting on money, right?
And like, you know, we got to get out of the casino, right? We need to have the real world applications. I think this about sums it up, right? It's uh, you know, 2017, people really had the vision and you could tell like, you know, we're going to change the world and we're going to do all of these new things. And uh, I get it, right?
Like it's been hard to actually realize this vision, right? People have heard it all before. They're like, "Okay, you know, we've heard that, you know, at this point the only way out is to is through, right? We actually have to build this thing, right? We need to build the real world applications.
Uh we need to build web 3." Um, so NFTTS were arguably the first application I would say on Ethereum um that went beyond just DeFi, right? There was a financial aspects, but it wasn't just like numbers on a screen, right? We had these, you know, sick JPEGs and uh it's it's I think not too late for me to get my doodle. Um, these were great and the way you built these, right, is you had this metadata.
Um, but the metadata was fixed, right? it was, you know, it'd anchor it on chain. Sometimes it would point to these HTTP URLs. Um, but quickly we started to see the the limitation of like composability actually with these NFTs. So back already early 2021, I started these weekly NFT subgraph working groups with you know people from Zora and foundation and wearable all these NFT projects and we worked to try to standardize the metadata for NFTTS.
Okay, because people started coming up with all these new use cases. They wanted to do ticketing, wanted to do, you know, roy creator royalties, all these things. And you know, there was this question, how do we standardize on the schema? So, this gave me the early glimpse and I've kind of been working, you know, since then on this problem. Uh, we still have this in social.
So, social has kind of taken off. you're seeing a little bit of these applications, right, with Farcaster and Lens and things, but even then these things are kind of rigid, right? It's like social is an app. Um, maybe you have posts and maybe it's composable within that limited, you know, structure, but not everything is a post, right? What about events?
What about jobs? What about all the different types of things that we use in all our different applications? So you actually need richer ways of structuring information across these applications. And so it all comes down to primitives, right? What are the building blocks that we use when we build things?
So on Ethereum, you know, with DeFi, we had ERC20. And that one little primitive was like a seed that you planted and it could grow. And because it was composable, you could use it in lending. You could use it with dexes like any smart contract could use ERC20 and you have this composable, you know, DeFi. And we need the same thing for knowledge and information, right?
A a composable primitive that works across applications. And so, um, we've released something. It's a new standard called GRC20, which is a a standard for composable knowledge. And with web 3, we do want that information to work across applications, right? We have all of these web 2 applications we use today.
And the data of course is stuck inside of these silos. And it would be really great to break out of the silos, right? Imagine if you know your posts that you have um you know, weren't trapped inside of X or inside of Instagram that you could just publish anything you wanted to publish to the world and people could remix it. they could create, you know, their own lists and curate and you can mix and match and, you know, have custom applications that just plug into this open composable knowledge. And that's the world we need to build with web 3.
And you know, it looks a little bit like this, right? That's what this makes me think of. But um, you know, it's like the early web. This is what the web was always supposed to be, right? Open, not controlled by corporations.
And we need to get back to this. So last year I published a blog post called knowledge graphs are web 3. And the basic idea is that knowledge graphs themselves are the core primitive that you need to enable this web 3 vision. It's a way of structuring information into entities and relations that are interconnected into a global graph. And this is actually the reason why we don't have composable applications outside of DeFi even in this kind of web 3 land on Ethereum and things is because we we haven't gotten these primitives quite right and the answer is we believe knowledge graphs.
So say say you had a question, right? there's a bunch of changes at the EF right now and you know let's say I just wanted to know like what are notable changes that have taken place at the EF since the leadership shift like where would I go to get an answer to this type of question and if you had some insights on this like where would you go to contribute your insights or your knowledge right so and and this is just like one simple example but you multiply this by all the questions that people have maybe today you go to like a chat GPT or something but like where does it get its answers, right? Where does it get its knowledge? So, if we had a solution to organizing knowledge and information that's not controlled by corporations, right, that's truly open and we could get, you know, larger and larger communities to use these sorts of things. That's actually, you know, a big the big thing that will enable us to start tackling big challenges.
And I really believe that's what we're here for with DeFi, with web 3. like we need to be able to like tackle big societal challenges, right? Things like, you know, actually fixing our public policy, which sometimes you look at like what governments are doing and it's like, you know, there's got to be a better way, right? Um, we've gone really deep on this uh issue of homelessness in San Francisco uh as a a way to test out these tools and try to understand like, man, this is a big problem. And it's it's a coordination challenge, right?
no reason why a city as rich as San Francisco would have such a big homelessness problem. And you know, partly it's an issue of transparency. Partly it's an issue of getting all the nonprofits and groups to actually work together to address this thing. You know, public policy is a big piece of it. Um but you know, all of these problems we can solve with the right knowledge and information tools.
So what exactly is knowledge? Um well data is like the raw bits like you might have on a blockchain. Um information you're all um you know familiar with but it's when you have structured data. So you structure information into like tables. So most applications that you deal with databases tables right they're basically using information but information is rigid and knowledge is not.
Like if you think about your own mind and how you learn things, what you're doing is you're creating connections between different ideas, right? Like this is related to that, this contradicts that, I don't really believe this, right? So all of that like you think of that as labeling and linking information into a an interconnected graph and all knowledge is interconnected, right? It doesn't stay siloed within a single domain, right? and and so knowledge forms a global interconnected graph.
And so at GIO, we've been working on tools to help people organize and share knowledge. And you could think of it a little bit like a notion user interface for the application. Um, and imagine if you could start with a notion, you could share it with people. Um, and you could interconnect all of these kind of notions together. Um, notion or Rome.
Some people like Rome because they like to be more free form in in their thought process. Uh, but then imagine that we could form communities around this. So something like Reddit, right? Reddit does a really great job with community formation and you have your interest groups and things like that. Except in Reddit, you just have posts and you know posts, whether it's Reddit or X or whatever, it just goes into a black hole, right?
everyone talking past each other, shouting and then it's gone. But what if we could actually grow those conversations that it was worth your time to participate because that was, you know, going into a graph that was accreing knowledge over time, the global hive mind and understanding and to then start to build up these like canonical sources, right? And it's, you know, if we try to understand the problem of truth, you know, today we use things like maybe Wikipedia as a source of information. Of course, that's still a pretty tightly controlled platform. And really what we want is open platforms that anyone can contribute to, but that we can form into communities to try to organize, you know, better and better understand the world.
And so uh in GIO we have spaces and these spaces are the communities and you can have a space for every industry, region, academic field. These spaces can interconnect um and they can govern themselves and you can organize and share knowledge. uh to publish knowledge um to go a user can use a web 3 app any kind of custom web3 app and uh using the GRC20 standard you can encode your knowledge and you can publish it on chain and so um the knowledge itself just like the you know the NFT metadata we were looking at but instead of it being like fixed schemas and information that you publish it's any amount of um of knowledge right and it's updates to entities and relations and you can batch all of that into a single onchain transaction. You can publish that to a personal space that you control or maybe an organization controls or to a public space um where then you can have governance on top of the public knowledge and you know governance opens up all kinds of interesting questions right um if you think about this kind of a system you're like okay well who decides what is true right like what's that review process like and that's going to look different in every case Right? Something like you know in academia we they have very rigorous peerreview processes.
Uh and even there a lot if you talk to professors they'll tell you that like it's terribly broken right so that's peer review in academia. What about the news? You know there it's going to be a different review process and you know a lot of people feel like news is broken. Uh but still you need this kind of journalistic integrity. So having these kinds of you know governance systems whether it's voting based or also signaling up voting down voting these kinds of things is a really key piece of how we organize knowledge.
Um and you can you know imagine in something like let's say you take a field like the energy industry and you're looking at nuclear okay like that's pretty important to get people on the same page there. you start doing things like regulations and how do you determine like you know uh what the right codes and rules are and processes for like nuclear safety. Um it's something where you need to get people to consensus because like it's going to impact a lot of people but you also want to be able to move quickly and I think that's what part of these tools if we get the information tools right we'll be able to do complex things and we'll be able to move a lot quicker than we can today. So let's take something really simple like uh the city of Prague, right? We're in we're in Prague today.
Um so uh you could represent Prague as an entity, right? That's what we call it. It every entity has a globally unique ID. Um so if if you were building an application today, you wanted to reference Prague, like what ID would you use for the city of Prague, right? And that already gets you to the first thing you're like okay like usually each system each application will have its own ids for different things right and already there you break composability so if we could get to a place where you know every application that wants to reference progue is using the same ID then I'll understand what you're saying right and and all the apps will understand each other and that's the interoperability you know our entities um can have types so you know Prague is a place it's also a city can have many types You can have an event like Pragma Prague with a set of speakers, everything just interconnected together.
Um, you can have a talk, you know, growing the infinite garden with knowledge. Um, that's this talk. Hopefully I'm at the right talk. Yeah, I think I am. Um, so you know, all of these entities and relations interconnect together into a graph, right?
And uh, and that can help us make sense of information. I mean, sometimes I feel like, you know, I get the constant stream of information and, you know, it's hard making sense of it all. Like, you know, this UFO situation, I'm still trying to figure out what's going on here. Uh, do do any of you know what's going on with the UFOs? Well, uh, I mean, it's totally possible that these things are real, right?
Um, but how do you know, right? like we need better ways to organize this stuff because if anyone can you know say anything at any time and you have this just you know information stream. Um it's hard to make sense of it all and so you know better systems for processing sifting through that information and sense making so that people can better understand the world um I think is something that's like really important um for for all of us. Uh so one of the things that we've been doing with geo because you know we can organize any kind of knowledge and information and uh soon we'll be able to build all kinds of applications on top of this. Um and so we've been exploring a few different use cases to go deep uh with this tech and uh one of the things we've been focusing on recently is news.
Uh so we have a set of editors that have been organizing news for the crypto space and with news what they're doing is every day they organize the top news stories of the day and they extract out individual claims and these claims each point to their sources and they go in sometimes and if there's something controversial they can add you know supporting arguments and opposing arguments. Is this thing true? And um soon we're going to start opening this up so that more people can participate. We can upvote, downvote, and uh and hopefully get to, you know, a better system for trying to understand the news in real time. And um soon, very soon, we're going to be opening up a set of tools for developers um to build custom applications on top of this open interoperable knowledge graph.
um you know nextgen web3 consumer apps. Uh for the time being if people are interested in learning more and about how we define these knowledge graphs you can go to this graph protocol repo GRC20 ts we have a library there for generating these entities and relationships types and properties. Um there's also a link here to the GRC20 spec um which we are about to finalize. So this is kind of last chance to provide comment before we freeze this spec for good. And uh we've been working on this app Geogenesis um which you can think of a little bit like a web 3 notion right so you can come in you can organize knowledge you can share it with people and then we've integrated these uh governance tools.
So um you know we've had to invent a lot of new UI affordances and patterns to to make all of this you know possible interconnected knowledge graph and uh we're going to start opening this up. So um you can scan here for early access and uh it's invite only for now. Um, but uh we want to make sure that people that want to help build out this web 3 thing and be at the frontier uh can get some early access. And uh yeah, this web 3 revolution thing is actually going to happen, right? Um we are going to change how we organize.
We're going to, you know, build new types of institutions that operate at internet speed that like actually, you know, work in today's high information environment. All of the stuff that the crazy people in 2017 were promising you, like it's all going to happen if we start using the right primitives. And so I I love Ethereum, you know, I think Ethereum has the right values. I think you know people building on Ethereum they're taking the time to really build the right foundation for civilization right this is civilization scale infrastructure um the incentives and the money and the DeFi is going to be a really big part of this and I think what we'll find is that a little bit of knowledge can go a long Okay, thank you very much. [Applause] [Music]
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.