Alliance 🛠️ Ideas to Build in Crypto (Request for Startups)

[Music] welcome to alliance's request for startups proposals we uh specifically chiao put a lot of work into making this list because we have data from probably like 5 to 10,000 applications that have come into the alliance accelerator program and we tend to see some of the data points that could dictate where the future is going to go and So based on that data we've created a specialized list just for you so that as you're thinking about building your project within the eth global hackathon you're able to get inspired from the list that we're going to share with you and for the winners that get um the number one spot for our Bounty which is the 5,000 five $5,000 reward you're also going to get a an interview by chow and myself so Chia let's talk about what excites us um what's the first idea that you're most excited about I mean at a high level we want to see really weird things really Crypton native things yeah uh specifically on the uh consumer application side of things uh one of the ideas that haven't been done before and that are uniquely enabled by crypto it's okay if the ideas too early there are many great ideas that have been proven to be too early before but what really excites us is things that that hadn't been done before uh so give you a very quick example I think that in the ZK space zero knowledge proofs are at a point where they're mature enough from a tooling point of view that they can actually enable new consumer applications and that consumer developers are able to build interesting things a couple years ago z z proofs were a little bit too early for Consumer developers but today we really want to see interesting applications one example Le is pseudonymous social networks um so the idea there is to use knowledge proofs to prove that you are part of a certain group or you have certain credentials without revealing those credentials and you can participate in the uh Gossip in a gossip Network right uh talking about things as as a Anon so those are that's an example of something we want to see at a high level another great example is you know on Tinder uh you put your education level your net worth and other key features about the user and some people may not want to feel like they have to share that publicly and you could think of you know you know pseudonymous social networks where you can share this Key properties of yourself without revealing the actual uh data behind it uh a related idea in the consumer application space is payment uh we think that in the first probably 13 14 years of crypto payment was a little bit too early because there wasn't a critical mass of uh users who hold crypto um but today we're at a point where there is a critical mass and so the idea here is to build applications for consumers or tooling for businesses that enable payment uh using crypto rails but the key point is we don't want to see projects that try to compete with venmo or revolute or cash app like those traditional incumbent web to uh payment uh applications we want to see applications that serve a uniquely underserved user segment in the world uh a segment that is underserved by Fiat payment rails um so to give you an example it could be you know users or businesses in the Cannabis industry right uh so stuff like that like really weird things things that are uh either weird or or sometimes potentially even outrageous uh controversial uh this is the kind of stuff that we're excited about another area is the uh Creator economy and fan engagement area um with the rise of uh friend Tech and song that XYZ um you're starting to see more or less some penetration in the types of consumer apps that can build for this genre and so some of the things that I'd love to see is um more applications for the super fence where um you know artists and musicians can better monetize that 1% of super fans a great example is uh you know fans purchasing $10,000 uh tickets for listening to Taylor Swift at a live concert and so there is a an opportunity to monetize that area another example is royalty from your from derivative works so an example of this is you know you could enable a whole class of remixes on music that could then be monetized if those remixes become successful where part of that royalty then goes to the musician that came up with the original song and the last thing is revenue sharing uh which is uh you could think of you know Dows as like labels that Acquire music and the music then that gets distributed or licensed can earn a fee that can go to the Dow and so these are some of the things that I'm excited about when it comes to creater economy F engagement a broader theme uh across uh Creator engagement uh is uh the idea of hyper financialization so want to see consumer applications that are hyperf financialized uh if you look at all the most interesting uh crypto consumer applications that we've seen so far uh they're all about speculation they're all highly speculative um be it tokenizing individuals you know or tokenizing pfps tokenizing music of you know famous musicians these are the things that users really want and care about you know ultimately they care about making money um for me personally if you think about crypto there's really two things that crypto are are fundamentally interesting about and they're really at the barbell like there are two at the two extremes of a barbell one is uh hardcore decentralization anti-establishment you know destroying the the Central Bank you know all that stuff and the The Other Extreme of the barbell is speculation is the shin is um you know sniping at new y2s that kind of stuff um so we we're really interested at at both extremes of the barbell obviously on the hardcore decentralization part there aren't that many Founders and it's obviously risky to build that kind of stuff but on the other side of barbell there is a lot of Founders building that and there is not that much risk we want to see more experimentation in that uh hyper financialization SL speculation part of the barbell another area that I'm really excited about when it comes to hyper decentralization is proof of physical work um we've started to see helium uh and others that have started to kind of build the core infrastructure of what a successful proof of physical work product can look like and some of the areas that we think could be the future could be renewable energy it can be um you know like from power sources like wind and uh solar it could be batteries um it could be uh telecommunication it could be many many different areas that could ultimately take the the the the community of people that are all individual operators that can contribute to a much broader Network that can enable a new product or offering that wouldn't be uh available today and that's all by using decentralization and then a power of incentives is a way to align the community uh around a product or an idea so in the proof of physical workspace um it often requires uh domain expertise in two seemingly very unrelated uh domains so crypto is one and the other one is the domain specific so it could be telecommunication it could be climate it could be science right these side is another really interesting example y um so we really encourage everyone who come from these uh non-crypto related domains to experiment with proof of physical work um because uh the crypto stuff we can help you with it um and uh so that's proof of physical work but again that touches on the hyperf financialization U part of crypto So speaking of hyperf financialization obviously there d uh Imran what are you excited about in d what I'm excited about defi uh is uh so what I'm excited about defi is um two things one on the traditional defi side there is startups like agna that is using request for quote system that enables no uh it enables two parties from the Bor and lens sign to be able to come in and fulfill an order from both sides without any protocol integration so this enables like uh seamless decentralization and then two no uh counterparty risk as an example number two is um I'm excited a lot about uh an nft uh and the per or nftf and so that is the Perpetual markets that could be created around nfts and the lending and amm side as well uh an example of this is uh with blend you're seeing the RFQ system being used as a way for two parties to be able to enter into a transaction um and we think that this is great for tailin assets but uh there are opportunities to build something that's much more um scalable in a way that can offer better rates uh number two is uh on the per side we've seen um nft pur.com that it recently launched but then shut down uh and so I do think there's an opportunity for nft purs uh that's scalable and that could solve the Oracle pricing issue in a way that could help uh grow the Perpetual markets for nfts as well uh a big part of defa I'm personally very excited about is privacy uh we've been talking about privacy for 14 years but unfortunately we still don't have truly private Defi and obviously as a defi user myself I fully appreciate how important that is I want to be able to send transactions to swap tokens in a way that my addresses my amount and the name of the token is not revealed to the rest of the world uh I don't know how it should be done maybe it's as uh as an L2 maybe it's as a privacy Centric wallet maybe it's something else we don't know yet but we love to see more experiments on the on the Privacy defi side of things great and uh I know you're really excited about the AI and uh crypto crossover so maybe if you want to talk a bit about that yeah so uh one of one of the most obvious applications of crypto in AI is actually uh content Authentication right so in a world of AI there's a uh huge growth in terms of uh deep fakes uh fake content um one of the ways to solve this problem is to is for the creator of that content to sign a message on chain and separately uh publish their uh addresses on the social media for example um in a way that people can verify the signatures uh this is one of the most obvious uh ways in which crypto can be helpful for for AI um another interesting uh area to explore is uh to use um crypto incentives to bootstrap uh physical networks of GPU uh so right now we're we're in a massive shortage of gpus uh due to recent U uh Rise of llms and the subsequent uh demand for the gpus so again this goes back back to the previous conversation around proof of physical work and Hyper financialization the idea is to use incentives to bootstrap such a compute uh Network so AI I mean it's going to be really big in the coming years and there there should be ton of opportunities at the intersection of the two the the next idea I'm most excited about is habit form uh forming apps uh we started to see this with steppen uh where people were incentivized to walk and as they as as so they could either walk or run and they would earn rewards in the form of tokens and this created a positive feedback loop because those that were uh that may not be able to walk or run without any real incentives will not do it and with the power of the token um many of the people that wouldn't have walked or ran are now doing that because habits take typically 18 to let's say 45 days to form and uh we've seen a percentage of of people that use a stepen app that uh turn out to be long-term users of the app in fact um even over the course of the past two years of the launch of the steppen app there's still 200,000 monthly active users on the steppen ecosystem and that shows that the Steen has a a product Market fit that no other app has from the bare Market side so related to uh this health habit formation we love to see more experiments uh in dze so decentralized science uh the idea is that uh one of the key challenges that science or the scientific Community has faced so far is the lack of funding um and obviously crypto is uh uh uh one of the most effective tools at Capital formation so again it goes back to the idea the whole idea of hyperf financialization the idea is to harness The Deen energy of crypto users and help uh with uh Capital formation for scientific projects obviously these words sound very abstract and as because we don't know how it's going to look like exactly but we have to see more experiments at the intersection of crypto in science and this also touches on the uh the idea of proof of physical work so uh one possible example is um use token incentives to incentivize users to bootstrap critical and large data sets for uh scientific research uh so think of for example decentralized 23m uh basically where users uh contribute their DNA data in exchange for um uh tokens so to summarize uh there are two inter interesting things at the intersection of cryp science one is capital formation and the second one is proof of physical work and specifically in uh bootstrapping new data sites for science research great and maybe my final idea and there's many more ideas uh on our ideas page but the final idea I'll go over is consumer applications uh with the rise of frch uh which enabled this really weird application that enables you to purchase a key or share of someone that gave you direct access to this individual um is a key way to think about how to build in a social media space with crypto rails you don't want to build something that looks and feels like an app that you use today like Twitter or Facebook but it should enable something new using you know the using crypto and and financialization uh and so we'd like to see more applications being built around the consumer use cases because uh we believe that the infrastructure is ready for you know Mass adoption at least for the next 100 to million users in the in the next six to months six months a year my final idea is uh for those who are building uh on the infra side of things so we've talked a lot about applications but for those who are building infra there are three things we like to see one is uh wallet infrastructure obviously this has been uh talked about a lot but we still haven't really experienced a an awesome onboarding experience or sign transaction signature experience with mobile wallets or mobile applications so you want to see more of that um for for wallets so a wallet infrastructure that facilitates or makes the whole onboarding and signature experience a lot uh smoother so that's one thing second thing is uh some kind of uh Crossroad up Bridge so we're obviously in a in a world world where there's going to be hundreds if not thousands of uh rollups on top of ethereum and we have to figure out what is the most capitally efficient way to bridge between the various rollups um and perhaps the best Bridge hasn't been born yet so you want to see more experiments with cross rollup Bridges specifically and the third one is uh specialized ZK computer networks so you can think of for example ZK rollups as generic computer networks using zeron knowledge proofs but there are many applications that don't need a a generic uh computes because they the the kind of compute behind those applications are very unique to that applications and as a result the kind of Zer knowledge proofs that are required to run uh those applications are more specialized and therefore they could be potentially smaller than those generic uh xer not proofs uh smaller and more efficient and cheaper so we love to see more specialized zero knowledge proof Compu networks an example for is is uh Zer not proof computer network for AI so AI requires a specific type of compute uh many of which is actually just Matrix multiplications and so um the proof for matrix multiplication is very different from the proof for a generic set of computes so uh that that that that is my final idea well thanks for listening and uh if you want to reach out to us for more feedback you could uh visit us at the booth or find us on Discord um but look forward to working with you all