Building for Impact: Finding Local Solutions to Global Problems with Shuya Gong, Scott & Daniel

uh next up we have our uh Impact Panel on uh building for impact Global uh you know local solutions to Global problems we've got uh Daniel moderating with Chris shuya amreen and Scott uh please take it away looking forward to what you all have to say hi so we'll be talking about uh uh impact and its uh relation to the crypto and blockchain world so I'm Daniel I work in blockchain infra and climate and a lot of other uh impact areas I I got my I cut my teeth in crypto doing remittances in the Philippines in 2013. but yeah I'd love to maybe go down the line um and do name maybe current role or current project that you guys have been working on and maybe like a brief background that'd be great so Scott awesome all right I'll try and speak a bit louder just uh given the audience um my name's Scott I work on a project called git coin I co-founded that with awaki back in 2017. and ultimately the goal of Bitcoin is to find a way to coordinate around uh shared needs for any given Community any local community using uh primarily this tool called quadratic funding the idea of quadratic funding is in short that if you have a set of Voters in a system you can use the signal of their donations to allocate larger pools of philanthropic capital from governments or from non-profits towards a given set of local causes so that can be things like open source it could be causes like climate and to date we've done about 50 million plus dollars through that mechanism uh beyond that I Steward a bunch of dows Beyond gate coin itself which I think is just part of being a good Steward of the ecosystem awesome um hey everyone my name is amarine I work at UNICEF as a product manager particularly within the office of global Innovation unicef's mandate is to advance human rights for children and make sure that they can meet their potential and one way that the office of innovation does that is by identifying and scaling solutions that can really Advance children's needs and within that team I fall under Ventures where we look at building zero to one products that leverage Technologies like Ai web3 and so on in order to create that social impact we've been doing some projects in the web 3 space we've collaborated with Bitcoin so we'd love to share more about the work as the panel moves along I'll pass it over to you hey y'all my name is shuya gong I'm currently a design director at Ido and got my start in 2015. we're working with really large financial institutions as they had this curiosity around what would blockchains do for the future of large Financial infrastructure and as we were doing this explosion actually turned out that it was much more interesting to see where blockchain Technologies and the web 3 stack could be applied to places that are currently unbanked and currently don't have any Financial infrastructure so around five years ago with the Bill Gates Foundation we launched Last Mile money which was an exploration to see what this cash in cash out in the rural unbanked areas would look like and what it looks like to really start to get into the mobile money market I'm currently in Dow space that contribute to refinds out um just understand what the tools for working towards a regenerative economy looks like as well as with we three where we're working with early seed stage startups who are building the future of the internet looking at product and strategy design pass it to Chris hey y'all can you hear us okay good um my name is Chris Crone I'm an executive director and founder of bxc which is blockchain times climate leadership network uh we're a non-profit organization that brings together leading l1's adaps and projects uh looks to organize um synthesize and build taxonomies education and understanding across these groups then we drive into web 2 applications so driving into industry Pilots tests and MVP builds to really build capacity and understanding of how the traditional industry and Enterprise world can adopt and work with blockchain and web3 Technology right so I I think what would be really helpful is like let's do like a contrast from a lot of the impact work that a lot of these folks have been contributing to in the crypto and blockchain ecosystem and perhaps like the more of the ideological roots of how a crypto had started as an example um right I I used to work at a law firm and I Rage Quit started mining Bitcoin 2013 to like take down the banks right and now it's funny Rick we we simp over Banks coming into crypto but but now we've had like let's say 10 plus or so years engaging in some of the more qualitative and you know no pun intended impactful aspects of blockchain right there's there's this sort of like Resurgence of these spectrums that we've we've we've come across I'd be really interested maybe from each of you guys to see like how the let's say the hyper the popularity of these types of initiatives that maybe crypto had started off with are getting a footholder or need to get more of a foothold in this age of defy and coins and like ponteinomics and stuff like that right like as an example I I met Chris on in Greenland on like watching glaciers melt and then that's how a lot of like the initiatives of like the blockchain climate uh leadership Network started and I I think that was like something that got a lot of people more closely involved with why they're building in blockchain in crypto of course you need to have like this incentivization of this good behavior that we all are benefiting from but but I think like right there there definitely is a place for ideology where I think impact definitely aligns with more so maybe if you have like an example like what was your Tyler Durden moment like what what specifically from an ideological perspective was moving you for like the impact specifically within under the climate climate space uh the the impact in crypto space yeah I I think for me a lot of it comes back to the idea that um if we're looking at kind of building new systems we need to figure out what's wrong with the existing systems uh and for me what was often I think wrong with them was a lot of um inequity around how value is distributed so in a lot of startups like culture you don't have like the ability to invest if you're not accredited are trying to participate in a non-profit or cooperative ecosystem the actual process of setting it up is actually a huge pain in a lot of cases there's a lot of like overhead to doing that and I think um with the internet like and even just beyond blockchain or crypto entirely there's a lot of interest in just how do we actually live and and build value together collectively online so we have this sort of like existing scaffolding of uh like countries and like companies that do this work globally but what does it look like for people to actually just act globally and try and think about like their impact through you know group chats through like other online forums through uh random uh even just like calls that people put together fellowships people put together entirely online the fact that you can do all that is kind of independent from crypto but it's the most impactful part of why like we actually care about the idea of instantiating some kind of value layer onto the those kinds of systems those kinds of ways we engage and it's because of this contrast like to your point of like why are we doing this between these like traditional systems uh traditional sort of like scaffoldings like technology like companies or non-profit infrastructure or co-ops that are not uh meeting that need in a global context so that's kind of answering the question without actually even really specifically trying to talk about crypto like there's just this broader conversation about internet native existence and community that I think we need to have excellent thanks for thanks for sharing that um perhaps I'll tackle this from a different lens with UNICEF we've been creating impact in over 190 countries uh for years and oftentimes these are through traditional methods initiatives programs that are on the ground level we partner with governments other agencies and so on but in about 2015 is when we were exploring the web 3 space and blockchain and you know trying to think about what are some specific use cases in that web3 space that can be applied to the work we're doing so that a we can look at you know making communities more financially inclusive number two we can account for greater transparency and Trust in systems in the way you know even in which people are donating or funds are being transferred from sort of one entity to another and the third part is around efficiency and within the office of innovation we work not only you know directly with country offices and governments that do work on the ground but we also support financially and through mentorship other Ventures and other organizations that are you know Building open source Solutions who are ultimately also giving back to the community so as we're looking at this entire ecosystem the question became you know really critical about you know if we want to be a part and and make a difference in this future digital or digitally like Financial World um we cannot stay behind and we really have to take some calculated risks of incorporating web 3 Technologies in our more traditional work and and the way we do it and the way my team does it is by looking at smaller scale Pilots looking at MVPs iterating and we recognize that we can't do it alone so we partner with technology companies startups with government agencies and also academic institutions so just to kind of wrap that piece up in our case with UNICEF that impact was already being made in different countries but through blockchain we're looking at how can we scale that impact and make it more efficient and and make it more accessible to to everyone I think I'll build off of this point which is that it's about having ecosystems that are moving at really different Paces because of the size of their organization and because of their incentives and a lot of the existing powerful institutions of our day that we have today are backwards incentivized for impact and so I think that the reason ideologically why web3 as a space is so fascinating is that there's this double learning Loop that we're able to set up where for one of the first times in human history we have a coordination technology where we're able to say hey there's actually some new incentives that we're able to put into place to coordinate these different stakeholders that all want different things we're able to say what are those new Behavior changes that we want to push with those incentives and then really quickly learn and understand did those Behavior changes act in a collective way or are they actually still competitive and from there go back to our incentives and change them in a really tight Loop and so at the collab we're working with corporations and startups and non-nos as well as governments who had all of these different different incentives to try and push forward impacts and we had pilots and experiments that they were really interested in but no one was quite fighting the bull and saying like we'll be the first to go and we'll be the first to say we're going to try this out and pilot it and so what has become really sticky to me over the course of seeing five years of projects go out and launch is how do you actually set up the initial incentives in a way where everybody has a balanced not necessarily equal but a balanced amount of um Equity or value that they'll eventually get out as these projects thus and as they have time to build value in the world and so to be able to promise that and to be able to have that trust be embedded not in just personal relationships or really institutionalized old Power corporations to be able to say there's something in the future that's worth us building towards together is just a really I think powerful way of saying we have our existing legal system we have our existing code we have our existing ways of taking ownership and claiming it but here is something else that we all are agreeing on has value in the future it can be unlocked and in some ways is automated and also uh gets rid of a lot of overhead so that's what drew me to space and maybe was the Tyler Jordan moment great points um so I I think for for my moment I spent a lot of time prior to this current role uh bringing nascent Technologies and startups and pairing them with corporate institutions so basically supporting corporate Venture programs and accelerators to in the circular economy and climate Market I think what's very exciting specifically about blockchain and web 3 Tech is the speed at which it can operate as well as as you're seeing here the energy and Community engagement sort of from the Groundswell up that's possible with this new technology um but what I think is very important for us to keep in mind and we're going to hear a lot of this throughout the week is as we start to identify solutions that can scale and apply into traditional Industries it maybe is not as important to talk about the pipes behind the technology it may not even matter if it's blockchain or web3 or crypto what matters is the pace at which we can access communities make new markets and drive Innovation Solutions at scale so these feedback loops these learning loops that you is speaking to are so essential but we also need to make sure that we're bridging into the language of our traditional incumbent Industries and so they can understand how best to work with us how to engage with the technology and ultimately what benefit it's going to provide to them in the climate space or social good space I also think for the I'll just add on the Tyler Durden moment right like the climate space is one of those spaces where you're looking around you're saying who's gonna pick up the slack how are we going to coordinate the governments the corporations the people like all of those things are coordination issues and so shout out to raythe and toucan and the folks that are here from that is when you have a movement or a challenge that is as large as something on a global scale that's not something that comes down to the responsibility of any centralized entity and organization and so how do you use this incentive that you're able to customize for each individual kind of stakeholder to bring together yeah these are really great answers and I think you guys are all touched upon coordination that type of collaboration I really want to get your input on incentivizing right because maybe a lot of people might think impact is altruistic but then we all know that good behavior can't rely on altruism a really good example right with the the refi ecosystem I I had led the special projects for F2 point was like the largest Bitcoin mining pool in the world and then when nfts were getting hot we got attacked and and we realized like two and a half years ago that we need to do something so we we had purchased carbon offsets uh we we had done a lot of we we set up the working groups to do this stuff and we quickly realized there was this sort of ideological dissonance between supporting altruistic projects let's use Bitcoin mining for example yeah I I had started Bitcoin mining because we thought we could replace the banks it's obviously not true anymore but right that we right now many of the Bitcoin miners don't give a about decentralization self-sovereignty right they they they're a plug and play uh part of the ecosystem but because the system had been designed where they're incentivized to contribute to that good behavior then we get all the side effects of decentralization self-solverty even though those players don't care as much I'd be really curious to see like right there's this good behavior that you guys have all defined the collaboration coordination that can be directed towards these types of impacts and and let's say public goods or public works and stuff like that how do you think incentivization can help right because the refi example when toucan and clementau exploded right no one really was paying attention to the climate market like the working group that I had had fewer than 10 people now there's hundreds of projects right clima had hit one billion dollars in tvl and then all of a sudden the Wall Street Journal was putting full page a full page articles on it and Everyone Cared right there was a there was definitely a money and incentivization component to what was being directed and Evan now it was like a Cambrian explosion I I want to hear how you guys for your specific initiatives that are contributing to impact in the various domains you are how do you incentivize it yeah yeah um actually we're gonna switch okay we got one microphone down the um idea of actually trying to make impact yeah doesn't have to be a fully altruistic act and I think that's what people are realizing in crypto it's something that people are realizing like across different initiatives I think this is why we start to see like and in our partnership there's a lot of work around how do we encourage uh like startups or other sorts of Technology providers to participate in that process for us we try to incentivize people to give back obviously via donating in these quadratic funding rounds but we also want people to donate to things that they think are going to benefit them so in ethereum a lot of the early rounds that we ran uh resulted in projects like uniswap or projects like wallet connect uh some of which are like here today and those projects ended up being not just beneficial from the perspective of being public goods they were also extremely profitable to a lot of organizations that participated in those that process and for holders for example of ethereum in that context who benefit from the growth of the ecosystem so there's a question of who is actually sort of the the stakeholder group that is participating in this process and then what are the positive externalities that that stakeholder group is creating Beyond just their own local sort of area and I think if you measure that you can start to think about how to actually build more impactful ecosystems versus thinking about it purely in a charitable context so I think that's what we try to do with the way that we're scoping each of the quadratic funding rounds that we run and the way that we try and encourage donors to almost look for things that they might want to participate in or be part of in the future Beyond just a donation and that sort of is part of the community building exercise that leads to them being more engaged and feel like there's real impact in their work through the organizations that they're empowering so that's a high level for me absolutely and to to add to that um I believe that incentives are really critical in this space because my personal belief is that you know if if someone is contributing to an open source project or volunteering their time it's very likely that they are in a place where they're able to do that and not everyone around the world has that Liberty to be able to contribute to open source projects and therefore it is our responsibility as a community as an ecosystem to make sure that that sort of those resources are distributed amongst everyone and especially those who need it the most one example of how we're looking at this concept of incentivization is especially when it comes to contributing to open source digital public goods or just projects in general is by leveraging the Bounty program so we know very commonly in the tech world you know there are bounties that are cut out and developers or you know just people in general can go look at a bounty work on it and get paid because of the contributions that they make what we're trying to look at is how could we apply that concept for the digital public goods that are part of the digital public goods Alliance because on one side you know they have all these different solutions that are being leveraged at the country level but perhaps they don't have the technical capability to customize them or to update them and on the other side you've got people who around the world have the talent perhaps even have the time but other than you know just feeling good about it they're not really getting much out of it so how could we bridge that Gap we're looking at that Bounty program we're exploring sort of the get coin platform to be able to do that so that we can have two wins on that front and again learn from these kind of pilots and collaborate with others in the community to see how can we further the sort of incentive model to distribute that wealth and distribute that influence across the board um before I can I ask you a follow-up question so like where does the money come from for to support these bounties that like where how do you how do you determine Roi where does the money like it you can't just donate money right like how do you incentivize people to donate to these Bounty programs and how do they get a return on that yeah absolutely so we're looking at different sorts of business models and funding models obviously um UNICEF has a venture fund where um we have some funding allocated towards digital solutions that are open source obviously there's an application that they have to go through but um you know that's one Avenue another one is by collaborating with partners that are not only in that non-profit space but also on the technical front also at that government level um startups is is kind of huge as well and then the other part is when we're looking at digital public goods while they may have open source solutions they may also have um parts to their work that maybe um you know not in the open and that could provide an additional Revenue opportunity for them so that they can start reinvesting that money within that open source arm or wing of that work so we this is actually you know very timely because we are looking at how can we go beyond just donating and looking at something that perhaps may not be as sustainable if that DPG were to continue on their own I mean I think just that was amazing and we're going to have a follow-up conversation about that but I think one of the things that you mentioned Daniel's attention is also a very important part of impact right like the social awareness of oh there is a conversation around climate and finance to be had um is is just one way that that shows up already but I'd like to ground this in a in an example that may not feel like a digital public good or may not be something that we necessarily talk about in public good um in a ideal collab Venture portfolio company called Brain Trust not Shilling Let's Chill more shelling but it's a fascinating model of that self-incentivizing positive feedback loop because in 1937 rolled coats published this uh paper that was around the nature of the farm and was really about how markets are efficient for some things but organizations are really good to coordinate overhead and reduce the cost of one individual player going out to do similar things and now I think that that theory has held up for quite a long period of time but we're starting to see new software Suites New productivity tools that are really making it so that we have one the automation of the managerial class and efficiency for people coordinating and getting together to do what they want to do and the creative work that they'd like to do together and then this additional part of it which is after the pandemic and the lockdown you have all of these groups who are figuring out how to tap into local markets of talent that are all around the world that don't necessarily live in the systems where you're expecting to see product in Innovation design trying to understand how do I get into these job markets that are highly desirable and so what I love about Brain Trust is that they released a token in order to not only coordinate really creative talent to be able to be matched to and find jobs and careers that they love but also in that token we're given governance rights and so now without the extremely difficult overhead of creating your own organization your own industry agency and creating organizational overhead you are as a person as an individual actor able to access the work that normally comes through a larger organization that has a reputation in the brand but because you hold this token you are both incentivized to do a really good job so that the reputation of this overall organization is increased so that the entire ecosystem is able to have access to better and better gigs at the same time you are allowed and have the power to change this organization to work in ways that are better for you and the career and the types of deals that you would like to pursue so I think what you end up being able to do here in these incentives is not only are you saying the incentive that you have is purely monetary practice saying the incentives that you have here is also the agency to change the container that you're working inside of and raise the actual value of what that governance token holds when it's listed on an exchange in the future or groups have been doing like things like this and organization models like this have existed in the form of co-ops but never at scale and really never in a global view Chris uh no Martyrs in the public good space uh we tell that to our startups all the time and this really applies to actors across every level of the system um so I think in the sustainability climate social good space we've relied often on altruism as a as a motivator and it's simply not going to stale and it's not sustainable when we're looking at actors across the system we want to understand it's not just capital of course that's a driver of course that's needed by many who are trying to bring in stand-up Solutions but it's thinking creatively about what does every single person act or organization need at their level in order to speak their own language increase supply and demand increase Market making opportunities make or save more money and how does that relate to the climate goals or the social good goals that are at the at the table here so it can go beyond Capital into things like access access to Opportunities access to conversations access to rooms that may not otherwise be accessible exposure exposing the brand can a platform for folks to share their perspective um education helping to understand educate and share learnings across different actors and then finally capital of course is important but we need to recognize that Capital only goes so far so there are other types of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and incentives that scale and can really help Advance folks in their work right we have like a few minutes left maybe we can do a quick Ideal World what do you want to see from people um that could contribute to the impact space What would your ideal impact crypto slash blockchain future world look like what like entities that would exist people that exist structures that would exist do you want to tax people right like what what do you want to see yes but um I think that the the interesting part here is yeah there's no one solution to this problem like the goal of this is that we're building composable systems that anyone can kind of use and and build together if we have things like quadratic funding rounds that then are deployed for a given Dao that might be run using some of those sort of like Cooperative modeling that like something like equine or Brain Trust or you know swap or ens are using but you can then start to like think about okay now how do we use the money that those quadratic funding rounds get maybe that can be through bounties there's a way to tie all these systems together in these incentive mechanisms together for particular types of problems with local uh with the local sort of like impact uh that then hopefully creates these sort of positive externalities globally that to me is the thing that like we actually need to sort of piece together is what are those composable building blocks how do they actually work together and I guess the ideal form would be that it just feels extremely seamless uh and very almost like internet native for people who use these tools in a way that doesn't require them to understand as we sort of talked about anything about web3 they just understand that these are valuable uh sort of ways for them to enact some kind of public good and potentially even you know profit in the process there's ways for you know like a something like a subway system or even public physical infrastructure to do those sorts of uh to create those sorts of benefits and so I guess it's kind of like answer one is you have a very smooth system of composable infrastructure that works that isn't kind of known to people and then two you have a a network that is both digital and then also instantiating physically like it's not just that we're doing this all online there's actually a real physical community that is benefiting as well um that was that was incredible thanks for that um I think for me knowledge exchange is really big coming from the world where you know not a lot of people within UNICEF would not necessarily know about crypto web 3 and so on I think it's critical for the audience here to be able to share their work and then on the other hand for us to also publicize what we're doing so that we can find synergies um and then from there there could be more specific calls to act call to action areas like specifically contributing for a particular project uh donating through these Innovative funding models um or you know just looking at that leadership and and new ways of of pushing that boundary forward I think as a designer I want things to be more usable just in general better ux across the board um but I think that I'd like to see the entire space actually move from d-gen to regen how do we actually think about creating more usability more public good for all um and maybe sum it up is just like show less shell more like how do you think about this is not your thing that you're working on this is not your competitive thing that you're working on so we really look at cyberspace as something that is an infinite Frontier what are the assets that you're creating that are able to be Legos and Connect into the other things that other people are building so it adds up to a greater sum as a whole I agree with all those statements it really is about collaboration if we're able in past work as we've done to design pre-competitive collaborations across some of the largest corporates in the world we can certainly do it in this space and the reason it works at that scale is because those folks know that if you're trying to limit and control Supply ultimately you're limiting access to how large that market can be I encourage folks in the the crypto and the blockchain space to also keep that in mind let's rise the tide right so the old boats can sort of float a little bit higher a couple other analogies bigger pie all of these things but if we think about that now we have the opportunity to build that architecture in those systems early in ways that actually can exceed and Excel what we've been able to do at the large incumbrant multinational level because there we're having to piece together all of these existing systems we have the malleability at this moment right now to really think about what does collaboration look like now in this early-ish stage we still are early then what's it going to look like at scale and how can it match these large existing systems thank you so much and yeah this is amazing we have like the directors of Ido UNICEF co-founder of gitcoin I'm sure they would be interested in talking to any of you if you have ideas and um yeah please mob them after the panel thank you foreign