2023 is a year for protocol development - Lex Sokolyn

[Music] thank you sure it is counterintuitive that uh in a market that has seen prices compressed you would have a lot of people really paying a lot of attention but I think that when people say this that the bear Market is a builder's Market you know we and we've had a lot of Destruction fearing out companies that were fraudulent or taking advantage of the space and so the the people that remain it's easier to build now than ever before because you you have a better sense of what's real or what not to do and I think also on the institutional side um as the space gets crisper and um sort of more acceptable from a regulatory perspective you're going to see large companies step in uh once there is space for them to to actually deploy their Solutions thank you [Music] yeah I I think that especially the year 2023 is is a year of protocol development so we see a lot of scalability projects and a layer two projects Roll-Ups privacy Solutions you know zero knowledge proofs and that infrastructure development is really important to the space and if you don't have the pressure of token prices and so on building out infrastructure is very appealing to companies and it's very helpful because if you approve the protocol more people can come and then you have the second layer of companies that package and repackage that infrastructure so for example for consensus infurat let's companies and developers Connect into ethereum nodes and polygon nodes without having to spin up their own notes another example would be the staking that's gone online for ethereum and the question of how do people and institutions access staking can crypto exchanges provide that or do you need to run your own hardware and so I think these issues are just getting much more exposed and it used to be that the crypto native people were obsessed about protocol level details and financial institutions were obsessed about brokerage or some Capital market system and I think it's converging you know so so what I see at the conference is people from both sides of the industry finding language to talk about I'm infrastructure and to talk about things like Mev and you know the Dark Forest of transactions transaction ordering so I'm very encouraged that there's a lot more substance that people are engaging in [Music] I think there are there are two key areas of evolution in the space that we need evolution in terms of clarity and quality of solutions so the first one is stable coins and payments and cbdcs and generally just bringing Fiat and cash equivalence on chain and I think they're especially this year there's just been so much turbulence around governmental reaction to stable coins I think rightly so after the collapse of Terra Luna but also a lot of progress from D5 protocols like Ave launch and go and and CBC projects all over the world so I think the the bridging of money into tokenized form is here it is already happened but the kind of commercialization and mainstreaming of it is next and so the second point the second point for development is around what is the web 3 economy and what is the Commerce that lives in the luxury economy and so um you know we've have a lot of financial infrastructure in crypto um and the the financial infrastructure has to serve some sort of commercial activity that has to serve some sort of economic productivity that people are making stuff they're selling stuff and everybody's benefiting from that so again I think this year we're seeing a lot of development in endows in how people contribute labor to Dallas how they organize the tooling around it and I think that's going to start connecting into a payments mechanisms and and again into money [Music] thank you at the Cork and census is an enabling company and we have a really strong vision for how the world is going to be if the world has access to a global open source settlement layer that that is in many ways anti-fragile you know I'll use the word permissionless and decentralized and open for Innovation but at the core is is just available to everybody as as a place to execute software and to have digital objects and to have economies on those objects all of that being open source and available and so for consensus that mission is at the core of why the company exists and we've gone through different iterations of how to power that up at first we were a Labs company then we focused on bringing that to Enterprise and I think today the the biggest levers that we have ahead of us are how to get users to actually live in web3 and enjoy it you know have a good experience there that is that is safe that is secure that is protected from from fraud and so you know metamask it's the core product for doing that for helping people and corporations get to web3 and then the second lever is getting more developers and Builders into the space and it sounds generic but you know it's because it's necessary so with inferior we help developers use apis to build the applications in web3 to make it useful and there's a lot of other kind of technical protocol things that we do we contribute to ethereum we build out software libraries that others can use but I think those two levers which is getting people into web 3 and getting developers to build things that's the the core five thank you