Money Legos – James Young

welcome all right so I'm gonna be demoing for the first time like this this demo so excuse me if there's any issues with it it wasn't working this morning and then it works so we'll see what how it goes here but I want to make sure that I am super helpful and can give you knowledge from my experience and what we do at a bridge is we have this contract wallet SDK and I came from I came into the ecosystem around 2016 I helped co-author the white paper for TC RS token created registries and thought okay well if I get the game theoretic scre X then there'll be the stampede of users that will come to a theorem realize that you know the the friction of onboarding was really tough and so thought okay well we'll focus on scalability so that we can scale a blockchain crypto kitties happened in 2017 I helped launch the first layer to solution on maintenance in theorem and saw that there was traction and there was scalability but it was really difficult still with the the whole user onboarding so worked on creating this counterfactual wallet create to came out around this time last year and thought that would be the magic bullet to be able to to solve the usability issues that we had and I kind of fell under this premise and I think as an engineer we all kind of or as programmers develop it all think that you know if you build it they will come and so I want to talk about my journey here for the last four years and how came to the situation of the the where I'm at in terms of money Legos so first I want to set the context you know we are all web 3 most of the world doesn't use aetherium so i want to give some context in terms of kind of where things are where I see things are at as we were building our v1 of our sdk and comparing it to web 2 it was really hard actually for me to come up with these slides and so if you hang in with me hopefully there'll be this rainbow at the end but we take a look at 2019 you know the internet very important everyone knows baby yota right it's trending higher than the Democratic candidates right Disney Plus launched and in from November to now or whatever twenty-eight point six million new subscribers this is a brand name right everyone's been waiting for Disney to come out but this is the kind of numbers that we're talking about in like 2020 moving away from brand names you look at influencer networks like tik-tok who actually has a tick tock account here okay all right that's interesting so maybe like a tenth so Alex French went from 400,000 followers to 1.2 million followers in a day that's that's the power that we're talking about now when you talk about Internet and web 2 and like numbers so I went on to if you go to the site called tick ranked comm you can see all like the top trending you know people on tick tock so I looked at number 1 the rock he's a celebrity and I looked at his weekly growth so in his weekly growth just last week he grew 9 percent 9 percent to him is 1.3 million new followers in a week so just trying to set some context when we talk about distribution and like the internet in 2020 he started on tick tock in November end of November he got on to tick tock in in November so you talk about distribution and you talk about okay where are people at tick tock doesn't have a desktop app however when you talk about mobile and those are where people are at mobile installs are declining so you see this maturation when it comes to the mobile ecosystem right so it says you know the global apprehension rate after 10 sessions did at 32 percent in 2019 a decrease from 38 the previous year and it's just declining so you're like okay great I get it you know boomers are on desktop we're gonna go all mobile tick-tock is mobile only but when you look at mobile Mobile installs new install rates are declining how many people in the on average in a month download five apps on their phone on average a month five four new apps on a monthly basis three three two one one okay zero yeah so you know this is not 2010 this is 2020 you know mobile is pretty mature not only do you have like D client decrease in mobile let's say you have a hit mobile app right this is from shamov social capital slide deck and actually it's now up to 50 cents so even if you're able to raise money you have a growing app about 50 cents to every dollar that you raise is gonna go to distribution because it's gonna go to Google Facebook and Amazon because that's where all the users are at not only that there is this like slight bias or whatever misunderstanding whatever you want to call it and whether it's intentional or not that you have this the the platform's being able to call the shots and that's basically why we're all here in terms of decentralization but in the meantime you see issues mistakenly you know thank goodness that meta mask is now back in the Google Chrome store but coinbase one of the leading wallets actually is not going to support taps anymore so this is from like the quintessential like you know hit app crypto kitties from like 2017 right Rahm said that there was like a 99% drop off rate crypto kitties because of the onboarding friction could have been a hundred times I don't know if he would have been able to like handle unchain that amount of volume but just a friction alone it should have been a hundred times bigger and this is a report coming from state of crypto oops this is a reporter coming static static crypto it says I'll read it to you that after ten years and about ten billion dollars is coming up so this is including Bitcoin this is including like all blockchains after 10 years in about 10 plus billion dollars of capital injected into the blockchain crypto web 3 sector across all block chains there's about 60,000 da you so what do we do right like this stuff is hard you know in kind of like the the mainstream culture right now when you talk about Facebook and privacy that's just reaching the zeitgeist right now how much longer or how much education is it going to take to talk about decentralization and to get people to care about that when you see these other platforms and distribution like power or volume happening so when I proposed and this is kind of a call to arms for like any like crypto app developer is we gotta focus on these three things at least and make them butter I just wanted to use a butter emoji it just came out there is the user onboarding experience there is like the dev experience so we're all here at the hackathon this weekend and I think Dennison was talking about how difficult it is just to like bootstrap adapt like how difficult it is just to bootstrap adapt and then once you can you have like great user experience you have like a good app you toilet away and like blood sweat and tears to make your app what are you going to do about distribution so what I what I proposed and I'm gonna get to this money Legos in a bit but I wanted to like set the context here right of like the need of y-you we have to make this stuff easier not only from a user perspective not only from a developer perspective but also from like a distribution perspective I don't think a lot of us as devs think about distribution and I want to say like distribution is actually probably the most important piece of this all so first mobile first second no download and you got to go to where the users are at right so everyone here probably is on crypto Twitter and how many people here on encrypted Twitter are also daily users of people right why because no one else is there and you would go there if everyone else is going there but you don't want to give up your network that you've spent a long time accruing of followers but if everyone could coordinate at the same time and everyone can go to people that I'm sure people that would be used but it's not so we're also guilty in this room of people that are developers who are developing apps to actually we're not even using the apps that exist the social networks that currently exist so I encourage everyone this is kind of the that kind of experience if you have a telegram account go to this bot at Denver 2020 bot and this is a user experience that I'm proposing that we all need to go to we need to go to where the users are at we're all on telegram right people on crypto all on telegram for the most part whether you're a speculator trader a dev part of these different dows I highly suggest go to East Denver 2020 bot and this is the user experience that I'm talking about I'm not just talking about it we're trying to deliver this experience from a developer experience we need to be able to iterate quickly to find that product market fit because we don't have the users we don't have that value proposition we believe in it I believe in it but mainstream users how are we going to get them to believe in it well you have to be able to iterate quickly we need to be able to have speed it should not take a month weeks it shouldn't even take days to throw up these experiments they should happen on a daily basis we need to iterate we need speed and we need to go to users we need to go to where the users are at like today if we want a chance of being able to like show the value here and so here I'll give you my money Legos demo so this is what we've done and there and the reason why I'm saying this is that I feel and I've been part of this like pain right as an app developer in in etherium for the last couple years we created our version one of our SDK we had about a dozen implementation two on main net and it was really hard there's different varying levels of experience people coming in to crypto as developers it's not standardized the ecosystem is not yet that mature and so what we said and you know fully believe in the division of 1 million devs what we need to do is lower that bar of the dev experience and I think that people in the ecosystem now we're starting to think about this so Denison is taking it from the front end with web flow being able to like lower the barrier for DAP development we're taking it from the back end so what we've done is we've integrated with a no code platform called no dread and no dread what it does is it allows non developers to visually stitch together api's our kind of mental model of like smart contracts is that smart contracts are just API interfaces into the blockchain into the internet of value so being able to mix different mix telegram with your smart contract wallet should be seamless and today we're launching this aetherium transaction most of it has been built by Jonathan Dunlap back to their razor hand this is his first eath conference ever and so his mind is blown just talking about dows and everything but he helped built this he mainly built this and what this does so I'm gonna take a contract so who knows about Moloch v2 all right so this is I launched the Moloch v2 contract on Kovan I launched the Moloch be to contract on Kovan so what I'm gonna do now in this no code platform is I'm gonna add this contract address and what this will do is it will go to ether scan and if that contract all right so what this contract so I just pasted the contract address and what it does is if you have your contract verified on either scan you put that contract address in there and now I have access to all the API calls on Maalik and so now what I can do is I can begin to stitch and this is where the money legolas part comes in so any contract on either scan that's verified you can pull in and you can start stitching together and so what I'm going to do is I have this set already is I'm gonna just change so here on ether scan if I read so this is this I don't know if you can see it so basically this is my summoner address my summoner dress has it's like delegate key mapped to the same address what I'm going to do here is I can just do a write call and I'm going to change the delegate key for the summoner to this address and then I go okay I deploy I confirm my deployment and then I can like do an event trigger so you can actually have in node-red you can have the like an API call be a trigger so what I'm doing here for just testing is I have this like time stamp so it's just going to trigger a time stamp and it's going to trigger that transaction so I did that so inject happened I go in here I wait for it hopefully I get this transaction hash I can go to Kovan and I can refresh a hundred times until it comes up and then you'll see that the transaction get mine and so now the transaction is mine and that's all I need to do I didn't know need to know how to code I just needed to know how to input a link into node-red and I just needed to know I have an understanding of what that contract address or that contract does hopefully this becomes like a shelling point for like this like UNIX philosophy of smart contracts that do one thing and only one thing really well that way you can like start stitching contracts together if I go back now and I go to that new delegate key address I can put the new address in and it should map now back to that the same summoner address and so it did so this is what we're trying to foster in in the block change space and this is actually how we'll get to a million developers I would hope that like through interfaces where people are at like telegram or discord or slack you know we can not only have like a million developers but a million co-op organizations a million dollar you want to call them where people can coordinate because that you know the the philosophy or the mental kind of abstraction here is that aetherium with smart contracts reduces coordination costs but it's the UI the the usability that when you think about in the context of where we are now in 2020 doesn't match the user experience and so we want to not only reduce the friction when it comes to the usability we want to by having things be delivered and interfaces that users already familiar with but also lower the the developer experience so again I'm giving a talk I'm gonna also actually this is a precursor so I'm gonna have a workshop tomorrow will you'll be able to play with this and touch this and like launch your own contracts and integrate with chat systems if I can get it to work its kind of broken now at scales but so hopefully it will work but yeah that's it [Applause] I don't know I don't know how much time I have left I'm more than happy to answer any questions if people have questions or I can just exit stage left yeah so that's the power of like no dread there are already interfaces and BOTS that already been open sourced for discord telegram whatsapp WeChat viber like you name it and so really when you talk about developer experience it's this blending or this hybridization of web 2 and leveraging and I think Dennison talked about this why reinvent the wheel like leverage what you already have so I can give you kind of a kind of a sneak peak of let's see so real quick like when you sign up for the bot we already have everything kind of mapped into air table so we're using air table for example as our caching database so it's very similar to like the graph protocol but it's visual it's no code we want to go no code the whole stack even to the DB right and so with we what we want to leverage is we want to leverage air table air table has great filtering and you can link records you can do a bunch of stuff without having to know how to code so as people are I keep on sorry as people are you know entering the bots we're using a web form the web form is an air table so we didn't have to build the web form at all right and we didn't have to build out the interface for the chat bot and this literally took two minutes to create and now we have a way to like message people we can have telegram handles and things like that so yeah I think like web through development we all talked about decentralization dows a bunch of stuff that I think is very visionary but I think that you know we also have to fill that gap into like where we are right now in 2020 Thanks question question no question all right the the github for that so we're using node right the question came over here oh so if you look up a node red air table there are a bunch of different implementations so there's like more than one so you can take a look at it and I think this is like useful too so like you know our our small contract wallet it's a counterfactual based contract wallet so that you don't have to like you know when you create address it's free at the beginning and all that like that's just one like small component of this whole like no code what we're calling the future of work because I think all of us in crypto or most of us you know are used to being on telegram chats in zoom calls all day long and this is the future right where you know the future work is going to be remote a lot of people that I know in crypto are digital nomads as well it's gonna be partly no code and I think crypto is going to be part of that I think that when I really think about the autonomous version or the DAO the decentralized autonomous organization that autonomy is not just smart contracts executing on their own it's going to be able to have NLP or machine learning be able to like manage communities at scale and you'll bring game mechanics and things like that you know with these BOTS yeah thank you [Music] you