Web 3.0: The Decentralized Creator Economy - TOKEN2049 London 2021

good afternoon everyone welcome to the last panel of the day we'll be talking about everything nft related so hopefully make it interesting before everyone has to our evening full of drinks um so i am very honored to be your moderator today my name is annabel huang i'm a partner at amber group and i'm very honored to be joined by my stellar fellow pandas today so maybe we'll start off with a brief self-introduction um i'll start first again my name is annabelle partner amber amber group is an integrated crypto finance platform where people can buy and sell crypto earn yield spend crypto et cetera we're a team of almost 500 people globally servicing both institutional and retail clients across the globe and we've uh recently launched the creator fi or creator finance initiative where we're delving into the nft space as well with that i'll turn it to kathleen great hi my name is kathleen breitman i'm the co-founder of the tezus blockchain which is a smart contract platform i'm elias simos i work as a protocol specialist at coinbase and what i do is basically look at all the layer one space and whatever connects them and try and become the source of context for the company and our teams our partners and so on uh kyle rojas military originally goldman sachs for a little under seven years and i'm head of bdm partnerships at edge of note which is one of the core devs supporting the graph and we're we're decentralizing the um the data indexing the query services so what coin google did for web 2 we're doing for all public on-chain data for web3 yeah i'm i'm martin from gnosis and nosis is kind of the well in ethereum native team i would say so just a few weeks after ethereum launched we had first dev live and since then built all kinds of things maybe one of the most prominent is an also safe wallet to store funds with teams or individuals with higher security currently storing over 80 billion worth of assets great thanks guys so before we get to the series topics i want to open up with a bit of a personal question since you know nft has been big this year and maybe a little before what are your favorite nft collectibles collections and any interesting stories you can share with the with the audience sure um i'll go first um so after the tezos network launched in 2018 i founded another company called coase coast basically focuses on digital collectibles in in one form or another and one of its first projects is a tradable card game called emergence which is based on a universe that one of our co-founders created with a bunch of dc and marvel ogs and that's coming to the fore at the moment both through a tradable collectible card game but also an associated comic book series which is launching as nfts and what's really cool about this is that we partially use people who own the own the comic book to direct the story lines and thus you know kind of the arc of the game itself so it's a bit community-led but it's also in collaboration with a lot of very professional artists and comic book uh illustrators and and um i guess uh writers and i think the professionalism is is you know really speaks for itself um so i recommend that you check it out emergent ccg thanks super um yeah i love the stuff that um artifact does which is basically um supreme for the metaverse type brand and i like sneakers so they do a bunch of stuff of you know digital sneakers nfts and then you forge them and you have shoes and you know they have like a really interesting road map but i guess it's probably um my favorite type of nft or nfc in general is obviously crypto punks and i have this amazing story of how i missed crypto punks like five times so i um was at a one day conference at christie's in the summer of 2018 and matt and john from larval labs were presenting their project there and i saw it i'm like [ __ ] this is cool um because you know you know what crypto punks are right 10 000 uh 8-bit characters all uh all different like you know edgy uh simple enough to understand someone like very unique at the time um so you know we were very excited and then talked about like how we could i was working on a fund at the time and talk about how like how we could get like a bunch of punks and hold on hold on to them and and so on never bought right um and then went on um a whole story arc where i made scarves with punks on them i made uh mugs with punks on them i made custom punks in our team's likeness as a christmas gift right and printed them on chain like these things exist like my shame is somewhere in the ethereum blockchain uh in token form um and you know i never ended up buying any so i guess if you're to take anything from that story is that if you find something and connect with it and you have like some sort of passion that you you develop just um ape in you know don't think about it too much i'm surprised it's still your favorite and impressive i definitely participate in the nft space but i won't say anything about it because i truly get a ton of value in participating in the ecosystem as some totally anonymous dj so i will say that i'm super excited about the collectible aspect of it because i was a nerdy collector growing up i'm super excited about the gamification and excited to one day kind of live in the metaverse kind of ready player one style i don't know how far out that is but i think it's an eventuality and and i don't know how it's going to get there but also with nfts i see the the real world applications of real world assets and services which i also think is kind of inevitable and nfts are going to play a huge part of that so that's very exciting to me yeah i'm very much like if nfts are somewhat um connected to social causes actually we haven't seen it too much yet i think the best example i can come up with maybe the snowden snowden nft where it was uh connected to a fun to a donation to um freedom of press foundation or something like that but to me that is kind of very makes very very much sense because um well of course energies are to some extent about well status or kind of symbolizing your um well that you want to belong to something you that you want to belong to a group and obviously um well symbolizing that well you want to support this course uh yeah fits very well and obviously has nice positive side effects of making some form of donations more attractive all right great thanks guys so let's get to the serious topic today of a decentralized creator economy but i think first i want to talk about what is a creator economy so i want to ask the fellow panelists in your mind what is a conor crater economy and who are the key players in it maybe kathleen again sure um yeah i'll come up with a very vague definition that you guys can all beat up as we go down the line i think that seems fair um so i mean it's it's hard to put uh it's hard to put a pin on it right um basically people have been contributing a lot to the web but they haven't been able to monetize their contributions very effectively and i think when we talk about the creator economy in the context of web 3.0 what we're talking about is basically a way for people to monetize their time and creativity in a more effective way whether that's the act of collecting whether that's the act of creating um it's basically a way to um make the web uh i guess a bit more evenly distributed in its um ability to be monetized yeah and you have to think also like who are the creators right like at least when i think about creators like immediately my reptile brain says artist or something like that but it's it's actually if you scope it out a little bit it's also coders right like coding is is a creative art to some extent like when especially when you're building something anew so it's it's got it's got a pretty broad scope and as far as the sort of entities involved um within the creator economies of course the creators right the writers the musicians the artists the video artists and so on um the platforms that they issue their works on are also like a very big uh part of of that economy and then another um and i think martin has some really interesting experience and thoughts with that is the other piece is the distribution right how does how does this creative work get to the hands of uh of of millions of people and the boundaries between the issuance platform the distribution platform might blur but um i still think that they're quite uh distinctly uh separated right if you think about you know the apple store and and your phone as a distribution platform um uh there's there's a very clear separation there yeah i'd agree with both of you and i would extend it to say that it's not just coders it's not just owners it's every time we click on something every time we look at something every time we move a data point is made and someone makes money off of that so like in web one companies created content and they made money off it web 2 you know we created content and and companies made money off it and web 3 it's it's you know this coming to fruition of we create content and we own it and we control it and we monetize it if we want and i think that's a very important distinction that's really really cool that's coming to its manifestation yeah very what we we see was a safe and i have to be honest when we started to build that we definitely didn't thought of that use case but but seeing uh yeah small small small groups of people and well often they call they use the word dao and tao is of course a very fuzzy term and well it's not not clear defined but but essentially groups that together create something and also well potentially as a group um well then own own something so i think uh yeah nfts are inherently social and um yeah and and kind of this concept of of um groups together yeah i mean there was this was pisado obviously and and and this concept yeah to own stuff together um seems seems to be big on the creator economy i guess yeah i know i totally agree i i think it is like everyone said right it is the the creators being the artists or content creators themselves it is the consumers or us whoever click on the content or view the content it's the platforms and eventually it might be groups organizations dowse and it's funny because when we're sort of preparing for the panel and then facebook instagram and whatsapp went out for six hours and i think that definitely um influenced or affected a lot of the the creators and consumers on that side and that definitely made the case for for web 3 and a more decentralized systems and we've touched based a little bit on on the benefits of having a decentralized system helping the creators and consumers monetize and solve and have self-ownership um with that i wanted to ask you guys how are you yourself or your firm is building upon a decentralized crater economy and i'm just curious who are the creators you see right now should we start from martin start on your end yeah yeah again i already can maybe just uh repeat the previous uh um idea that that yeah um those those groups form and it's almost hard to tell kind of often who would or how was in a group um stuff is is created obviously there's a lot of like like sharing building on top of um ideas so yeah we i really see kind of those um yeah small collective small groups um as as a key uh key part i guess in in the creator economy and that you asked what we're building yeah and how we're building so it's back to what i originally said we're decentralizing data indexing on query services right now it's 24 evm networks um with just that 1.3 billion queries a day where we've announced we're building out to near salon and polkadot soon and just imagine we want all public on-chain data to be decentralized and accessible with in a permissionless way and you think of who the creators are there every time i go to any dap and i click or i make a selection or i buy something or sell something i am creating and those are the creators that eventually accumulate to massive amounts of data across the world and then eventually when web 3 kind of eats the world's data um every aspect every data point will be on chain i think eventually it might take decades it might take hopefully in our lifetime and then every everything everyone will be a creator and we're just gonna need a really good web three stack to to track that yeah we don't build stuff on top of the creator economy we rather build stuff under the creator economy so what we do as a company i work with the bison trails team which is basically um a an infrastructure provider and what that means is that we run nodes right we run validator nodes read write nodes and so on which is effectively like the lifeblood of this decentralized creative economy right without those blockchains running and you know being able to read and write data from them and also provide security by staking your your tokens or or otherwise you're not able to have these platforms where all this creation and economic activity and new economic primitives that that creators can employ and experiment with um they don't exist right so we are basically putting our best foot forward in supporting um any and all blockchains that that we can and that we matter including tazos among among among others um and um we are very uh excited to be doing what we're doing especially when we're seeing so much activity start to blossom like you know beyond ethereum uh uh you know kathleen i'm sure we'll have uh great stories to tell you about you know all the nft activity on on tasers there's like a almost a shadow community from my feed on twitter at least like i have a separate uh uh list where i track like all the tesla's activity i'm like why does that stuff never appear on like my main feed um but it's it's like truly mind-blowing how how this uh this community has like taken a life of its own right yeah no absolutely um you know so i think there's a few things in your in your question annabelle um you know first and foremost i think you know the outage of facebook and instagram like it it goes to show that like yeah we're all very much uh relying on one company and centralization is a risk um but i also think that there is a huge attraction to centralization that we just natively have which is how we forget these things so easily um i've never been terribly um i've never been terribly compelled by the argument that all social media should be like web 3.0 decentralized whatever because i think there's actually a very um legitimate like you know attraction to centralization for these systems um what i find a little bit more interesting is sort of um the nft marketplaces that have sprung up on tezos the most prominent being nunc is a great use case or a great example of where i think the web could go tomorrow in social spaces um so hike is is an nft marketplace on tezos um it was built at a hackathon um by like a 20 something year old uh in brazil and it just sort of was scaffolding and a lot of the people who came to it in um i would say february or march of this year were actually ai and generative artists who themselves actually know how to program and so it was sort of a community self-organization to kind of take the scaffolding and and almost homestead um uh in a digital sense um on on hike nook and um you know in terms of daily active users and in terms of passion and um i guess contributions to the number of smart contract calls on the tesla's blockchain um it's been a tour de force um much more so than anything that's been venture funded or you know kind of artificially uh you know kind of synthesized to be the next big thing um pikachu is truly something that's entirely grassroots the uh the people who contribute to it are also able to build the tooling and infrastructure for it and i think that's really the path that we should be looking forward is not just um you know people who who crave centralization for the convenience of it but the people who crave decentralization right for the um amount of free expression that it lets you um harness so hickey is my favorite you know case study and conveniently it's also in the tesla's blockchain which i'm as you as you might imagine quite fond of and just i guess the follow-up quote oh please maybe just say one more comment of um what we are building and yeah it's it's wallets and just to make the connection um that we call it suddenly the creator economy the new thing is not in kathleen you said it earlier that people are creating i mean obviously uh well on facebook people used to create on what blocks on tick tock people create on whatever people create or are creating sinsweb too they are creating for a long time so the why we suddenly call it the creator economy and i guess well that's not what we meant basically so why we call it now the creative economy is because yeah now um well ideally you own your the well those that created actually own it you share in the economy yes right and then we need to talk uh about well wallets so how do you how do you actually are you actually owning it are you actually well not your keys not your well crypto punk i guess um and and well in that context um and that's of course broader topic we need to talk about decentralization identity and well currently i guess the best to that is the key private public key part pair but we believe that's not what eventually will um succeed we believe we need smarter wallets and i mean that's that's a also a topic that has been discussed well for for a while kind of smart contract wallets and that's that's what we built so uh contracts or well in a way an identity or something a wallet that can have uh can have smarter rules of um how you own the stuff with under what conditions you can move things uh well key recovery um social recovery um kind of all those things but essentially that's it's very core of it i mean if you don't own it then well we are back in another way of putting is that you're just shifting risk right from one you know centralized entity to like another infrastructure provider and you're not you're not necessarily uh solving the problem if you don't have absolutely not we are giving control to the user yeah shifting ownership i think yeah but yeah i i agree there's a lot of use cases for centralized entities in in tradify and normal people in general that aren't comfortable in this space so i don't think it's a winner take all scenario i think there's over seven billion people there's gonna be a lot more going forward i think we're all going to find our niche is what we're comfortable with and so i think we're all building something really cool that's going to apply to different parts of society so there's there's an interesting thread in something martin was uh mentioning before which is we call it the creator economy because the power is moving to the creator right because they have like this this ownership and it's it's cryptographically secured and proven and so on and like gnosis is the safe is incredibly cool right because you're empowering like creators to team up and also have like a a treasury and be able to like not only you know they could they could team up in like a web 2 context but now they can have like a you know a permissionless communal bank account that they can they can co-sign and then they can they can divert the funds into uh furthering their common goals which is like you know squad squad wealth or whatever that's called it's actually a pretty pretty pretty great piece of infrastructure to have and make available to creators for them to actually kind of you know use not only their creativity but uh capital to uh to to enhance uh uh with whatever they're doing but kathleen i think you're right does shift risk and responsibility as well uh so and that's a huge responsibility yeah good thing we have people like martin making tools right but but yeah actually i think the shift from web 2.0 to 3.

0 it takes the brave the brave ones to to try out first and to accept the idea of self-custody and that comes as a lot of with a lot of benefits but also at risk right i have a lot of clients who can't figure out how to use the ledger or panic because they thought they forgot the password and have to walk them through how you can recover and it's it's not easy the user experience hasn't been easy but but i think we are on this trend of making it better and there are people who are building infrastructure out there that's needed what can happen what's what's i think really interesting is that that is entirely true but people are just like jumping over the fence right to get in and try it out creators in particular like the nft boom this year has happened not because of like the easy access but despite of the the difficulties in in the tooling that's available and so on which i think is a testament to how much power this technology gives to creators right like there was like a super interesting anecdote there's this platform called catalog which is you can imagine as openc for mp3s or waves or like music effectively um and someone i think yesterday or the day before sold like a relatively small artist as well right like not not a huge following and so on they sold one of their music pieces one of their tracks for as much as it they would get from spotify if they hit three million listens which is to me completely mind-blowing and if you try and like peel it back and see why it's like if you go back to like your economics 101 i don't know like how many of you have have been exposed to that kind of kind of thing um but you're you're actually like as a creator able to capture more of the demand curve right you can sell at different points of the demand curve instead of having like someone just saying like this is the point that you're going to sell this is the vig i'm going to take see ya right i'm the network effect so if you want a career you know if you don't please be my guest try someone else um so i think i i think i'm super excited to see not only like how this stream develops but like also what other ways there are available like to fund creative work and monetize creativity i would add that like what's really nice about this is that it's inherently happy um so like the web 2.0 like the ad model of the web just basically stokes a lot of outrage and kind of um strongly incentivizes that to happen right because that's what gets people going and that's what gets them the click and that's what gets their eyeballs um what's been heartwarming about the nft boom is that it's basically introducing a sense of play into the web that didn't exist um you know for the last 10 years or so that things become much more vitriolic um and upsetting in a lot of ways this is inherently happy when you have an artist releasing things and you want to support them entirely happy so far this is the sort of application that i think the mass gets and we've tried i think we've spent the last 10 years trying to explain bitcoin as a financial application um on top of blockchain to people and it just it's hard i think people don't like numbers but when it's blocking games blockchain content or watching base sort of a creator economy where they can play to earn or do all these fun things and and all of a sudden right people get it and like elia said despite the hurdle of having to set up your wallet and all of that people are jump into this and i think that's what gets me certainly what's super exciting about the space and and as a follow-up to my earlier question i wanted to also talk about who are the creators in the decentralized world right now and um from those of you who are building platforms or nfd marketplaces um as are these super crypto native people or are we seeing influx of traditional musicians content creators um coming in as well it's a mix i would say there's obviously like it's more crypto native people boy it has been up until the middle of this year um because that's everybody that was around really uh and then you know the platforms were mature enough uh and i guess it was the right moment in time right where a lot it felt like from i guess may or so a lot of new people entered the space like creators right and so you can you can whip up a 10k pfp project and like you know issue it on on openc and so on that's like not definitely not the most interesting thing but it's also kind of interesting because it's like a community um uh it's like you create a community out of nothing right and and and that's that's pretty special um but there's also like all kinds of uh interesting creators coming in right and so far like at least as far as i understand i don't know about you guys um it's more visual uh related which is i mean the web is mostly visual so that that makes makes a ton of sense but there's like a very interesting intersection in you know code and art and you know the the art blocks and the the generative art that kathleen was talking about um before um i'm excited to see like more right i'm excited to see more video i'm excited to see more uh uh 3d environments there's like apparently an army of unreal engine engineers that are severely underpaid please come along uh call us [Laughter] yes um there's like musicians uh i just talked to you about this this example um before i'm like you know i i collect records uh as one of my my past times i'd love to like collect digital nft records more of them please um it's just like the scope is just massive and um i think it what is really encouraging to go back to annabelle's um question is that we are seeing like completely new people uh enter that are not crypto natives and we don't necessarily need to become like we are at this like we talk about how it's difficult to navigate the space and so on but we also have to realize that we've come like a long way in the last like uh i don't know three three or four years right i would you know i think about it this way it used to be the case that the model t was sold with a kit to basically fix it right and you had to know how to fix your model t and um i think crypto will have its moment when when you just buy a tesla and drive it off the yeah off the lot and it auto updates the software for you and you don't have to worry so much about it um but you know doji cad is posting nfts on tezos and i can't think of anyone more mainstream right now than that so um and and then you know on the other side of it we've got like people who basically you know have been in crypto for a really long time we were seeing this as like oh yes i've been creating you know art on the side and i never thought i'd have an opportunity to sell it online that's great too we welcome all types snoop dogg did you see snapdog it's crazy dog snoop dog snoop dogg is like has an alt uh uh on on twitter that is like basically an nft specific like collector nft collector type profile right and then they're like i'm gonna do this big release from the alt and then turns out it's snoop dogg so like there's a few there's quite a bit of that going on i think too like people kind of testing their toe in the water to see like how how much you know curation there is and then yeah you know doing a big reveal um you know scooby-doo style um but uh then maybe not a good reference but in any case i i um i think that's part of the cool myth of this is that you get to experiment with it and see like what sticks what do you what do you think um about the role of curation in in the whole like creative space that we're talking about because you touched on it right like you know snoop dogg is effectively a collector is a curator and so i'd love to hear like your thoughts and experience on i think value is subjective right and i think that this is at the intersection of like you know pure artistic interest which is like you know just the truest form of self-expression and uh and something a bit more a bit more you know web 2.0 which is like how do you how do you actually like make money off the internet right like yeah so there's clearly like status symbols and there's clearly you know people who who don't care um and it's kind of fun to see where they collect and where they gather because there's clearly thematic there's clearly stuff that's incentivized in certain marketplaces that aren't on others and i think you know in the next year or so we're going to see different communities emerge and that's what the self-organization of like crypto is is kind of beautiful for but i'm definitely curious about how how that curation might play out in in in practice because i i just saw kind of this um preview really exciting that uh twitter apparently is working on uh on yeah on something where you can select an nft as as your profile so you literally connect your wallet um well it will load the nfts in it and you can um collect it and apparently they then give it the check mark so that they even verify that that is nft now obviously you can create an nft but anyone can create nft so you obviously could just copy a crypto punk and create an ft yeah well it's a verified mft it's on the blockchain and so on well obviously it's not the right one so who decides which the right one is and that well there will definitely be some form of curation or kind of yeah well somehow expressing that this one is authentic and that one is not i think we're still so early and what's cool is that we all probably have a different crypto pill um a day or aha moment and whether it's bitcoin or ethereum or other you know the crypto winter building now a lot of people are going to say my crypto pill was nfts and they're going to come for the dopamine hit and they're going to hopefully kind of stay for the revolution just like a lot of people did and i think that's super important it's onboarding a lot of people and opening their minds and they see the sense of community and then maybe they peel back the onion and and see how exciting it really is and the potential for it no totally agree and i think wanted to bring this conversation back to maybe a more realistic light where obviously we still live in the web 2.0 world mostly and as you guys are as us um as more of the the the leader in the space trying to to do to lead the crowd into web 3.0 so to speak what are the the challenges that you have faced so far the bottlenecks you've seen maybe from the infrastructure level to whatever interesting legacy system there is um so yeah i wanted to hear your thoughts on that i could start as kind of an institutional person i was 12 years air force almost seven years goldman and i was i've always been financially and emotionally dependent on institutions even though i've been participating in this economy for half a decade and you know totally anonymously but now i think that is a huge hesitation for people to kind of get rid of the dependency the addiction um the essentially i wouldn't say brainwashing just the culture of that's how it is and then being able to trust something new and that's a big paradigm shift that took me even a long time um you know this long doing this on my own in the space because i've lived that my whole life so um and that's with me actually participating the economics so i can imagine somebody's just seeing this nft that's worth 5 million bucks shutting the door on it and never trying to get into it so that's a huge mental shift for people it's kind of great that the institutions are doing everything they can to push people that way though yeah um that was that was that was kind of my my entry into the space was like really disillusionment with like a lot of the modern institutions that like society and like europe specifically together right like there's a lot of disconnect there's a lot of um um friction and it feel it felt at the moment and it still feels like that that you know we have a real opportunity here to uh just um elevate people's uh uh wants and needs and front center and like find ways to um satisfy everybody you know we actually the pie can get bigger uh and the pie can be shared a lot better if we just can coordinate and so that's like you know i think a huge part of the creator economy is also in in what we're working on and the whole web three idea is coordination right and and there's something really powerful in that yeah one of the benefits i think there's a lot of them it would take a while to go through them yeah but um talking i mean there are of course very very concrete dependencies on web 2 platforms and most concrete well i can share we can share and well we are not the only one affected by that is the apple uh app store so we wanted to make a new release of our well mobile app of the safe supporting nfts and it was not allowed by apple so that release was blocked because yeah they want their i mean it's just their policy i guess they want their 30 cut on digital items uh but but or simply i mean even even if we somehow would try to build in this 30 or well it's not really possible they simply just don't allow it so they apple policy currently is to not allow any wallets that allowed to interact and buy and sell nfts yeah to to kind of display um nfts and i'm really curious how that will turn out if at some point the pressure might be high enough it's hard to tell i mean um which was the company and the um the game that they tried to try to fight yeah right i mean they they tried to fight and i guess they lost i mean i mean they made a concession but yeah i mean largely lost a lot yeah i mean it was a huge hit for them fortnight yeah exactly so i think they're still not in the app store and i think they regretted their decision to uh try to fight against zeppel yeah i i think just um i violently agree with martin um and the rest of the panelists but i think also just people inherently crave you know centralization whether they like to admit it or not and the only reason we you know have see striving for decentralization is largely when centralization fails um but if you don't like kind of practice that you don't kind of set up a good environment for that to take hold you know the default is basically trying to rely on centralized systems um so it's an uphill battle yeah on that mental shift like i think one of my most sort of contentious beliefs about what we're discussing and like the whole web 3 idea is that like not everybody is and i think not everybody will be comfortable like holding their own private keys right and custodying them so like there is a real comfort in centralized environments as well and there's like there is a space for that and um you know we can definitely improve in so many different ways right like uh you know centralized environments that like enable this but also kind of you know give users the comfort of them not having to cuss and be responsible for custodying their own assets which sounds a bit silly if you think about it like you should in a way but also you don't have to right um yeah yeah i agree there's something we said for verification though um which we don't necessarily have today in standards no entirely and there's like so what's a really interesting vision of the future and i think we'll probably get to that in a bit but for me there was like a big revelation moment when i first sort of interacted with cryptokitties back in in 2018 so you know you basically had your metamask wallet and then some nfts in it and then you went to the cryptokitties site and you fired it up and then suddenly like it was like a personalized experience right because it was almost you logged in with your meta mask and then what you would what would render in in the site was whatever was on your wallet and i realized at that moment that like oh wait a second like i'm the only person in the world that is seeing this screen right here and every other person that's visiting that site is seeing like a different screen which is like an incredible vision if you if you think about it that's enabled by blockchains right we can all be in the same environment but we can all like see slightly different lee right uh like i assume that we also like perceive colors i've never been someone else so i don't know [Laughter] but we perceive colors slightly differently you know in different tones than each other but we can still we can still um you know coordinate and cooperate and and have fun together and i i think it's a it's a really exciting future totally yeah i love that and with that i think wanted to ask you guys what what other things what new things would you like to see in in the spaces of whether having um what we just talked about infrastructure that better connects web 2 to web 3 or is it some something completely web3 native that's going to be able to onboard more people in this space or or get and also give people that level of comfort while socializing or or you know doing financial transactions and what are your thoughts um what would i like to see yeah what what new things yeah i mean i'm slightly triggered by by martin's comment before because uh basically you know i do think mobile is kind of the way that we engage with the world and that's not going to stop it's only going to accelerate um so the fact that a lot of mobile platforms are basically in one way or another throttled by apple and google in some form um is is quite difficult uh and so you know that that um i have personal experience of trying to develop a mobile first application uh using a blockchain and um to to martin's point it is um it isn't a full battle um yeah i'd love to see more experimentation with uh economic models uh and and creators like you know wallets and infrastructure and all that like we definitely need that stuff but selfishly what i'd like to see is both more music mp3s and so on in in the broader sort of nft metaverse space but definitely more experimentation with economic models right like how do you um i don't know if if if you're tuned to that sort of thing but for example balancer has an uh which is an amm there's a great innovation the 92 98.

2 pool which is like a liquidity bootstrapping pool right that was like a real zero to one in my eyes at least for like the d5 space so i think there's a lot more uh innovation that we can see in kind of like you know the nft space and in issuance and then how creators actually kind of monetize the work and and how they present them in to the world and how this kind of economic uh uh flavor of of the work itself kind of actually describes the work right and and defines uh the work and i i i'm super super interested to see how this how we can see more experimentation uh in that dance between you know the financial aspect and the creative aspect and how the two become one and enhance like the sum of the parts yeah i i mean i agree with everyone there's so many cool things that are happening right now it's just exciting i think i would like to see even if not web 3 in the in its entirety i'd love to see the principles of web 3 filtered in so verifiability and transparency which takes a lot of decision making authority and autonomy control out of the top and kind of allows us at the bottom to trust but verify i'd love to see a realignment of incentives with distributed participation and everything from economics to governance which will allow us as humans to kind of uh as a hive mind which i think is much more powerful in decision making power uh than like wealthy people in a small room to adapt fail forward and innovate faster which is probably the best leading indicator indicator for like a survivability of a species and i'd love to see redundancies and robustness and reliability which is a big thing of decentralization and then i'd like to see really a very underestimated piece of the puzzle but super important to me is just everyone owning their own data and digital identities and doing what they want with it and that's in my opinion a right not a privilege and and i i think that will resonate with a lot of people so that's what i'd love to see definitely building up on top of that to me that's really the key piece and if we don't get that right then it's well not due to me whether it's it's worth it that is like are you owning it and i would say um maybe you can you can i i definitely also see the uh role of centralized services but essentially you could make the test can you withdraw so can you somehow get it out um on in in many platforms today that's not really possible so if i want to withdraw from twitter like well i guess i could copy my tweets somehow somewhere and kind of try to paste them somewhere i i don't know and that is of course still a large uh somewhat unsolved challenge the question of digital digital identity and specifically digital identity across blockchains i think for what for one block for for a single blockchain we have solved it pretty well i mean it's your key and maybe well maybe it's a smart contract and it can do smarter things but as soon as we uh hit borders of blockchains then well it really almost doesn't work well at all so the question is where will people have their yeah whatever it is wallet key identity where will that live and will that be that universal that actually all the the content or the the data the identities they have is truly connected to that um yeah digital identity super cool it's just an exciting time and i think with that i want to close with one last question and again a bit on a personal side i think kyle touched upon matter the idea metaverse in the very beginning of our discussion and i want to ask my fellow panelists today in the in the dream world where you know maybe all of these things that we just touched uh talked about become real and you know what is your ideal um or your dream metaverse look like opt-in matrix style definitely um as in i don't live in like a jar of fluid um but i can i can just like tap into that type of type of world i want and like as an interim step we can like i'd be super happy to have this uh um you know you own your own game items and then you can the game items are interoperable and you can um you can take them from one environment to the other interact with users like truly own right like i think ownership has been like a an underlying thread in all of the stuff that we've been we've been talking about so you know first the the game items i think that will be kind of like a like a good leading indicator of we're on the right track and then the matrix that's a tough question you guys can go first i think i need whiskey to answer this one talking talking about the matrix i am definitely fascinated also with vr and well i have my oculus and put it on my head and then at some point i realized okay every pixel and everything i see here is controlled by facebook essentially and really literally you face some facebook engineers and guys decided well what i see and kind of what i what i experience and and and i completely give my all my senses to their i don't know algorithms so um yeah so that i mean i i see the great potential of stuff like vr but i really really hope that we somehow uh keep uh an openness and and keep keep systems open that um not just one company decides what what content yeah but what stuff we consume john carmack's pretty cool though i said john carmack is pretty cool despite the facebook affiliation um but yeah i think like i just just things getting weird like i think the internet is that it's best when it allows like people who would have otherwise been like very socially stranded to come together um and make something odd and like profound arguably cryptocurrencies were first an expression of this um and i think that's really like when the stuff is is most fun is when you find like your very weird tribe that you would have never in a million years found because you were born in i don't know southeast asia and they were born in new york um and so that's that's kind of what gets me going about thinking about the web and the next iterations of it is like weirdos finding other weirdos um because that's where that's where fun starts right yeah i don't know how to answer it because i think anything i would say with regards to matrix or the oasis ready player one or ar vr would probably end up not where i'd want to be in the end because i think we along the lines whether we're uploading our consciousness like in black mirror episode or something like that i think we'd leave lose some shred of identity and humanity that we didn't have before and we don't understand what those externalities or unintended consequences will be so so many things seem exciting and i'll probably participate i'll be the second or third to upload my consciousness as long as it works and i really don't know what that's going to look like but that's super exciting that we can even imagine that that might even in a small way happen during our lifetime so i'm it keeps me up at night i have no idea again it'll take whiskey to really get it out of me what if you could fly yeah of course i'd have a jet pack come on um great i think we probably just have two minutes left for uh maybe one or two questions from the audience yeah do you need a micro project to the room yell it we got one hi everyone uh so quick question so this creator economy is mainly kind of dictated by youtubes of the world and instagrams and facebooks and all right with this new paradigm how do you see them as threat to this new nft economy and especially the nft creator economy because we might innovate a lot and they might come come at the end and might take over everything yeah i mean i think that that is open kind of how those platforms will position themselves one super interesting thing recently was of course tick tock uh who announced to um i don't exactly know what they and what they sound like 300 million euros yeah so so my understanding is that that well uh detector creators can create their content directly as as nfts all right yeah so how how how are they i think i'd like to answer that yeah how this how the startups are going to compete like like tik tok announced 300 million euros uh for next three years i believe for the creator economy same i think instagram youtube has also announced recently so how do startups will compete i think it all comes down to incentives and centralized entities who make a [ __ ] ton of money off of us and our data their incentive is to make more money to change the laws to allow them to make more money and accumulate more power and that i think is being disrupted by this little revolution and it's good to be the disrupter so i think they're a threat because they're the incumbent in the powerful scheme of things and that's our job to get in participate and disrupt them and eventually i think they will capitulate i really do i think we're actually running running out of time but you know maybe we can't have a discussion later off stage and again thank you thank you all here and thank you to my fellow panelists today thank you