Opening Words - Tokyo 2024

hello everybody good morning Tokyo welcome everybody and welcome to the 10th edition of funding the commons has uh how many of you have been to funding the commons before all right all right so a lot of new people great uh well just to give a little explanation funding the commons is a conference focused on public goods funding it's incubated by a company called protocol labs and we bring together Builders funders academics and the public sector to discuss and innovate on public goods funding um when I say public sector this includes International bodies National bodies and Municipal bodies and today is a very special funding the commons because I think for the first time ever we have all three of those geographies represented so thank you thank you everyone who [Applause] came first I would like to introduce our MC Rachel who will be hosting today everybody yeah I'm super grateful to be here can we give another round of applause to the funding the commons team they're just going around the world making an impact um [Applause] um and yeah David so grateful to be here today uh my name is Rachel I've been in the web three space for several years working on several projects um a published author worked on the edcon team uh I've worked on teams like opis Harmony and uh have also worked in the eth Denver ecosystem uh so yeah super excited to be here today as your host and I'm going to pass it back off to David now to start thank you thank you and uh first I would like to thank our hosts here at the United Nations University for hosting this conference so thank you and without our Japanese Partners this event would not have been possible so I would like to thank diai Tokyo plurality yeah fracton and Aria and without this amazing crew uh I'm I'm not kidding this event would not have happened so really really thank you yeah [Applause]