How crypto can regenerate the world - Kevin Owocki

hey everyone how's it going thanks so much for inviting me to speak at this event really wish that I could be there in person web 3 logos looks like it's going to be a great foundational event for the logos community and for the Nigerian Community really hope to be able to be there next year the title of my talk is how crypto can regenerate the world I want to talk about some of the more pro-social uses of crypto in this talk and I want to talk about how we can use crypto to fund public goods infrastructure that's traditionally provided by governments things that are non-excludable and non-rival risks and are uh things like climate uh climate Solutions Environmental Solutions open- Source software um things like that things that are not traditionally having business models in the Old Market and how I think we can we can fund them with crypto so that's is what my talk is about today I uh I hope that you enjoy it so for those of you who do not know me I am Kevin aaki I am one of the co-founders of gitcoin which is a crowdfunding product and protocol that is funded $50 million worth of public goods for the world and green pill. Network green pill. network is a podcast that comes out on every Tuesday Thursday and it is dedicated to highlighting the more pro-social uses of crypto check it out at Green pill. network if you want to learn more about that so um in this talk I'm going to talk a little bit about the target State what I think that we could build with crypto um how do we do coordination um a lot of these not funding of public goods are examples of coordination failures so how do we at scale use crypto in order to regenerate the world starting with our local communities and how do we do it right and uh then we'll close from there so I think that the target state for what I want to build in this space is what I call regen so basically regen stands for regenerative A system that goes up in resource availability over time as opposed to degenerative A system that goes down in resource availability over time so uh people call themselves dgen in the space if they do a lot of of just gambling in in like pool twos or something like that Regens are more focused on resource availability going up and I think an important part of that is building ecosystems that are not fragile so uh fragile ecosystems hit a shock event and then they go down over time uh but building ecosystems that are antifragile which means they hit shock events and they go up uh in resource availability so a regenerative system um not only regenerating Financial Capital but keeping in mind that there are eight different types of capital so basically Social Capital material Capital Financial Capital living capital intellectual Capital experiential Capital spiritual capital and cultural capital so I talk about what kind of crypto Financial system we could build with crypto I think that we want to build a regenerative system on many different types of capital not just on financial Capital so this talk is going to be how do we take the future and how do we pull it from this projected future that's the current course that we're on and move it more into the plausible or possible adjacent future that is more regenerative so how do we use crypto to regenerate our local communities and to regenerate the world is the target state of this talk and another way of orienting this thinking is to talk about how do we use this technology to solve coordination failures the things that we all agree are good and that we all uh rely on but they don't have a business model and so we haven't been able to fund them in the past things like open-source software funding this whole whole ecosystem relies on open source software so it' be logical that we wanted to fund it all but since the source code's available for free it's very hard to monetize AI alignment obviously a big one in the news with open AI having just came out preventing climate change preventing bio diversity collaps preventing surveillance Tech and authoritarian government are the coordination failures that I think about I'm sure that uh every nation and peoples on earth have their own coordination failures that they think about in their local communities and um you know I'd be curious for the audience members what what what comes to mind in logos and in Nigeria what coordination failures do you want to solve out there every nation on Earth has public goods that they need to fund so public goods are things that are non-excludable which means that I can't exclude you from consuming a good and non-rivalrous which means that you consuming a good does not stop me from consuming a good so basically every nation on Earth has to fund their national public goods in order to Pro provide infrastructure for for their citizens so in what way could we use crypto in order to fund public goods for Every Nation on Earth um so this is like a a map of what I like to think about when I think about public goods and I know that it looks a little bit complicated but but basically the idea here is that there's different public goods at different apertures so basically we have Global public goods things like her immunity and climate and um and then we have nation state public goods things like Economic Development social welfare systems sometimes the military is public good for for their citizens sometimes they're not city state public goods local public goods would be something that are local to logos to Nigeria to like things like community centers roads and bridges and schools and what I think is interesting is that the only one half of this pie is really physical public goods you've also got digital public goods things like crypto public goods and then you've got digital public goods things like web servers or python packages and and stuff like that so these are all different types of goods that are non-excludable and non-rival and we want to pull ourselves into the possible adjacent future in which we're funding those things so how can crypto regenerate the world our Target state is we're building a regenerative economy that funds our public goods um I one of the things that I think is an easy way to to orient myself when I'm thinking about this is to use something called holons so basically a ho on is something that's simultaneously a hole in itself and also part of a larger hole so I'm a human uh part of a team that uh that founded getcoin and is part of the ethereum movement which is part of the crypto industry which is part of uh a global ecosystem likewise each individual sitting in the audience right now is a human in losos which is a a hon in Nigeria which is a hon which is part of the world which is a hon so when we're thinking about funding public goods we can think about the public goods at each of the levels of of these holons and up and down the the holarchy so coordinating at scale but also in our local Villages um going up from from like a family to a kin Network to a village to a community to a state um these are all connections between where each holon is a part of each other holon one of the things I really like about this uh this thinking is not only does it allow you to separate concerns from Global public goods to Everyday public goods but it sort of breaks The Duality of the individual's needs in the collective needs each individual if you look at them as a hon is just a collective of individual cells or organs in vice vice versa so um what I like about it is that it allows us to break this duality of individualism and in and collectivism when it comes to funding our public goods okay so um basically I think web 3 is the ultimate coordination power tool our Legacy institutions for supporting public goods for coordinating and solving coordination failures in these whole ons are opaque unaccountable inefficient and often centralized and have hierarchical power structures which means that they do not see the situations on the ground web 3 provides a better coordination substrate because we can build transparent uncorruptable programmable and permissionless coordination mechanisms so uh I think web 3 is a coordination power tool that is going to allow us to fund public goods Within These Hons so basically we can build coordination mechanisms that allow us to fund public goods and then distribute funding to these these public goods within the these ecosystems so so um you can fund public goods with things like donations or if if you're ethereum then you've got a pre-mined block of transactions that go into your wallet which you use to distribute to public goods and then there's distribution mechanisms that are also being innovated right now things like quadratic funding retroactive public goods funding and conviction voting uh from there so you know I think that gitcoin my work is an example of this gitcoin is a funding mechanism and a distribution mechanism for funding public goods Within these ecosystems and one of the things that I think is really cool about the ethereum ecosystem is that we now have multiple funding and distribution mechanisms that are on top of each other in the ecosystem so they all work to fund public goods in the in a different way within the ethereum ecosystem right now and one of the things that I think is important about this is it's got the Unix philosophy uh style architecture here where each funding or distribution mechanism does one thing well and it interoperates well with other funding and distribution mechanisms in the community so this is what it looks like in the ethereum ecosystem if youve followed optimism and retroactive public goods funding there you know that they're funding $20 million worth of ecosystem public goods using retroactive public goods funding Dow drops is doing 250k per quarter of retroactive public goods funding getcoin has done $50 million so far of public goods funding clear fund another quadratic funding tool has done $3 million gith is doing on the order of millions of dollars and protocol Guild which is a self curating registry of ethereum protocol developers is doing around $10 million per year of of funding of the ecosystem public goods so I think that we're proving in the ethereum ecosystem that public goods can be funded with crypto and I'm really excited about how these things connect with each other not just that they're interoperable with each other but we're starting to see people put together funding aqueducts so you can imagine that you've got a dow that relies on all these different public goods and you maybe take an equal percentage of your uh Treasury and allocate it to optimism and protocol Guild and dial drops and and getcoin from there um or you can do really interesting things like build opinionated funding aquad dos where you have governance weighted position percentages that go to each of these different public goods funding mechanisms out there or maybe even more complicated funding aqueducts that are composed of of different ways of of funding public goods um another thing that I think that we've seen in this space that's sort of interesting and how this whole layer of funding public goods composes is that there's now hundreds of DS out there with millions and sometimes billions of dollars of Treasury and the Dow toow relationships that are forming in the space are are somewhat interesting ing so you've got basically um I think three layers to a dow to Dow relationship um you want to have a social layer in the relationship so basically sponsorships and hanging out giving a talk at each other's events I think is an example of a social layer relationship and then you've got technology interop which is like hey I'll use your technology if you're Unis swap I'll use Unis swap um and if you're getcoin I'll use getcoin if you're optimism I'll use optimism and then you've got economic interop which is hey let's let the tokens flow between these two projects and um and uh you know maybe that'll mean a token swap maybe that'll mean joining an aqueduct together or or something of that nature and so um one of the things that really excites me about how these Dow to Dow relationships are composed as how they stack on top of each other holonic so basically as more and more Dows enter into these relationships with each other social economic and Technical they're going to start stacking on top of each other until you have this like mesh network of incentives in which the whole EOS system Rises and falls together not only because it's on ethereum together but because there's so many relationships with each other and I think this is going to matter because we're all going to be in this economic Fabric in between these different Dows and holonic we'll be part of many of these different holons and we be be benefiting from each of their successes so um you know I am Kevin aaki which is part of the whole L that is eth eth Denver the Denver community and you're probably in a ho on that's part of the logos ethereum Community if if you're at uh web3 logos we're all part of the ethereum ecosystem some of us are part of getcoin Dow and some of the events that they're doing so um when you think about this economic fabric right here think about where you are in that you benefit from ethereum you benefit from gitcoin you benefit from optimism and all the layer 2 technology that's happening so this mesh network of public goods that are being built uh in this da to Da fabric is going to be benefiting everyone and what I'm really excited about is this density of public goods funding how it's going to uh scale so this this graph right here is it's I know a lot but this is a holonic view of of civilizational scale so all the way up from atoms and molecules and cells and organs and uh up to or persons and then families and then local communities City Town Village you guys are in in logos right now in Nigeria on planet Earth so what are the ways in which there are coordination failures at each of these levels of of holons um one of the most profound I think ways things that I think when I visualize this slide is that cancer is just a coordination failure of cells in which one cell gets on this Runway Loop where it consumes too many resources just to reproduce itself and that's a coordination failure at the cellular level crime at the local community level is a coordination failure and climate change is a coordination failure at the global level of of public goods and so in what ways uh can we build economies with web 3 that um help solve some of these coordination failures and are able to help us help us fund public goods within each of these ecosystems and of course it's sort of a silly question to ask in uh in physical space right now because uh we haven't really proven that ethereum can do that yet but when you start to look at how there are digital Hons and digital public goods we're all the member a member of probably multiple Dows and if we're not members of them then we receive benefit from their technology we're all a member of multiple social networks telegram groups interest groups uh the open source software that we use so these these holons that we're building in the digital ecosystem I I think that it's really interesting when you start to look at how much money goes to public goods in the digital uh public goods ecosystem right now let's just take the market c cap of crypto which is like $1.2 trillion and um and take a look at it the uh Geographic public goods if you add up all of the taxation of governments across the world is on the order of trillions of dollars so what if there was a cross-pollination of mechanisms and money uh between these two sets of holons the digital hoon and then the physical the physical hoon and what are the ways in which we could build a mesh network of incentives that helps fund public goods that is um cross-pollinated between these two groups and I think a great example of this is that gitcoin just did a round of climate Solutions funding on getcoin grants that are basically projects that are helping to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere or service core infrastructure for climate Solutions so we're already starting to see this cross-pollination of web 3 infrastructure you being used to fund Global public goods and it's it's bottoms up it's through the market layer as opposed to top down and through the United Nations or or um or or government agendas so um that's sort of some of my early thoughts on how crypto can regenerate the world and um I think that in this talk so far we've gone from what are public goods why do they matter there are things in your community that you uh that you care about and that you want to see funded and um and then we talked about how these are things these things are ultimately coordination failures if we can find a way to build a mesh network of incentives across communities then uh we're going to be able to recognize all of the different h on that that we're in and hopefully build a mesh network of incentives that funds public goods across the the ecosystem and uh we're all doing it in a pluralistic way getcoin is one seat at the table but we also have clear fund and GTH and protocol Guild and uh many other great projects that are doing it and um I'm I'm really just happy to be part of this movement today uh I want to end by talking about gitcoin Grand stack which is a next gener product that will allow anyone to create a quadratic funding round so basically the same Tech and the same Playbook that getcoin follows in order to fund public goods for the ethereum ecosystem now anyone can do you can go to manager.

gitcoin doco and you can create a uh around from there and use getcoin grants in your local community so I just go to manager.co.th entic my metamask and then let's say I wanted to create a round for open source uh software funding I can go in here and just with a couple clicks create a round of quadratic funding and fund a whole on so basically getcoin 1.0 was fishing for you getcoin 2.0 is teaching you how to fish so we've got tons of resources for people who want to run a quadratic funding round in their local community soon this will support direct grants and Milestone based payouts and I'm told a bunch of other coordination mechanisms out there and we're really excited to support a the growth of this vision of of honic public goods funding across the world for for many many causes across many many scales so um you can go to manager.

gitcoin doco to set up around you can uh join The gitcoin Operators Guild which is a community of getcoin operators and you can get uh pure support for for running these type of rounds in your local community if you want to learn more you can go to gin. CGR stack um I'm really excited about quadratic funding because uh there's uh gitcoin has funded $50 million worth of public goods so far and because it has um uh because it's got two million data points about what people actually care about I'm excited about the ability of web 3 to build Bottoms Up collective intelligence of what these communities actually care about so basically uh this is an economic graph of getco Grant round I think it's 14 here and each graph each node on the network is a person or a grant and each Edge in the network is a transaction between them so basically we're building a signal of what a community really cares about peer-to-peer and only funding those public goods so uh much more signal goes into web 3 than I think goes into traditional um traditional type of mechanisms for for funding public goods that are that are a little bit more industrial era and not scaled up to web scale so what are the ways in which we can measure and and scale out the amount of uh public goods that people care about across the world so that is how we rotate attention and capital into regenerative projects that is how we pull ourselves into a uh plausible adjacent future that is more about funding public goods I think that this technology is going to allow us to scale to funding public goods at web scale and that is my presentation for web logos this year so I hope that you got a little bit of vision out of this talk uh how web 3 could be used in order to cross-pollinate an ecosystem of public goods funding across the world I hope that you got a little bit of practice in here how to do it using gcoins software stack and all in all I hope that you enjoyed the presentation again I uh I really hope to be able to be at uh at web3 logos next year it was a real honor to be invited to speak this year and um and uh I can only hope that I'm able to make it in person next year to join you all in logos Nigeria for for this event and um I think that we're building a Global movement here and it's very special to me I always pinch myself whenever I whenever I think about the fact that I'm just here in the United States with my family and I'm able to just sort of be myself in somewhere across the world and and hopefully educate them inspire them and in commune with them so uh if you have any questions you can hit me up on Twitter that's where I'm most active and we'll respond to you twitter.com oaki and I invite you to join this this Global movement of using crypto to help help regenerate the world so uh you can you can uh you can tweet me at twitter.com awaki I'd also ask uh check out green pill. Network that's the educational community that we're building in order to help crypto um be used to build regenerative digital infrastructure in the world we do have a chapter in logos Nigeria so um if you're interested in joining that that's another way that you can get involved in my work all right that's all I got thanks so much and see you next time