The Road to Mass Adoption - Shira, Luke Stokesn Frank Brinkkemper, Manasi Vora and Michelle Abbs

yeah should we like how long have you been sitting here by the way three minutes okay well you know six days can we just like all stand up and like move our body or something yeah i'm from la okay is this what you get all right just a little move i think we need to move our bodies come on or just stretch all right fine don't do it yes a little move just stretch i feel like in order to take in information and to enjoy it you've got to have your blood moving through your body i'm shira lazar i'm the founder of which trending i've been covering digital culture and social media trends for uh almost two decades and bringing you know median content to emerging tech so it's really cool to be here as this space is growing and building i also have been moving into the web 3 space as a consultant and advisor i host twitter spaces specifically one where some women have been in the space women in web 3 weekly have been doing on twitter space every wednesday if some of you've been in there i encourage you to follow me to check it out and join in i also do alpha mondays so if you have any projects you're working on or any mints coming up join us on alpha mondays with brian fanzo who has a great nft podcast as well that said we have a great group of folks here today we're talking about mass adoption so we'll do a little convo and then open it up to questions as well so let's start the introductions from here hello my name is luke stokes i'm the managing director for something called the foundation for inter-wallet operability where we support the fio protocol basically trying to make all cryptocurrency easier to use kind of like paypal venmo giving it a human experience i've been in the space for over nine years very passionate about dacs and dials and governance and different governance models and really uh had a company for 10 years doing e-commerce and we implemented blockchain and it was too hard to use so that's my passion right now i'll give one mics maybe we'll share mics awesome hey everyone my name is mansi vora i am the vp of strategy and operations at skynet labs if you're not familiar with us we do decentralized data storage and application hosting been in the space for five years um i also founded women in blockchain which is a non-profit to increase diversity in the space which is super important and through that launched an investment now so we invest in female founders in the crypto space so really passionate about this technology and the impact that it can make i am loving the trend of the intros uh my name is michelle and i am an educator at heart i care a lot about diversity and inclusion and equity and i currently hold two roles so one i work with a project called metagood and we have an nft collection called on chain monkeys which mission is around you know bridging social good and nfts and i also founded web3 equity which is around onboarding more women into web3 which specifically doesn't call out women in the title because the role of onboarding more women is both for women and men um so it's around bringing equity in web3 uh with all of us involved awesome thank you uh yeah i'm from frank blinkemper i'm a product manager at oasis.app and we're becoming the most trusted place to deploy your capital into d5 so we're trying to also get retail into d5 and that's yeah that's our goal so when we talk about the road to mass adoption um you know you can still go on a lot of platforms and if my mom went on some of your sites she'd still be like well i do not get this these words and all that so with that said how are you each looking to change that because it needs to be something that we all get but also the the uh typical consumer needs to understand it too how are you each approaching that that's actually the core of what we're trying to accomplish if you haven't noticed in this space there's a lot of engineers building tools for other engineers you know and they if you're looking at like an nft and they say well how do i know it's yours we'll go to etherscan and see all this crazyly gobbledygook of contract addresses and big complicated hashes and most people that's just not something you're gonna be accepting and so with a human readable expression a human readable address the crypto handle that we're doing with your protocol trying to get that into more wallets more exchanges more nft platforms i think it's something more palatable and it's more friendly someone understands they have a login to a website or a login to their bank account what's their login to crypto and how do we do that in a decentralized self-sovereign way because i think central bank digital currencies and the other centralized solutions kind of give that usability but they sacrifice decentralization and it's kind of a problem because then you get away from the entire point of all this the self-sovereign nature of value so i think a big part of it is focusing on usability and a lot of projects unfortunately don't really do that because they're just a swamp they have so many people coming in they can barely keep their servers running and so usability is like way back there so i think a focus on usability is going to be really important especially in the next handful of years we have about a billion users coming to crypto and they're just not going to be able to do much with the existing tools so we're out there trying to help with that i'm trying to educate people on the importance of usability because i got into this more nine years ago for money for the unbanked this it's supposed to be not a rich person's only club like it is now the engineers and the people that have enough money for gas fees and things like that so my hope is as we think about making it simpler we're gonna have more people have access to these systems yeah uh yeah so uh i don't know if how many people here are aware of um the tesla master plan that they that elon musk wrote at the beginning of tesla where he was like first we're gonna build a car uh the roadster that's gonna be a really expensive car uh then we're gonna use that money that we got from the car to build a cheaper car and then we're gonna use that money to build an even cheaper car and we're taking at oyster.app we're taking the same route in the sense that right now ethereum uh layer one is hella expensive but we're we're focused on it and uh we have our usage on it and uh so our master plan is first build an awesome product for ethereum l1 then use that money to build a product so that more people can access it on ethereum l2 and then after that build an even more accessible product using traditional finance institutions to get people through those institutions into defy without maybe yeah the same hurdles that you have in d5 right now with setting up wallets and stuff like that so yeah that's the route that we're taking personally and what what stage are you at right now so we're at the first stage but but um actually this year we will be expanding into l2s as well as well right now we're we're mostly a front-end to the maker protocol so you can generate dye at our website and we will be following the maker protocol onto the various l2s that are out there so i am not an engineer i am not actually building one of these things that we're talking about um but i think one of the things i would love to hear and love for folks who are building to think a lot more about is who they're building for and what the proximity is to that audience so i think there's a lot of folks who are onboarding into the space right now who maybe are not can't claim that they bought bitcoin whatever 10 plus years ago they haven't been in this space for a long time they you know don't have degrees from mit and they aren't technologists and one of the main headaches is discord for example well discord was built for gamers wasn't actually built for all of us to be able to be talking about what projects we like so a lot of the things that we don't like about it is because it wasn't built for us so the products that we are building right now i think that we have some incredible brains and brains and group in this room right now but if your grandma and your mom and your niece and the teacher and who you might sit next to in church or whatever else you do on the weekend if they don't understand how to use your product like that's you know that's the proximity gap that i would hope to fill and help you know fill currently in my role with uh the metagood team and on chain monkey in thinking about how we interface with the broader community how do we educate and how do we onboard people because i don't actually see the level of ease of use for the mass adoption that we're talking about yeah i agree with all of that i think we also need to ask who's our target audience right sometimes it's just developers and it's okay to have a technical product if it's a consumer-facing product yes we need that kind of usability i think um the crypto space has come a long way since the early days where you had to download the blockchain and figure out how to run a node and know how to acquire cryptocurrencies at least you know um i can give the example of how we approached it at science and skynet society is a decentralized blockchain or like social storage protocol which you had to literally download the blockchain acquire cya coins to start using it to start storing your data and then we launched layer 2 which is skynet essentially with skynet it's web-based application you go on the website and you start uploading your data without needing any kind of blockchain knowledge or cryptocurrency information and i think i would love to see a world where cryptocurrency reaches or like blockchain technology reaches that stage where people are using it and getting the benefit out of it without even knowing you know how it works yeah i see that a lot too like origin protocol just launched for the nft space there's tokenfi i do see it being like squarespace for these things right um do is there worry about uh the security when it becomes like a squarespace s type of system where it becomes so it's so simple so consumer facing that yeah it takes away the things that protect people well actually we're going to be launching a dashboard project which is very similar web-based experience for interacting with the field protocol and one of the things we worked with uh paul from edgewall is on our board and he's got a great process for the backend api uses your login and password to encrypt your seed phrase and then from there it creates a recovery system that people are used to in web 2 like hey i lost my password i need to recover it so these are recovery questions that are hashed the answers that are hashed it's all completely anonymous they don't even know your public key let alone your private key but you have a way to get back if you lose your information so i think those are really interesting ways so we can have a web experience that's fully non-custodial meaning there's not a custodian managing your funds that could take it away from you or a central point of failure a point of attack and i like to see those kind of hybrid models that are coming out but i do you make a really important point that if we if we sacrifice the entire point byzantine fault tolerance that's a complicated way to say it's immutable meaning nobody can change it it's really secure if we sacrifice that by centralization kind of defeat the whole purpose i mean really as an engineer you can just have a database in a network and it'll be much more efficient than blockchain so there are ways that we have to focus on our kind of what i call our sovereign rights in blockchain things that matter to us most and then still focus on usability uh quick example that i thought was fun i got to go on some delegations to el salvador honduras and panama and recently uh saint quince and nevis with brock pierce and some others and at one point we're kind of an after party and there's a dozen people in the room and i said well hey everyone go to uh this website and then go to whatsapp because they all had whatsapp so i don't have to download anything new and i onboarded 12 people to crypto simultaneously they all just shouted out their crypto handle that they got oh i'm you know so-and-so and ulti i'm so-and-so at ulti and i just started flinging them five bucks each and they thought it was the coolest thing ever i'm like i just onboarded people simultaneously without them having to give me some complicated hash and public address that kind of a thing i want to see more of but not just like in person but online and everywhere in between it's so interesting you mentioned el salvador because we know like government governments implementing this creates mass adoption quote unquote but that once again doesn't that defeat the purpose because now it just becomes like an another government uh focused project right does that work is that where you would concern you and how do how do we navigate that i know this isn't a government focused uh panel but i think it's fascinating you know when you're speaking el salvador my friends going to el salvador i know brock you know people are going there like it's like the going to miami every every day to work with the president it's fascinating right now yeah so uh in terms of regulation uh i definitely think there there should become like at least more clear guidelines all across the world also to to get the mass adoption because right now i'm from the netherlands and the rules in the netherlands are are really bad in the sense that uh to to buy crypto right now in the netherlands uh and you go through a broker for example uh then you have to uh literally take a screenshot of your wallet which is open to show that your public key is is yours so for example if you have a meta mask wallet you have to be locked into metamask create a screenshot where you see your public key send that to the broker um before you can actually buy crypto with fiat i mean how bad is this this is so stupid and our i see people laughing laughing in the audience and yeah like every one of us here could come up with better regulation and i think it's also part of our jobs to educate these regulators to make sure that they don't like ruin the rules even further than they already did i wanted to answer the question you asked before about decentralization and security because i think this is a really key focus area as we you know bring on hundreds of millions more folks uh to this world i mean i think i have encountered a lot of folks who've accidentally clicked an errant link in discord for example and you know gotten some of their assets stolen the first thing they do is what can i do to reclaim my assets and some of them i've actually this is not funny but it you know i've watched them go on twitter and like tag like at metamask like you know my items were stolen and can you help me and you know then the the bots you know and the scams like reply and in the twitter thread um but we are so used to being able to go to institutions for support and for help when these you know when when assets have been stolen and that is not available to us in this decentralized self-sovereign world and so i think we have to think about like what is the sort of web 3 version of fdic or some sort of you know uh arm that helps um in these moments is there a world that we can you know create that is still you know the ethos of web 3 but allows for the security for an everyday person to feel like if something gets stolen i'm not just stuck on my own and these things are just completely gone i think the only thing i would add is security i think of it as from three different perspectives one is regulation just like getting more clarity having something like fdic the second is technical you know when you're building your product the features that you're adding how secure are you making it for your users so they don't have to go through like 100 different steps and then the third piece is education how do you educate because this is a new paradigm right we are used to just like calling customer service we are used to just like talking to people at that company like how do i recover my account password and that's totally a different paradigm in the crypto space where users and people need to be educated that's not how not how it works you are in control of your private key and you need to learn how to save it yeah if i could also respond to that i think there's also an opportunity there to make uh an an even more um user-friendly or uh yeah type token um yeah this is just an id and maybe there are builders out here who are interested in this idea let's call it uh whoopsie die where it's just die only then if you made a whoopsie if you accidentally yeah if your private key got hacked or or if you accidentally sent it somewhere that you didn't mean to uh that the sender within seven days uh can go to for example a clearers court or or some some else blocked blockchain type judici judicial system or some type of blockchain institution where they can like go into a dispute process i i think it could help with mass adoption i'm not sure like um if if any of the incentive structures would make sense but i think it's an interesting idea at least i think someone just registered whoopsie diet twitter right now i think that's an interesting example like we dealt with a lot of interesting governance challenges when we first launched the eos network and we had these things called ricardian contracts for each interaction with the chain you had this like idea of a court system almost and it didn't work out very well unfortunately uh the ecaf is a whole set of drama but one of the things i think we can start with is just obvious mistakes and i think that could be handled by again a user experience that's palatable we have for example a feel request where you can request funds from someone most of the financial space is requested you have money show up in your bank account randomly where like where did that come from i have no idea it's always like oh there's an order card there's an invoice there's something where you're requesting funds from someone so we've added this as a usability layer to all of crypto every chain every token in the wallets that support the protocol it's like edge wallet and shapeshift and many others so you can request not only the chain code and token code and the address the amount with an encrypted memo but it avoids like oh i sent bitcoin cash to a bitcoin address or i sent usdt on tron to a usdt on ethereum address and now i lost all my money so like simple mistakes that the interfaces could really alleviate and the on-chain protocols like this could make sure that i'm reviewing the request and similar we also have like nft signing so we're talking earlier about identities and ways that we can trust that we're interacting with the right people the artists can actually sign their nfts again with the human readable experience so this always comes back to technology should serve humans it should make someone's life better if it doesn't like kind of what's the point and unfortunately as an ng i'm kind of saying this as engineers we often build stuff that we need as engineers but they're just not very friendly so they don't improve people's lives as much as they could so i know we have till 4 30. this is like speed dating um i have one more question then we'll go to the audience um so media and celebrity as we know have so much influence on mass adoption how will media companies adopt these technologies or are you thinking about how you work with media and celebrity to tell your stories part of this do you guys remember the steam steemit blockchain and now it's the hive blockchain show of hands i'm curious anyways so i joined that in 2016 really passionate about uh media on the blockchain so this is censorship resistant immutable content which is really exciting and interesting and it was very interesting there especially because the the chain got taken over got attacked essentially it was a simple attack on the chain cz got lied to by justin sun and all kinds of drama and they used finance tokens to outvote all the bps and yeah it was it was interesting and but the conversations that that started about the idea that even our censorship resistant media on the blockchain could be attacked but then of course the the community responded created hive and all my content's safe uh i also worked with a company called roundtable media where we're looking at using blockchain technology in media so that if somebody says something you know it can't be censored if it's true or at least having good conversations so i think in terms of where everything is going and we're seeing stuff going on in canada and all this drama but your political views can be weaponized and used to attack you even financially and they're shutting down bank accounts and things like that i think there's a combination of this story is being told about blockchain and media and the tools we're using to tell those stories meaning the tools themselves are all also using blockchain media and blockchain technology i think that's important i think they go one in the same so you can support people that are maybe uh not politically accepted in their area but having an important conversation and know that their content and their funding isn't going to be taken away from them so it's a huge responsibility now as you probably know there's a bitcoin obituary of 440 something times that bitcoin died from the mainstream media they always write these big articles bitcoin's dead and well clearly not but they keep getting it wrong so i think we also need to hold accountable our media representatives and without voting down voting things you can do on the blockchain yeah and i think just generally media influencers it's the same you know with any industry any technology like they are the ones creating narratives and how do we engage them to create narratives that are more appropriate for the industry right do we want this industry to come across as a scam which it does sometimes and like how do we mitigate that but also the they are examples for other people if and artist out there has a huge following and then talks about nft helping them monetize their music or whatever they are working on i think that legitimizes the industry and that's super important but even up beyond media i think like institutions coming into this space legitimizes the space a lot um for example robin hood cash app venmo adding crypto and i know we hate institutions in the crypto space but i think those are just like entry point for a lot of people like that's just the first step and then once they see the value of crypto and this technology hopefully can they can start using the decentralized versions and applications that are out there yeah i think also uh indeed what you say the media is often uh especially at the end of the bear market like at the oh sorry at the end of the bull market uh saying all of crypto is a scam and and stuff like that and uh while they are the ones who at the start of the bull market are saying ah number go up uh number go up uh number go up uh so everyone is following uh like all these news outlets and investing due to uh that they see number go up and then oh nobody was a scam oh what do i do now yeah uh so i think there's also again on the on the allocation part uh i think a lot of a lot more people uh in crypto could could like say uh which are the scams because there are some like open scams in crypto i mean bitcoin sv i'm i hope i'm not uh saying bad bad things here but that that's like a really open scam and there are other uh really open scams in crypto uh i feel like snopes for crypto yeah yeah yeah they should have the division yeah something like that and and then there are like the gray area uh i i think i'm also not uh yeah it's also not strange if i say ripple is in the gray area even though like a lot of retail invests in ripple so yeah should we educate them uh i think so but yeah who's doing it i i don't see anyone also not myself by the way but yeah the last thing i would say is i think we haven't found the killer application for mass adoption yet and that's fine i think we are still in the early stages of building this technology and applications there are various use cases but a lot of them still tend towards either speculation trading or raising money and i would love to you know work with everyone in the industry to identify use cases that really resonate with everyday users quick quick example of that i was at the mag conference in atlanta earlier this week that it's the merchant advisory group and there's just like 67 of all the transactions go through this group of people with their technologies like bank of america and jp morgan stuff like that and there was one session on crypto and about half the room raised their hand for owning crypto which i was really surprised about i was like wow that's pretty pretty incredible these are kind of an old guard people but they're into crypto and then they said how many of you have used crypto to buy something i was like crickets like almost no hands going up and i thought that was kind of funny because we're trying to make transacting with crypto easier and it's a little too early nobody cares yeah that's interesting all right let's go to questions we have yes you oh wait mike here one of the mics since we are live streaming on twitch i believe hi twitch hi everyone um i think one of the more fundamental problems with crypto uh that like the ordinary people are going to complain about like my own family um when i explain to them what the blockchain is and i explain to them all the transactions are on the blockchain they freak out because now you know if you're buying an nft it's no big deal but if i'm buying my groceries or i'm buying a birth control or i'm buying all of these things that i want to keep private and it's public right like that's that's one fundamental thing that we don't even think about that people's expectations of my money the things that i buy is going to be private um ironically i think there's actually an opportunity for traditional banks to be intermediaries but then it's money laundering in a way but it's they need to figure it out but i think there's a there's a um an opportunity there um and the the other thing is that one of the reasons why we don't buy anything is because frankly the gas fees are so high like it it like you know i had trying to convince someone to buy a dot ether dress for five dollars and then you have to spend 70 on gas fees like that like we we talk about third world we talk about you know unbanked and like but you know moving one penny from one address to another right like so we really d desperately need to figure this stuff out technically and you know this is the reason why it doesn't even make sense to move things cheaper than a thousand dollars on on the main blockchain much less you know and there's there's second you know um you know second layers and all of that stuff but those are i think those are the kind of fundamental uh problems is that there's there isn't privacy and um it's very expensive so i don't know if you have any answers about that because people are going to be on other going on other blockchains if that's the case right i know we're at ethereum conference but um does that like were you other people adopting i mean at this point it's so mainstream but like what does ethereum do to solve this or what do developers do anyone no i think frank kind of touched on it earlier with the example from you know tesla meaning it's going to be difficult and that's just early like the internet was early in the 90s very difficult to use and it got better over time but i personally don't like that answer as much because i want it to be easy now there are people in africa and stuff for a whole village needs one phone to be a bank for the whole and that's why i got it is money for the unbanked but now it's kind of rich person's only club right so we're getting there i think there's l2s i think dag is interesting directed acyclic graph there's a project called waterfall that foundation's interesting exploring that we can be an evm that's a dag so it might not even be blockchain might be post blockchain tech that solves this but ultimately you know if it's cheap and fast uh you're sacrificing decentralization or something else so it's a very difficult problem with the solvent as far as the privacy i think there are many chains monero and others that are doing privacy there's even some l2s that are using zero knowledge proofs to actually have your d5 be private so it's getting there as well but i think most people don't realize how not private everything they're doing right now is anyway every single credit card statement is breaking down do exact categories of what you're spending it on and and often cases not even de-anonymize which crypto at least is awesome we have time for one more quick question yeah one thing i would add is maybe not everything needs to happen with one coin or cryptocurrency right like ethereum might be a use case for non-private transactions and then there is another cryptocurrency that you use for private transactions and another one for smaller payments so that you you don't have to pay hundreds of dollars in gas fees i am getting really bullish on like multi-chain ecosystem where each ecosystem focuses on a use case and a niche and i don't think you know one thing solves all our winner takes all um is the right way to go all right one more quick question uh i have a question um do you one of inherent properties of blockchain and like whole the whole culture is openness to create anything and therefore also as comes and therefore don't you think that uh because of this like blockchain uh is inherently hard because you do not need to do your own research and therefore it it is kind of dumped to be niche have answers to that i'll get a little more esoteric answer is that you can think we're in like a consciousness training simulator and being your own bank takes personal responsibility and people have to level up their consciousness in order to do that and at the same time we want to make it easier so i think it's both so isn't inherently difficult yes some people even call that a feature because it keeps old money out so we get to create new money without them joining in and taking it all so there's a lot of different ways to think about it but i actually do think it's a it's essentially a proxy for us becoming more personally responsible and our finances and the way we think about things instead of trusting mommy and daddy government and trusting some central authority to make up for all our mistakes we actually can take personal responsibility and a blockchain is a tool for that it's a it's a global non-violent tool for consensus and so that's what a blockchain is it's a beautiful thing but it requires us to take a lot of personal responsibility because it's very powerful yeah i think it's an interesting point but i think also on the question i think also uh this happened with the with the internet and uh with the switch from http to https uh with the the signing of certificates now like uh all the banks have have indicators uh when you're doing transactions like are you on the actual website double check it uh in in the address bar and maybe we need need something like that but but a little more advanced in crypto as well where where you're indeed yeah validated uh where everything is validated that you are on the right website that you are transacting with the person you are thinking that you are transacting with so yeah i think there are uh uh we we've just in half an hour had tons of stuff that we need to work on uh so uh i guess unfortunately we're out of time uh thank you guys that was amazing we're gonna thank you we're gonna do a quick