Is Blockchain the Future of Technology? Andrew Chow, Zoe Gadsden, Sam Kazemanian and more...

what's up guys what's up alrighty a lot hey guys um my name is andrew chow i'm a reporter at time magazine and this panel is entitled is blockchain the future of technology which is an incredibly incredibly wide topic um we could probably spend should we just say yes and yeah i think yeah we're done um but we're gonna go in and out of a couple different areas of this um and i just wanted to introduce my panelists so starting from the end this is eva bailin she is the director of the graph foundation hey eva how's it going we've got rick burton the ceo at balance in ios wallet for eth yup thanks a lot sam kasamanian the founder of the stablecoin frax and also everpedia and we've got ilya um the co-founder of near hello hello um thank you so much guys for joining me for this um so i first i wanted to talk about um sort of the bridge between web 2 and web 3. and we've got a former googler on stage ilya you came from google rick you also worked in silicon valley and i know from talking to a lot of people around this conference there are a lot of people who are coming from this sort of web to web 2 companies so i just want to start with you ilya i was working in silicon valley and why did you make the leap over that's a deep question but let's start unpacking it i think the [Music] kind of general first of all i would say silicon valley and google is also somewhat different right because at this point google is like you know not not a startup for already like 15 years and so a lot of it is like we have this big companies that are internally trying to build everything right they're trying to build the universe they you know if if you thinking of a project somebody probably at google is building it and so from my perspective coming from doing open source coming from doing a lot of kind of more i would say like smaller projects with smaller teams it's just way too like compressed and so kind of looking at crypto where it's a lot more community it's a lot more collaboration it's a lot more not about like this specific company or that company but like protocols that you contributing to that's way closer in the in in the kind of way you approach things and even when we're doing kind of ai startup in silicon valley we were trying to work like that we worked with berkeley we worked with google we worked with microsoft because we wanted to be kind of and we open sourced almost all of our code uh and a lot of our data to really build kind of a platform and and uh and kind of community around that and so i think like for me at least on one side i think the startup community that was built in silicon valley is pretty unique in the world but at the same time what crypto is end up building is kind of you know really pushing it further and kind of bringing a lot of this open source mentality as well as some of the startup mentality and kind of bridging that gap that exists in silicon valley to really you know build this amazing community rick can you tell me about your journey from web 2 to web 3 yeah i mean um i think that if you're a technologist or you're interested in technology at all there's four ways you can get paid right it's either fiat currency like dollars you can get stock from a large tech company like google or facebook and just sell your soul to a retirement farm that's trying to get you to not join a startup you can earn stock options which seem like a good deal until you leave and then you have to pay tax on the gains of something that you have no cash for so that's how startups have you wrapped up forever and then there's tokens which can kind of get you everything from buying a region of a city which one of my friends did and getting put in jail which one of my enemies did so like the variance of tokens as a compensation metric is just so much larger than dollars so much larger than stock and so much larger than stock options and you can have everything from a seriously unfair token compensation package to one that can literally change your life in 18 months and i think that we have to be honest about this is that that what's happening here is is a is innovation is downstream of compensation a lot of people don't understand silicon valley history but my reading of it is it's the first place where the employees got a sniff of the upside right and that's why suddenly everybody started working way harder they're not actually better than any other humans in the world it's just they've got the upside and so i think crypto protocols dows daps projects and tokenized systems literally not only do they get the investors involved not only do they get the employees involved but they get the users and the customers and the participants and the people who use these systems some of the upside so i think that that's the big transition it's a gigantic compensation competition if you want to hire engineers and we are starting to win [Applause] eva i'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about the processes of developing technology or funding technology um from web 2 to web 3 and what makes sort of the development of tech different yeah sort of echoing what rick said you know tokens allow many people or shareholders or stakeholders to align around one mission without being part of the same organization so for example in the graph ecosystem we started with one core developer team and now we're at five um and that's just in one year and these are separate organizations separate entities but they're all aligned around our mission to build this decentralized protocol and you can't do that in web too you know the only people who care about your stock are either you know the people who are holding it or the people in the company with web3 protocols anyone can participate and contribute so even the staking you know the utility of that token is contributing to that network and we don't have many opportunities like that in web 2. and one concrete example there is i believe there's a graph curator who couldn't get a job during the pandemic because he was disabled and couldn't move to certain places to interview and he's been curating data for the graph earning grt from the system and making a fantastic living and that's just one of the many examples i've seen in the graphs discord and i've been involved in the project as well but i think that's exciting because token compensation whether it's from a protocol a dao adapt or any kind of new system that lives on ethereum or similar blockchains is a game changer compared to stock options given that web 3 defines itself almost in opposition to web 2 so often i'm just wondering if it isn't ironic that there are so many familiar faces or people who have come out of silicon valley and into these new protocols i mean i don't think it's ironic it's it's kind of it's a pretty much a combination of people like continue learning and figuring out the way to better organize and better compensate and better to kind of build this new world right i think like exactly the reason why silicon valley was built is because it was a better way to kind of build things and it had a you know huge attraction right for example for me to go there because anywhere else in the world you didn't have those opportunities and now we have kind of the next evolution right that is happening that is you know already here and so people who are kind of driven by kind of building better world you know however courtney that can sound right are also driven to move into this direction as well and so there's like so much leverage and opportunity you can build when you can align all those people to work together and at the same time you can you know i'm from ukraine actually delivering value to people in ukraine who you know like grieving is all over the place right like local currencies not working a lot of kind of instability happening right now but even beyond that you know we have philippines you have indonesia all those places which like are kind of starving for opportunities and are not able to move to silicon valley right to get the same access like now they're able to right we have a near crowd platform for example uh where like two three thousand people every day kind of doing data labeling pretty much is you which is used for ai and machine learning on the other side in some web 2 companies but they are kind of able to receive you know tokens in the platform and able to make good living from that so kind of creating those new economic vehicles is is so powerful and so people are drawn to that because that allows them to you know kind of bring the things they want to build into this into this world yeah i mean i do think you're raising a really important point that the financing agreements that many of these projects are entering into are exactly the same ones that got us into the situation we're in now so i think ethereum had this wonderful moment where about 10 000 nerds funded it on a blog post uh with bitcoin and then we swung way too far the other way with the kind of ico area where it was just all hype no delivery a bunch of people who could barely balance their checkbook raising 10 20 50 100 million and even more and just absolute morons left right and center shilling projects that could never exist and now we've kind of swung back the other way where we're having these incredibly valuable projects that are getting set up with two three private rounds of funding and and these investors and i've seen it they write emails to terrify the founders and say oh you've got to worry about regulation at this series you never know where it's going to go but as soon as there's a sniff of a liquidity event or some kind of liquidity mining or some kind of token they're right behind it and so as a result we now have dozens of projects going out the door uh multi-billion valuations where the regular investor is just getting absolutely hatcheted to death because these investors are lying to everyone and it's terrible so i do think we're seeing some of the similar faces using the similar tactics of wrapping up the series the seed round wrapping up the series a and then they're getting liquidity within six to eighteen months they're tweeting one thing and dumping another thing on chain and it drives me insane so what i'm looking for is more founders to have a little bit more regulatory bravery and to start to do things that are sailing closer to the wind but with sensible valuations and finding ways to identify not just people with money but people with time to give people with ideas people with work to give you know you shouldn't just have to be a massive staker or a huge miner to earn tokens from these systems you should be able to contribute with your mind but the most important thing is if the valuation goes out the door to the public at hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and then it collapses everybody feels like [ __ ] like vitalik started ethereum off at 33 cents an east and now it's risen all the way up and that's number go up is the best [ __ ] marketing tactic in the world let me tell you that vitalik's a genius and we need more of that for stuff that people can get into now and so that's why i would caution founders is don't listen to these investors who terrify you about regulatory issues they're full of [ __ ] if you do sensible rounds of sensible valuations and try and bring in your community then you can actually start to reward your community and bring them along with you so that's that's brilliantly said and i actually wanted to just say i look at things from the angle of stable point so i i found it fracs fracs is famous for two things one an algorithmic dollar peg stable coin and two one of the first stable coins packed to cpi which is the consumer price index and on that line i think it's interesting to watch the evolution of stable coins and how people can actually invest in these things for example who's invested here in tether or usdc no one right because you can't actually own stock in biff oh we've got a we've got a bitfinex shareholder maybe there we go but no one else okay so the the main thing here is like as more and more stable coins and projects become decentralized as more and more of them are not afraid of regulation and actually want to distribute out their tokens and distribute ownership like fracks like fey with the tribe token like all of these other stable stablecoin projects like maker you can actually own the piece of the decentralized central bank of of the ecosystem right one of the main things is we only basically work uh at fracks in the stablecoin space and one thing we're really really really interested in and it's important for us is to make the distribution and ownership of essentially what we like to call the money printer as wide and distributed as possible so that the governance belongs to devs and people using it and not just basically the the private vc ownership cool i want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the metaverse um which is totally a way for me to self-shill because i run a newsletter called into the metaverse at time which you can subscribe to for free but if you ask some of the builders of the metaverse right now like mark zuckerberg or others they'll tell you that the future of technology is not the blockchain it's it's immersive worlds it's ar it's vr it's haptic gloves it's all sort of you know technology wearable tech and i'm wondering if what you guys think of that and if there's a way to integrate some of that tech into the blockchain or if they're opposed or yeah what do you think of that so my definition of adap regardless of if it's the metaverse is it needs to be open permissionless decentralized and you have the right to exit meaning you're not being locked in by a platform and when it comes to the metaverse you know that means that the infrastructure the metaverse is built on needs to be decentralized so when you know companies like meta come out it's unclear if they're actually achieving the vision or if they're just rebranding for their own bags but you know more creatively what the metaverse i think enables is for us to have a digital afterlife so where we created you know social media and web too like instagram you know twitter and that captures a lot of our thoughts and images and whatnot you know they're stored on centralized servers but when you think about an afterlife you know your legend or your your um you know what lives on after you're gone you know the metaverse given that everything is permanent on chain and you know people can interact with it it kind of enables us to live on beyond our physical body so that's how i kind of view it i hate the term metaverse it comes from a [ __ ] who's got a haircut that looks like a rolled up foreskin on the top of his head okay mark zuckerberg has never created a product in his life he steals ideas or buys them and this is the first project that has his stench all over it now i accidentally created what someone my kind of metaverse project a few months ago i thought it'd be fun to send three kids to um an ethereum event so they can go experience this and then it just spiraled my dms got absolutely melted and we ended up sending with a bunch of wonderful contributors and a bunch of wonderful helpers we sent kids all over the world to go and experience events like this who couldn't afford it otherwise that's the real world and having fun so [ __ ] the metaverse let's get people paid let's get them so they'll have to worry about next month's rent let's get them out of their [ __ ] parents basements let's get them on flights around conferences let's get them building cool [ __ ] let's i'm having fun and looking people in the eye and falling in love and going away to a forest and all that [ __ ] [ __ ] putting goggles on your eyes [ __ ] mark zuckerberg and [ __ ] the horse he rode in on [Applause] it's hard to follow that so from my perspective we are living in metaverse already like every single person here has a phone with them which has most of their life actually in that device somewhere in the cloud and somewhere kind of shared with all the other people in this in this ecosystem like we are from my perspective we are already kind of living more in our digital life than in our physical and yes we should be doing more physical and obviously past two years have not able to like for many of us have not made uh us able to do that uh at least for me i've spent i don't know probably 10 hours on zoom every day but like in general you know our life is kind of already digital to many ways like for me the definition of you know being in metaverse is when more than 50 of your you know assets of your communications of your friendships of your thing are digital and we are there already and like 3d glasses 2d vr whatever doesn't really matter as much as like this you know connection to the build with people and the the things we're doing in this kind of very rich environment and like yeah i mean there will be a bunch of 3d staff will you know the games will be built like all those things will come but at the same time it's like we are already here like let's keep let's keep building like productive stuff and let's uh yes let's enable more people but it always feels if you read bill gates books around the information superhighway and you watch him stand on stage talking about how you know the internet is going to affect our lives he was so directionally correct but execution wrong he obsessed over the browser when the value was google and i see mark zuckerberg doing the exact same thing he's obsessed about the medium but not understanding the culture he's obsessed about putting goggles on your face but doesn't want to know what it's like for somebody to be able to afford three months rent like he's so removed from reality and i am certain that man has never experienced love in his life and he has no soul and that is why the people apple hate him and they're trying to make sure he doesn't slap goggles on your face and win but that all aside i think that we are living in this crazy three-dimensional bubble where we all come together and debate ideas and get to go out in the world and we get to do that because we got early access to technology that we have to give to more people so i think instead of debating the overlap of blockchain and metaverse we should just keep focusing on one thing can we make some of this [ __ ] work on your phone because today it barely does like we've got these [ __ ] metaverse devices you can slap in front of your face right now but most of the transactions that can really make you a profit you need to construct them on a desktop computer and that has to change [Applause] what aspect of blockchain technology or nascent block chain technology coming in the next year or two most excites you at the moment so for me right now i see the biggest gap is actually is that people are afraid of holding their seat phrase of using applications and contracts because this stuff is technical it's not secure there's drug pools hacks you know all kinds of stuff going on and actually like regulators and hold that space is not helping because they're driving people to be anonymous and so you actually have even less clarity what's going on with your applications and contracts and all those things and so i'm excited about actually addressing that problem with products he's able to you know machine learning with all the tools we actually have already to really deliver kind of a safe experience to the users who don't know anything about crypto who don't know what seed phrases are or if we just want to sign up and start using apps who want to save money we want to buy some stable coins to put them into some kind of lending market and at the same time know that this lending market is not going to steal their money right like kind of surfacing the audit surfacing the potential threats cert like understanding if there's anomalies in the activity on chain and actually preventing users from being kind of attacked by the systems yeah i think the most interesting technology in the next two or three years is people being able to save on the blockchain instead of in their bank accounts right exactly as it was said people being able to actually earn good yield on their dollar denominate stable coins or any kind of stable coins that they want to do because you know that the bank is scamming you you know what i mean when you actually put money in the bank and they give you 0.05 interest you know for a fact they're making much more than that because they're in business they're they're not making 0.05 interest on your deposits right they're they're basically rugging you right and the most important thing is in the next two to three years they were excited about it fracks other projects like faye and rari that was on the panel before me is exactly stable coin yield stable coin lending people moving their actual savings accounts and and safely moving their dollar denominated savings on chain being able to earn actual living yield that's actually important to them and not just a rounding error and getting completely scammed by banks which is literally exactly what's going on right now i would add so ripping off yield traditionally we've thought of yield as like d5 degeneracy but we're starting to see staking come to life and i don't think staking has had its heyday so we have ease 2 coming up and we've got all you know other protocols like the graph where you can use a utility token but to me this is really the like 0 to 100 moment because even if you hold a stock you can't do anything with it if you hold the us dollar you can't do anything with it but with a token you can stake the token you're contributing to the consensus and security of the protocol and you earn more of the token it's fundamentally a different way of you know contributing and also making income and i think we're going to see a lot of people start dedicating their full-time job to just staking across protocols that they believe in and that's how we you know can actually change that inequality we've been talking about yeah so i've been um thinking about how to design a good mobile wallet on and off for five years the previous iteration of balance we ended up building uh wallet connect because it was the only way that we could figure out how to get an app that contained your private keys to talk to a browser and and this was a kind of hack that we we got done to create this communication layer but three months ago or four months ago apple released something called safari ios extensions and to me apple is like this gleaning citadel in the sky of perfection that has a lot of really weird stuff going on inside it but they laid down the drawbridge for the ethereum community with this extensions api because what it allows us to do is create wallets that are extensions to safari that allow developers to build tools with the number one mobile browser in the world like almost 70 percent of mobile traffic in the us is on safari on ios and that's because people are really active so we're we're really going after this as hard and as fast as possible at balance and i think this is really exciting because i think every wallet should have an extension because then it incentivizes dap developers to adapt their dap for mobile and that means that we are going to reduce the cost to access ethereum by tenfold you don't need a laptop you don't need a ledger you just need an iphone and it will work with 99 adapts by the end of this year i think um and that's that's a huge innovation so we're really excited about that we're really excited to see all the wallets do something in that space and we just want to make it easier for dap developers to put this stuff on our phones cool well one of the really cool aspects of blockchain technology is how modular it is and people keep using here keep using the metaphor of like lego blocks like building blocks on top of each other so i'm wondering all four of you guys have like very cool products and protocols you're working on and i'm wondering if you can talk about how there might be overlap and building blocks on each of them and i know that already there's a connection between near and the graph i think so yeah i mean everything is building on top of each other so you know uh balance could use a subgraph you know maybe balance is connected to near so we have a near subgraph and maybe frax is on near or whatever chain and basically all of our protocols can collaborate and that's really the cool thing or really the definition of web 3 is like how open source is it how permissionless is it can people really switch on and off whatever layer of the stack they want allowing that sort of agnostic view that you know we as builders aren't deciding for the developer what they should build on but enabling them to choose for themselves yeah and there's an interesting story how i became affiliated with the graph where uh the engineers came to me and they said richard we can't figure out token balances and i said that's somewhat problematic because the brand name is balance so and we realized that there is no way to actually count token balances without stepping through every single state transition on every single block for every single token for the entirety of the ethereum blockchain and then reverse engineering it to give you the wallet outlook and so this is why you have to still manually add tokens and why um if you go into xerion or zapper there's differences is that your balance is some kind of mirage out there that you're trying to figure out and so i think it's really interesting that you have a decentralized protocol but these incredible points of centralization both around who can see the protocol clearly and then also who can actually construct a transaction and broadcast it to that protocol quickly so if you actually look under the hood between the wallet and ethereum there are these massive points of centralization and that's what the whole graph's mission is is to at least take the query layer and not let get that sucked up into a single company which is exactly what happened with google because you have the web right but the index of the web is infinitely larger you can slice it in so many ways and what might not be apparent to people who aren't engineers and certainly wasn't apparent to me is that you have ethereum which is several kind of tens of gigabytes but then you have um the index of ethereum which can be terabytes and terabytes and terabytes depending on whether you slice it by stable coins or nfts or derivatives or ens names and and so these building blocks are fascinating but also understanding who controls them and the points of centralization that aren't at the visible layer is very important yeah that was really well said in fact expanding on that point frax is one of the most prolific users and integrators of many many many blockchain products we're not only on 12 different blockchains natively we use alchemy we use the graph we use inferior we use probably so many things and compared to the average project just because we want to be prolific and everywhere and what's actually amazing as rick was saying is we don't need anyone's permission to do that right we literally don't need anyone's permission to natively issue fracks there we don't need that we don't need his permission to use his wallet you know we don't need anything in terms of any kind of user agreements or anything like that if we wanted to get on paypal right if we wanted people to be able to send and receive payments with frax on paypal we can't do that right it is a completely closed off system is completely guarded and they can kick us out at any time and at any place and the beautiful thing and the reason web3 is growing many many magnitudes faster than anything web2 ever did is we don't need anyone's permission to build on top and use anything else and that's the beauty of composability and one last thing i want to highlight is that the wallet layer is one of the most contentious parts because very few of them are actually truly open source and and to stick with that open source ethos is really hard right when my entire team told me to jog on and started rainbow that was a real testing of my principles but my principles were you were free to do so and you were all free to leave and fork me and the same is true for this version of balance if my entire team disagree with me they should fork me if anybody has a better idea how about to do a wallet just don't use our brand just fork off in a different direction and and i think that if you study history we've benefited from hard people who didn't make as much money as bill gates but they had way more impact because they open sourced their work they shared it with the people and they allowed differing opinions to fork off with one click and that's what i really hope can percolate up from the protocol layer and the infrastructure layer we've got examples of that now and now the wallet layer we need a rich ecosystem of collaboration of forking of of merging and re-merging and different brands existing and different takes on what a wallet is because it's not that everybody is going to build their own wallet and run it on their own device but i'd like to know that someone can and i think that you should really pay attention to to what tools you're using to construct your transactions over the years and they should be more like ethereum which is community built open source and community funded yeah in general for me the definition of web three is low switching costs decentralization open source all of this is what powers it right it's an instrument we use to achieve low switching costs and like even if you think like the block production the whole point is there's a central servers that actually produce blocks but that is like each one of them can disappear and it doesn't matter which one you send transaction to there's always things happening and similar like on every single layer we want to have you know enough different options for middleware that people can switch we want to have enough options for wallets to build and switch we want to have enough options for languages so people can switch we want to have enough options for even stable coins and and this at every level allows us to kind of keep innovating because this actually keeps us on our toes to keep making the best product and that that's what incentivizes us to do better right we've had open source but we've never had open state right you can you can have an open source ui to some product but if the data of your friendship group is hidden away and that state is kind of buried away in a server of a company that just precludes developers from having different opinions and and to the extent that blockchains are the future of technology i think it's shifting the world into state we can all agree on and that developers know they can rely on i think uh we've hit our time limit here but thank you so much to all of you for this awesome and fiery conversation so thank you so much guys thank you