Bridging the Metaverse and Meatspace - Kristen Stone

so i'm obviously very excited to be here thank you all for coming i don't really have any slides so we'll just say what i have to say and then we'll have a little bit of a guest q a with what time we have left so for the last year it has been my privilege to get to support the balancer community i've been able to watch it grow and evolve and the passion for this project for this space and actually the passion that our team and our community has for each other is what's been the most incredible my role is as the co and so while i support our organization in helping them manage day-to-day my passion is actually in supporting our community and making sure that they have the structure to be the most efficient and effective that they want every day all right we're going to test if you can hear me out there how many of you are part of a dow and by dow i mean like you're in a discord voted on a forum where you voted on a governance proposal you're on a forum all right good and how many of you have been part of a traditional organization those things with like hierarchies and incorporations and stuff awesome all right often when people talk about this when they talk about centralization and decentralization when they talk about being part of a hierarchical organization or a decentralized community when they think about structuring a community they set it up as this polarity right and they say how do we either be decentralized or centralized how can we be one or the other and really what we should be talking about is how we can be both and and this is something i've been thinking about for the last eight months the trade-offs between centralization and decentralization and how to build an ecosystem that can facilitate both if you've read jesse walden's post that's titled progressive decentralization it showed us that this is a spectrum on one end is centralization and on the other is decentralization we know centralization offers efficiency and the decentralization offers anti-fragility but i don't really want progressive decentralization right i want to have both centralization and decentralization i want to have both efficiency and anti-fragility and the reason i want that is because it's the maximum way we can serve our communities it's not and i was just talking about this backstage it's actually not really safe to be in a space that has no rules and no structure it's fun but if you have this space where you don't know what the rule set is and you don't know how to engage it's actually pretty terrifying and i think a lot of the women on our team and a lot of women i hear that they're like i want to join a dao but i don't understand how to get involved yeah because there's no structure and there's no rules and there's no safety so we want to be able to combine the centuries of experience we have in centralization with the anti-fragility of decentralization if we were to only optimize for efficiency we would create hierarchy and central authority which is of course subject to a single point of failure to corruption and to incentivized abuse of the community and listen we're all in this this industry i don't need to convince you that decentralization is important but if we only optimize for anti-fragility if we only optimized for decentralization we'd also underserve our community we suffer because there's a lack of general efficiency allocation of resources timely decision making those are all compromised any of you experienced that challenged to make decisions endows in decentralized organizations yeah so if the premise that it's necessary to optimize for both efficiency and anti-fragility is true we have to ask how we can actually accomplish that how can we bridge centralization and decentralization how can we bring together the meat space our physical world the one that we all live in every day and the metaverse which is our incredibly creative digital world and what the balancer community is doing that i am incredibly excited about is that they're beginning to form ecological collectives which are these interconnected group of non-affiliated centralized entities that support a broader decentralized system all right let's say that again it's an interconnective group of non-affiliated centralized entities that support a broader decentralized system so we can have both and and the ecological collectives made up of four groups a participating community a foundation service providers and protocol developers the participating community is the ultimate decision maker it essentially constitutes the community that is to be served generally we all call this a dao right our participating community they're up at the top and then under that you've got the foundation and the foundation generally acts as the agent of the dao it's at the dao's direction it facilitates the dao's connection to existing centralized structures and many many teams have this right it lets them sign contracts it lets them interact with any other centralized entities and then we get into the cool parts service providers and these are groups of people who organize into central entities that are capable of efficiently executing tasks that support the protocol so at the direction of the dow which directs the foundation the foundation can engage service providers of all types to apply their expertise for the project usually entails supporting operational efficiency of the protocol in the future can be a lot of other things like growing the community or providing new product market fit on top or even combining different communities together and then the fourth group in this ecological collective is the protocol is the protocol developers some of the most critical people they're open source software developers that are interested in furthering the development of the protocol and this group is generally best served by not being distracted with anything else and they don't really enjoy being too distracted by other things as we all know some software engineers so in this ecological collective what happens is that the service providers become centralized entities that can move quickly and execute but they have no decision making power it's pretty critical the community is the one that makes the decisions and should any of these meet space entities these ones that exist in our physical world should they become a bad actor the community can choose to remove them or replace them or change them and then we get this important competitive environment where the best things flourish ultimately there's no central point it's the community that's comprised of tens of thousands of people coordinating on the internet all over the world they are the decider the entities are at the direction of the community and they get the chance to efficiently execute and what it creates is this epic self-sustaining ecological collection what a good word ecological collection and the dow can direct the foundation to hire as many service providers as it needs which lets us actually recruit a lot more people into the space because we say hey here's a group of people they provide a certain service and a function they get this opportunity to work for a foundation and now the service providers can support multiple communities with their specific expertise and they're going to do it inside a structure that they understand it's just one way that ecological collectives can form but what's fascinating at least for me to see is that these collectives are actually forming we've talked about dows for years and we didn't know what that meant or what that was going to become and i have been waiting for this moment for eight years maybe like three years since we started talking about dows but since i've been in the industry i've been waiting to figure out how we can build a structure that gives people safety and security and continues to offer the anti-fragility that we're all here for so as we continue to see growth in our industry and innovate not only in the technology side but also with these systems that we use for organizing humans and communities my expectation and hope is that balancers exploration and all the things that the incredible team sitting over on the right and up in the middle is working on that this will be the first of many iterations in our pursuit of harmonizing decentralization and centralization thank you tyler how much time we got how much time we got left five minutes you just made that up i'm just kidding do you have mike can we get one oh thanks maggie so in the last couple minutes although i didn't think that would take so long so hello this is joshua hi everyone i'm joshua rivera i'm the general counsel at blockchain capital uh we invested in the balancer ecosystem um chris and i have spent many hours on zoom trying to talk about this concept of ecological collective and so yeah before each of you asked me afterwards yes we coordinate our outfits we telegram message last night it happened we wanted to look cool on stage so no questions of that please um but what i what i what i really i i want people to understand kind of the like how big of a moment this is because so i i'm a lawyer and i apologize ahead of time for that like if you guys just want to tune me out it's fine i totally get it happens most of the time during my day but but from a legal perspective there are rules and requirements for entities that create structure around organizations and that's what has made dao so difficult right because in in in commerce we want to encourage uh corporate systems right and so we've created rules for that right we've created c corps and llc's all right these rules allow people to take risks right without putting certain you know personal things at risk right that allows people to experiment right but we don't have that type of structure for what we're building in the metaverse right for what we're doing in daos um and so this whole effort is really how do we kind of leverage as kristen said centuries of figuring out how to organize formally right uh how do we leverage that that knowledge and utilize it in order to make our metaverses our dows better um and so i i'm really excited to see how this kind of continues to grow um one thing that i'd love to hear is you know you talk about serving the community right we need both decentralization and centralization how have you seen that play out with the balancer community like how have the core devs been served how has the community been served right um how has that balance of things no pun intended sorry but how is that how has that actually allowed you to see greater efficiency but also greater protections uh for people participating ooh interesting i feel like that's not one of the questions you said that's not no it's a curveball yeah sweet um so but i trust you i know so first i'll comment on one of the things she said and there we all wake up every day in the real world and there are real rules that exist in our real world that we have to follow and there's important protections and liability protections that exist inside centralized entities that allow for risk-taking so centralization has so many pieces it's not all it's not just efficiency but it also is efficiency from the sake of um rules and being able to wake up in the physical world every day so to your question how has everyone been served and this is actually our last question we don't have a lot of time but you can come see us sometimes we sit around and talk about stuff like this um you want to just gather somewhere we talk about stuff all the time too much so yeah you know what i'm reminded of is that one of our community members and our last community call with some of the the more engaged community members sits back and he goes so we're like um our dow just really got started it was flourished it's been flourishing and booming and we have a ton of our engaged community members who came here to participate it's incredible in the last call he sits back and he's like working in a dow has really made me bearish on this [Laughter] because it's true it's hard and so the way that people are are becoming served by this is that they're seeing the structure and they're understanding their role in the broader structure right so the protocol developers are served because their role is not to get inside the community and to make decisions and to vote like they do and can participate in all those things but they have a very specific role that provides a very specific value so they don't have to be in all these thousands of channels that exist everywhere right and some people's role that is what they do because it is what they love so i think individually every person is served and growing and then every group is served by being able to focus in a world that is full of noise on what they can do to provide the most value that's a great answer thanks good job and then we'll leave it there is there anything else to say no great to see everyone uh great work to you and the balancer team very excited about what you guys are building if you see us anywhere just uh come hang out [Applause]