Funding the Commons | Closing Remarks

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey can you see me i think so yes i'll be sharing my screen okay can you confirm that you can see that you can see it great thank you very much today was a phenomenal day um i am filled with a ton of optimism for the future of public goods funding um we have heard from fantastic set of speakers uh about many different kinds of projects and mechanisms and tools for um how to do goods funding um and so i wanted to just kind of leave you with a set of ideas uh for the future and and then kind of think about uh a little bit of what what's next uh so we we talked about public goods the whole day and we um talked about many mechanisms for how to um uh get more of them to exist and how to reward groups and participants for um for creating them and and we talked about um and so i wanted to kind of touch a little bit on why i think crypto presents an extremely optimistic potential for um for actually having an impact on public goods funding so of course public some being funded by um many uh groups and organizations throughout history uh especially governments at you know with massive um funding scales uh but it it looks like uh crypto networks uh might actually be able to start reaching the level of funding that some nature states uh have provided so as a good example uh for this it's useful to think about kind of like the the r d budgets of of nation states and so um this is roughly kind of like the the distribution um of uh r d spending um across different nations uh across the world in in 2020 uh you can see also uh there's an amazing graph of this uh that shows it animated and kind of like you can see this this changing over time it's a fascinating really really useful thing to look at uh i'm especially partial to science funding because i think science is one of the most important and valuable uh public funding most important valuable uh public goods in a sense um and we talked earlier about uh how the innovation chasm is uh holding back uh tons of the science uh discoveries from having significant impact in the world uh but here's here's a sense of like the the funding scale um that just you know one of one of the bubbles here uh spends on uh you know non-defense funding so it's really useful to kind of separate non-defense funding because that defense funding ends up being um kind of about as big as this whole um this whole stack uh so a lot of the the us's uh focus on um scientific funding came out of um so afterward after world war ii and one of the seminal works in kicking uh starting all of this was van over bush's uh the endless frontier and this was venomous bush had led one of the agencies that had um overseen the all of the r d work during the war effort and so he presented this this kind of pitch for the u.s turn now turning uh towards scientific funding um and the science has the endless one tier meaning um channel all of the energy and efforts uh that the entire kind of industrial might of the of the us um during the word uh had mobilized and now channel all of that sorts um you know super strong uh uh set of discoveries in public funding sorry in in basic research and and doing all kinds of r d uh throughout the the um the landscape and this uh pitch uh ended up turning into um exceeding the the formation of the nsf and many other agencies um in in history and so you can see here like the graph when the us sort of became um super committed into uh to driving kind of a lot of this um uh r d funding and of course this this doesn't look at defense so defense was actually a very large portion of this because uh some of the r d was going into defense funding at the time uh but if you look at the the um amounts of money uh and this is kind of in billions of constant um this is in billions of of 20 20 that's adjusted for inflation um this this amount of money is actually within the realm of possibility for um crypto networks uh uh in the future so if we consider crypto networks and their value increasing but just two orders minute or three years of magnitude uh which is sounds like a a ton like that that is a lot fearsome actually there's an enormous amount for um kind of an industry that's in the trillions now uh but if we think about kind of all of the forms of value that is transacted through through assets that could eventually be transacted through crypto uh things like um real estate and derivatives and all kinds of other you know structures like that uh then will crypto networks might actually start commanding the level of capital um comparable with with top nation states so right now already crypto networks are larger than many nation states in terms of economic size and so eventually these scriptures networks might actually be able to fund entities and agencies at the scale of nation states and so so that's an extremely um uh both amazing and kind of very promising feat because it means that if we can get the mechanisms right now if we can prototype a lot of these these structures and we can figure out how to do it well then as crypto networks continue uh rewiring the economy we can end up with with a massive amount of um funding for for public goods you know in the long term so a lot of the experiments that that our communities are running now and with kind of sizable amounts but um objectively small amounts relative to the to the rest of the world um these might actually form the the the structures or will inspire the structures that might end up um organizing vast amounts of resources uh to do all kinds of of um long-term r d and um public goods funding in a larger scale so um if you uh saw that what you were doing if you already thought what you were doing is pretty important for for your communities now um uh consider that you might be running a lot of the critical experiments that we that we're going to need uh and we are going to retroactively thank you for um in terms of like finally uh arriving at extremely good structures that we can rely on for for larger scale funding so one other thought that i want to kind of leave the community with is we've talked about kind of the differences between kind of project funding in sort of for-profit endeavors and it's kind of um not necessarily non-profit it's it's not for profit not for not nonprofit it's other kind of public goods funding public goods efforts that are that tend to not be for profit and tend to not be well rewarded by markets and so i think like what we effectively need to get to and this is one of the things that the pro collapses is going to be focusing a lot on in the coming years is create a structure that really enables teams to form and have a access to a kind of staircase of funding uh similar to what the startup ecosystem has so the startup ecosystem has developed an extremely successful staircase of funding to identify really promising businesses and then um over time uh fund them at different levels once they've proven out other results and then eventually kind of have some reward for uh all of all the prospect prospective um uh speculative investments of participants along the way um and so we've got to get to a point where we can have a similar kind of ecosystem developing around these kinds of public goods or network funded structures and so i think like we can we can arrive to that with kind of like the the um thinking about the the possibility of like all of the value generation that will um be created by public goods and then use smart contracts to um you know vault a lot of that value back into our time uh to then um get us into uh into a success case um and so i think you know this is kind of like um and an era of like prior to zootopia and crypto economics can can now start taking hold um and and i think like the the thing that a lot of people understand about the purpose space is that it just sort of feels for people outside of the crypto space it sort of feels like a um just kind of a new um important development in technology and so on uh but it doesn't feel that fundamental and what's really going on is that we've coupled the world's most powerful um superpower machine the internet and sort of like computing the software development and deployment platform that we've built with one of the most um powerful components of our societies which is mechanism design and economics and so on and so we've turned all of that into a uh a fully programmable structure so that means that the impacts of the of the crypto space are gonna effectively rewire um how most of our organizations and economic structures function and and the success rate is so fast and so promising um and it's still extremely difficult to to kind of um make a case against it i agree with when he said earlier today that um even now he uh he's like dramatically more optimistic this year than um than in the year before in terms of you know krypto being here to say and uh krypto being um a really strong force for um economically and so i think it'll of course be rocky along the way um and as these new structures emerge it'll it'll be kind of many difficult challenges solved things will get built that will not be um that won't be right and we'll have to like go through uh iterations of correcting those mistakes and so on um but i think it's an extremely promising um promising uh potential and just to kind of like illustrate the the power of mechanism design in general i always like using the example of bitcoin right so bitcoin is the output the bigger today is amassing and organizing a massive amount of of energy and a massive amount of of computing power effectively even though it's it's not very useful computing power um and and this staggering amount of energy use uh is organized just by a few mechanisms thrown into the uh onto the internet and so this this is like the the just raw power of the of mechanism design and you know we've had very direct uh experience with this as a community like we um of course many many blockchain projects exist uh in the falcon network we just passed a year um and just by weaving a set of mechanisms onto the internet we managed to uh create a massive storage network 13 exabytes amass in like one year which is uh staggering i don't think any um i don't know for sure because there are many storage networks that are not only private but um uh uh secret uh by several uh nation states and so on but this seems to be like one of the fastest growing uh search networks ever ever assembled and like that's one of the um the uh just a staggering kind of um show of like the the capability that you get out of out of creating mechanisms like this i'm really interested to see what's going to happen once we finally get um structures for understanding economic flows in all kinds of goods that today um have been sort of implicit or or only factored into the economy kind of end to end or or um where the transactions don't actually quite match uh what's really happening i think today with with the power of of blockchains and smart contracts and so on uh we get the ability to identify all kinds of value flows um and make them programmable in a way that they weren't before so these kinds of things i think are extremely promising so as those different kind of transaction flows can get composed and can get connected and interlinked uh we might see these kind of massive royalty networks um uh not exactly networks just value flow networks um emerge and so i think this kind of stuff can start very small i think one of the very successful things about the the blockchain space has been um the strong emphasis on small composable improvements released out into the network that people then end up building on so i think something like this could get started just by developing the tools and primitives to create you know distributions of of impact uh like for example if you could easily go uh to a website today and um describe a list of participants and their rough um you know some weight uh in in the distribution of credit that they might receive and just create that as a smart contract that just flows value whatever value goes into it um into this account it just flows out to all of the other accounts according to that distribution and if you make that distribution updatable over time um that that component just on its own could start forming all of these networks over time um and so i think right now mirror can do something close to that i think they call it a split um but this hasn't really been been done at a larger scale and for for any other kind of component so i think just that primitive could enable reusing all of the nft infrastructure to now couple um many different kind of um assets and and and property and so on with entire networks of value generation which which would be extremely uh extremely interesting uh and you know just as a an example of like the the scale of um a value that could flow through these things like this is this just kind of the stats on the on the nft arden mark this is mostly art some kind of gaming now but um this is it's pretty staggering to see kind of the level of uh transactions and the level of funding going through these systems um i would expect this to to keep growing a lot and especially change a lot once um you know physical real estate starts joining right so when um actual property is transacted um houses and and land and so on starts getting transacted in blockchains this will grow tremendously um i think uh we talked a lot about dallas today um i think that they are it's been amazing to see the the rise of dallas as a new organizational primitive um that many many groups are experimenting with um it's been really great to see kind of the success cases so far um i haven't seen there's been a lot of cases where these where taos have been successful in achieving a lot of things but i have we haven't yet seen bows that do kind of like robust long-term planning um and and uh you know kind of achieve like really efficient um outcomes in terms of um the time spent and so on uh i think that that'll be a place to watch i think once um we should come up with some test cases for what dao's should be able to achieve um and what degree of quality and and with what sort of resources it's kind of like a test case or um for uh now designs to to evolve towards uh to get to be extremely successful i think um this also presents the the promise of potentially um coming up with new organizational primitives for many different kinds of uh structures that exist today so for example it'd be really really cool to be able to create kind of a new version of a research lab or or an r d organization which is just sort of um constituted or formed in the blockchain and all the participants that keep contributing to its projects and so on get tracked in in um credit assignment networks across across the history of the of the of those projects and then over time um you can sort of like uh either potentially subdivide those labs as those labs grow and kind of like nucleate out into into smaller labs um or get kind of like interrelated in some ways and then you could then apply all this uh public as funding kind of structures especially retroactive public goods funding work um to then yield a totally different way of funding uh science and funding r d super excited for uh all of the things that the community is building and that are gonna get built um i really hope that this uh today has been um useful uh in kind of exploring a lot of these these structures uh i would love to see kind of certificate impact certificate of import pack markets actually emerge i think it's one of these ideas that once once it gets built well and we can have large volumes of transactions around certificates of impact um this might turn out to be one of the most important contributions um in in entire space and so i think this is one of those ideas kind of like cryptocurrency that once it gets built out and gets tested out at scale and once we work out all of the problems and so on this could be one of the most valuable contributions um maybe perhaps in a decade so i think like this is the stuff that people should be experimenting with and building on and and so on uh finally i think um i want to kind of like create a a a hope that i think we could create a crypto powered arpa level institution um and you know created in kind of a composable way by being able to kind of commission road maps uh publicly be able to integrate those road maps into kind of tech trees then commission kind of a scoping of individual experiments that need to be done or project plans for for kind of achieving those those potential unlocking those potential technologies and then create funding tools and networks to then sort of um invest into into the generation of new scientific results and the translation of those scientific results into new technology and and you know crossing the castle and so on um and kind of feed all of that back on on the cell phone so i think we might be able to arrive at um you know sort of like the the world's best um science and and tech r d um uh institution but this won't quite be a single institution it'll be um a network of institutions uh composed through mechanisms uh publicly and i think if we can build the right primitives in the pieces and test it out with i don't know at the scale of like you know tens of millions uh over the next year or so um and we find a good model that works we could potentially scale that out by two or three orders of magnitude over the next five years five to ten years and so that's an extremely promising promising thing because that would start being able to fund all kinds of efforts that today are totally underfunded so i think that this is pretty interesting so again thank you for working on this on this area of the of the chat on let's try and get more groups across um all right i'll plug again the amazing talk from uh eric drexler on fair dystopia and go alignment as one of the most useful ideas that i think um our communities can can benefit from and um i want to give a special plug to patreon because i think it's one of these things where perhaps in the future we should ask them to give a talk about this as well this is one of one area that has been experimenting with public good funding um in a kind of a pretty decentralized way on this sort of uh totally outside of the crypto space but but extremely interesting um it's really cool to see that all the stats are around it um and the last uh thing i wanted to mention is kind of this idea of funding staircases which is there's one really useful structure around the investment landscape is the ability to kind of very easily start projects and test them out and get to the next level of impact and use that experience to kind of raise more funding and so on in the the investment landscape in for-profit businesses and so on uh it's filled with tons of investors across this entire landscape giving many different levels of funding based on kind of really well established impact metrics and there are tons of organizations doing this so i think one of the really useful things is looking at just how much capital gets deployed this way so it's on the order now at least dc so there's much more in other parts of investment investing but just vc alone is in the order of 300 billion a year uh nowadays um and and this is deployed by a very large decentralized network so we're talking hundreds of thousands of of angel investors tens of thousands of vcs um and millions of investors in public markets um this is like a a pretty large um uh decentralized network of funding and so it'd be really really amazing to be able to create a similar structure for public funding where today um there is a very large amount of funding but it's mostly um it's very decentralized in the small scale so in the smaller parts of the staircase it's it's very decentralized there's tons of individuals doing donating tons of money um but in the larger scales it's actually quite small um there are a few large uh large agencies and um sorry the attacks here didn't get updated but uh there are there are a few large agencies and um tons of the funding ends up being uh overseen by uh small groups uh that fall prone to kind of all kinds of um group think and bad decision making that that we know about like um you know happen in kind of like large organizations and so be extremely interesting to see what happens when this entire landscape gets way more decentralized uh so again um get involved i would say um there's uh if you are interested in working on any of this kind of stuff uh so evaluating impact impact markets network okrs compostable funding via blockchains um reach out to us uh we would be super happy to um evaluate proposals for funding uh so things like grants and so on or potentially retroactive funding um contact us we'd love to kind of um we'll we'll apply this kind of in uh funding circus approach with different different levels and um as seven mentioned we are hiring for public funding teams and you also saw um the plug for the s plus developer from um uh from andrew uh definitely if you you know are interested in any of these uh definitely apply and thank you so much for an amazing day uh thank you for uh working on this in this area and i wanted to kind of end with a huge thank you to all the organizers and all the people and all the groups that um were involved this was a huge labor of a huge amount of effort and a ton of labor um over the last uh week i was a a fantastic day overall um and thank you so much uh carla for uh running an amazing show today um i'm super in awe of your amazing ability as a host so thank you so much and that's it uh perhaps see you around another time great thanks for that call to action and opportunity and thanks again for joining us for the funding the commons virtual summit remember that it's our goal to have more of these events so please use the telegram channel to continue the conversations we began here today and follow the research twitter at proto research to learn about upcoming events in this series from all of us at protocol labs youth global good morning good afternoon and good night and we'll see you at the next event [Music] [Applause] [Music] you