New Ownership Models in Web3 | European Blockchain Convention 9

[Music] okay so hello everyone my name is Simon I have the honor to moderate this amazing panel today um as you see behind me there's a slight mismatch in some of the faces go figure it out by yourself so uh we are blessed to have some uh new joiners in the panel so this will be slightly um spontaneous with the two of you okay um but Jose is prepared so um we're asking you to be perfect okay today no expectations no pressure yeah no pressure no pressure and yeah we covering very none of us are sitting in the right spot even Jose so right okay but I am confusing so at least one person spontaneity yeah but it's not about me uh right now um so we're going to talk about ownership and this is something a word that I use very frequently when my Normy friends ask me what web 3 is about I usually say well it's about digital digal ownership right it's about you having the opportunity to finally first time in the world in the history of the internet really own digital Goods by yourself right with no middleman in the middle um completely cutting them out and you are in the power of your digital assets but it's always slightly on on a level that's not really tangible so what I'm expecting from this panel today is to make web 3 ownership a little bit more tangible and understand what's really happening here with actually real world use cases and I think I have good uh people for this on the panel we have Jose um so Jose has a very long experience in digital industry can I say you've been working decades in technology yes I have okay so a long time um and the past years focused on blockchain So currently you are helping uh different kind of projects and companies um to implement blockchain technology to create new use cases that's correct that's correct yes okay so um I've been in this uh online world for the last probably 20 years and I've been riding every single wave of um new technology development yeah um right now um we made the decision to move into blockchain and artificial intelligence because these are the tools that I think uh will provide a little bit of support to the current Anarchy that exist within the world it's thought an that's that's a statement I actually have a question which is um what is a crazy belief you have about the current world and maybe also the the future and I think this is already a good crazy belief we're living in an anarchy um so okay let's let's make a point to that Leo yeah um kind of like what you mentioned like what is web 3 so I think I am probably qualified to talk about this because I launched a ler one uh I was like one of the first employees at near protocol and uh why why why do that uh so I think you have to take a look at the landscape when I started in the business and I'm from the valley so um from copertino originally and I started in Enterprise software Perpetual licenses and you know software companies charging 11% renewals and fees every year doesn't really matter you own the software but you really don't really own the software it's behind a firewall I mean sure what not what what may have you and then came basically the cloud so which now we dubbed it as web too so I lived through that era so 10 years of cloud and there was a lot of hesitance I mean coming from the valley like you know the most Progressive when it comes to software and adoption and so forth were those people even us we were like oh no nobody's going to touch the cloud it's very uh you know you're putting your data with somebody and you're trusting your entire data with one entity whether V Microsoft Amazon what may have you take your pick right uh so there was a lot of push back for that but now every single company's on the cloud uh when when is it I mean having like web one is an afterthought no one's building on Prem softwares are not coming out on enterprise software everybody's building basically for web 2 that's what's going on because that's just the norm it's just easier to put your infrastructure there so come 2016 2017 uh the era of layer ones that's where I came in with near protocol ethereum there's a lot of other great salana and all these guys we started building cuz we said you know enough is enough there's have to be a better way cuz now you're building on web 2 and you're putting all your trust with one entity they can do whatever you want right so you violate one terms of service your data is gone right and your entire business is shut down overnight they can do that so we said that's not okay that's where you want to build a decentralized solution that's also good for the world and gives you more control uh all the all of those things uh so we became some of the naysayers who said okay let's just not put everything on the cloud let's just start building for web 3 so that's just the journey from web one to web two to web 3 it's just another label but it's just what you really want to do do you really trust your entire business with one entity right that's the thing uh where I'm from in the US uh we have FDA uh which is the Federal Reserve and they what they do is they give you insurance on if your bank is robbed for example right but only up to $250,000 let's say you have a million dollar in the bank right you only get 250k the rest is gone centralized institution that's why you say keep a hardware wallet and all those things and you know that's where the entire Revolution started we said enough is enough we don't trust in big uh big banking uh you know too big to fail and so forth you know what happened with 2008 collapse so that's where this entire um industry kind of like spun off from first white white paper came out back in 2015 uh for the Bitcoin and basically everything changed so I lived through this entire era of like kind of like you know the last days of web 1 and early days uh of web 2 and all the way even till now and the early days of basically web 3 so that's that that's kind of like you know the backdrop in the story so yeah uh that's great that's great do you want to do you want to that was like the perfect introduction because essentially our game could not have been built without the story that Leo just told so we then are the sort of consequence of that trajectory that you just outlined so I love that you just kind of laid out that history so I'm Sarah mcken I'm the founder and CEO of dcoo and we have built the alien worlds game which is the most played blockchain game in the world um we also have the most called smart contract in existence um more people more people own our nfts than any other nft collection in the world more wallets own our nfts um and we are a game that is built entirely on chain so our gaming logic actually runs on chain so we are an application a decentralized application that is running its logic and its application on a blockchain and that is a consequence of what Leo just talked about right so being able to have those uh you know underlying protocols that are decentralized public permissionless chains that then allowed an application like ours to come along and say hey how about we try and actually encode game logic on one of these things and what then does that make possible possible and of course what it makes possible is the subject of this conversation which is ownership ownership of assets so what we were able to do is to put blockchain tokens both fungible tokens nfts but also Dows which have a token and are a tokenized entity in themselves to put all of those directly on chain and as Leo just was was building up what that means is that those really belong to you they don't belong to somebody else who can turn it off because you violate one of the points in their terms and conditions so let me give you a because you were saying let's make this tangible so okay you want to own an alien worlds nft you can go into our game and you can acquire them through playing we were a play to earn games you can earn the nfts through playing different things you can also go onto a Marketplace and buy one from another player okay so once you have that alien worlds nft in what sense even is it an alien worlds nft well it's issued on the alien worlds collection but that's pretty much it by the time you own it you own it you own it in your wallet and there's nothing that anyone can do to take that away from you the whole entire chain that it runs on would have to somehow be corrupted in order for that ownership to be alienated from you and the whole premise of blockchain technology is that it's very difficult to do that on that point hold your breath right there because I think that's that's a great point and it sounds so good right you own your assets but now the question is do you care like maybe you care but do the people care right because that's what I find always the most difficult part about all this like where three is great right ownership is great decentralization is great but people need to care about this and they need to really start to um get a real benefit out of those models that is better than what they're used to and I think gaming is one of the best Industries to explain this would you say maybe either Saro I think maybe Leo you can you can pick up on that would you say you have cracked the nut and you have now found the Holy Grail of convincing all the people to turn into web 3 because you have the perfect pitch for them or are we still in this kind of building phase infrastructure phase where we're building the applications but we still not there in terms of the perfect use case to bring all those people into the space no we're not we're not there yet uh in in my humble opinion uh as long as I mean we need the masters of the world uh you know the Googles the metas uh they have billions of users right the the reason they use all their tools uh it's free and it's easy web 3 is anything but easy you have to create a wallet most people don't even know what a wallet is is uh I have an email can I sign up with my email no that's not how it works right um so they love to do like kyc and all that great stuff uh but that's just that's just our world is a little different and why do you care of ownership you should care of ownership uh CU we're heading towards this subscription economy where everything is sub subscription right you barely own anything now um and um like even uh so I'll give you an example like this this phone right here from Apple right they make a great phone $1,500 phone do I own this I mean I went on the subscription side but I I want to I want to own it right but that's what they're doing like just pay $60 a month and then you know you you can have your phone same thing with we're looking at the housing market like Black Rock and Vanguard is basically in my country in us they're basically buying every single home that is out there right they're out bitting everyone and user scan so you're not going to you're not going to be homeowners anymore so you're going to be subscribing to towards you know having having some sort of a uh home over there is that okay is that good not really good for the corporations but not really good for uh you know for the people but somehow I disagree a little bit with what your with your point first of all I find um that in our company um we find people that really care about uh the web three and the advantages that it brings to them you said that is very difficult uh for people to have access free access to all this yeah no novice people ma masses they they they don't understand but this is this is what we are here for yeah for instance our company euroes that what we do is to make it simple for people right now we have been involved in in the developing of a of A New Concept um for the control um of copyrights for authors for musicians uh writers um that kind of thing that is general public you have millions of these people that produce content so far this has been coordinated and controlled by the editors they are the ones up until now in Web 2.0 web 2.5 those are the one that have been controlling all the um sources of income and all the promotional activities with the web 3.0 what we are doing right now is different we are giving the control back to every single individual every author every composer and we have enabled recently we put it live and you can all see it at thed.com uh which is the um organization that control all the um all the rights for for aors in Spain you can upload your book you can upload your musical notes you can upload there and we help them to create uh an nft we help them to avoid through the uh tracebility of these nfts we help them to to avoid piracy acts uh we helped them to claim the credits we made it simple for them so this is we only have to think about the whole process is complex but this is why the technicians are here for to make it simple for people so this is one of the projects where I can feel that people care and the the um uh our program there has been really well um received by all the authors they really are using the technology and this Jose is a great example of uh a company finding a niche a very specific Market where blockchainbased ownership models make sense but I make a bold statement right now I would say that I don't know about the number but let's say 70% of what's out there that is using blockchain to enable new ownership models is and then there 30% where people actually care about now zaro for example tell me why in gaming would people care about this ownership model why do Gamers want to go to alien world instead of going to a web two based um game like what is the motivation for them to play your game does it need to be more fun than all the other games and that's it or do you actually have a case with this web3 ownership way to attract an audience or is it a completely different audience maybe yes so you could be right that ownership doesn't matter but and I don't think that that really aligns with human nature I think that people know when they own things and in fact sometimes they only they only know it in the negative right when something gets taken away from them I heard the other day that one of ital teran's inspiration for ethereum in the first place you probably know this is that his he was playing World of Warcraft or some game and they basically took his level away from him all of a sudden and he just couldn't deal with that he was like no this belongs to me and so he's like well I'm going to create an Unstoppable system right and you know sometimes we don't appreciate the rights that we have until they get taken away from us or when we see them getting taken away from someone else and then all of a sudden it Twigs that maybe we don't own that thing now clearly the rule of law private property makes a big difference in systems right it's one of the reasons that Western liberal capitalism flourished once we had democracies and legal systems in which people had faith that if they engaged in contracts they would actually those contracts would be honored and there was a judicial system that was independent and so on so it does make I mean I I I think it's incontrovertible that ownership makes a big difference at a philosophical level and then at the sort of more practical level in terms of how Gamers for example are using those within games it's it certainly can happen that games achieve a similar level of people feeling um a sense of ownership and taking for examp example entrepreneurial risk and investing huge amounts of time in those game systems for example E online is a good example of that it's it's a game that is not currently a blockch doesn't have a a blockchain associated with it that that present yeah and yet people act as if it did they so they feel ownership and in fact they can part of the reason for that is that they can actually go off and trade those assets outside of the system so so we don't need web 3 we just need to create the illusion of ownership and everyone is happy but let me tell you took them 10 15 20 years to do that and they also had to be extremely they took they they took many decisions that showed the community that they were a trustworthy custodian that they wouldn't for example take so they had to build up a lot of reputation over time that allowed the community to have faith that if they invested Time created Enterprise created what within their system is private property that that would be honored yeah but what we what we were able to do in web 3 was within a matter of a year people would develop a similar sense of trust and faith in the system because it was built on a public permissionless chain so it fast tracks people's sense well their realization of ownership agency and then their willingness to take entrepreneurial risk and to develop out the system in tandem with the founders am I on the right track stating that a very Elemental part of all this is education because you need to make them understand that that is actually the case right like they need to understand that it is a safe system they need to understand to a certain degree how blockchains work otherwise they don't get this if they don't get that they're actually safe with their uh with this ownership model then why would they come to you instead of Eve Leo you can react to that want I think one of the biggest problem is uh kind of like what you said onboarding the user so the onboarding user experience is not as fluid as what other companies have done and that's what the valley has done really really well they've like made it so much more easier for you to just basically on board give us your phone number text message boom you're you're on you know Twitter x what what may have you um so the onboarding is just super super easy that's the that's you know it's a funnel like you know when when the funnel comes in and how you actually get people in um so the barrier to entry is very low uh with in web 3 it's a little bit it's a little bit difficult and how do you tackle this as a marketer yourself with a long track record as a marketer I believe right just better education how you create a wallet kind of like what he said like you know we actually they make a you know a consistent effort and a conscious effort to make people understand like how do you uh run the system how do you create a wallet and so forth and actually not just create a wallet yeah like what are you going to do with the keys right so that's because people just forget Keys here if you forget if you forget your password no problem you just click on forget password you get an email right and then uh you click on a couple of links and you're you're back on forget that about in our world right you you you you lose your keys you're you're done right you're never going to get it back so I think uh it's really about onboarding and educating the customer and uh we just need to collectively do a little bit of a better job uh on doing that people are people over here they know what I'm talking about they they know uh right but I'm talking about novice people who just don't understand what this entire world is and they're trying to come into our world so I think we have to build better onboarding system for those guys yeah we have to swap the audience for normal people and you guys go out there and like spread the word you know like you already know it anyway my my recommendation is pick one person and teach them so right good stuff okay Jose let me let me just get a little with regards boarding boarding people um I just i' like to talk a little bit of here just to give you an example of on boarding people what we do in our company um is try to make things easier for for everyone who we want them to be on board on something for instance um some of the projects that we're working on are related to the management of CO2 rights this CO2 emission rights okay and all of it starts with literally what does that mean yeah the actual okay actual okay I'm not used to talking about actual okay we get on board the farmers to produce green gas for instance okay so we are in a project that we are involved and we are doing all these blockchain activities everything related to the web three and what we do is the to um to do a whole process of traceability so that we know that the that comes from this cow ends up becoming a green kilowatt or part of it and the good thing just me the good thing with this is that in the um test that we are doing we're doing it with Farmers where education is not the highest thing on the right but they're using it now the trial it's a matter of communicating I think telling them you can do it and you can do it easily by just putting this thing here that controls and that's the transability education helps and everybody especially in Western Europe in Western in Western countries um the level of Education everyone has heard about uh blockchain anyone in the streets you talk them and they have heard the term they don't know how to use it but maybe we can help them use it did you want to no fun fact on that I mean CS do create uh more uh methane gas than anyone else so so they they pollute the pl yeah great yeah thank you for that no that's great okay um I think like Jose you're a good example of different use cases as well like we have two people in the gaming industry which is a very I think actually this is one of the toughest industry um to kind of get into as web 3 um person because you have to convince the people that already game and already used to those kind of uh environments to switch and go somewhere else um for me this is uh like startup School 101 you need to s solve a problem a pain they have right now with your technology and do it better than their uh than the old ones right what would that be like what kind of pain what kind of problem are you literally using for those users like what are you solving for those users um that you couldn't solve or that they can solve in the in the in the web two game what is it Zar you can I mean I think the fundamental premise of blockchain technology is bringing people together peer-to-peer in a trustless way where there isn't an emphasis on an intermediary or or a middleman that owns a proprietary stake in the system so what blockchain environments are good at doing is to is creating Community creating bilateral relationships between people directly yeah um where they feel like they're able to kind of take increasing levels of like ownership within their Community they can have different types of levels of responsibility so for example in our Dows we have different ranks within that you can run to be a custodian or you can just be a voter I think that you can achieve that type of community in other games especially sort of outside of the game itself so through live meetups or other sort of external um groups that the gamers create but inside the game itself you're mainly in a sort of situation where you're a consumer of the game and people want to have a more active some people want to have a more active role some people just want to be 100% casual gamers and in fact in our game there's also a role for them so you can just mine or just go on missions but there's also this way that you can be a Community member that then takes on greater and greater levels of responsibility um and I think that that only happens in Trad in other you know more traditional games outside of the game itself where they form these communities themselves because human beings will do that but in our case it's built in and their reward mechanisms built in I think that's the pain that's being solved okay now I I would like to make another statement and see your reaction to that if I'm true or false here um another belief I have is that you have to kind of fall once and get hurt a little bit in the old system to understand the real benefit of web 3 what I mean by that is exactly the example you you you brought earlier earlier um about uh like losing your very valuable item to the system right um which is which is just not fair right because you earned it yourself now this is a is a moment of of um of pain for you and this is when you will start to look for alternative is that correct like is that is that something that helps you as an industry as the gaming industry to to get new people and if yes are you reliant on this pain do they need to like feel this before coming to you or can you provide them something more right that they would just swap from place a to place B yeah so I mean the first thing that I would say is that I don't think we're actually primarily acquiring users from traditional games I think that we're primarily acquiring users who are yeah or or I mean we were for example alien worlds was one of was one of the places where people created their wallet for the first time so I think you know especially when markets are buoyant people are trying to figure this technology out and a game is a really nice way in because it's low risk it's not financialized it's clearly a game so um but I think blockchain or curiosity about crypto curiosity about web 3 was especially in the last cycle of user acquisition one of the main conduits for that but we can't rely on that right of course we need to move beyond that and all of those user um experience issues you know are being addressed in our industry we're still at the beginning of the of the technology I I actually think I mean because I get asked constantly well how can you know why are why isn't adoption moving more quickly or whatever I mean I actually think adoptions happen really fast if you think about it we were only at the stage of layer twos like six years ago and now we're at the stage of pretty complex adaps being run on chain um and now we're increasingly looking at user experience issues wallets and so on so I think that that's a very fast um pace of development there are two different things what she's saying and she's absolutely right they're just genres and different users that's that's just what it is let's just say if you play a game on Nintendo and you're a Mario player right that's what you're going to do you're going to live on Nintendo you're going to play those games it's not that just because you had a bad experience like you you know your profile got deleted and you got so upset with Nintendo uh or or the hardware the the console itself that you're like screw this I'm going to go to blockchain I don't think so that's that that's a normal user Behavior that's that's that's going to happen in terms of I'm speaking for gamers I'm not speaking for like you know in terms of you losing your wealth or something and you're like no I don't trust any financial institution I'm going to go to Hardware wallets and control my own Financial uh Destiny that's all great that probably is more of a a likelihood use case but in terms of gaming that's not how gamers are coming Gamers uh they just want something different like if somebody wants a play to earn model that other uh traditional platforms are not providing them they're going to look elsewhere and that's where you know we come in so they come find you so we we really don't have to go and find uh people who are like new user Acquisitions I know it's it's it's next to impossible to convert uh you know hardcore Gamers that are on either Xbox PlayStation or Nintendo and convince them to come and play our game it's just it's just completely separate worlds that they live in they and us a convergence might happen at some point uh but I don't see it as of today that that that conversion is going to happen so there's a lot of push actually I was at Nintendo live uh you know their conference that was happening in Seattle completely different user base different audience different Gamers and they know nothing about our world uh they're just oblivious to the fact like what web 3 is and how you know these Gamers I mean it's it's just different it's just parents with little kids and they're coming in it's you know it's more of a family environment and so forth completely different audience and I don't think so kids should be having access to platforms like web 3 and our games uh because it's play to earn and so forth they're too young for this so again different audience different platforms different genres you know corporations have different agendas and so forth they sell you through kids Disney right they they do a phenomenal job of this right user audiences younger generation and and your kids basically nag you to take you on a cruise ship or like a you know an event and so forth they get you somehow that's the business model works really great for them um but speaking of Disney I was talking to somebody they're actually pushing the envelope when it comes to web 3 because they know their younger audience is going to adopt web 3 at one point they're building now so they're not even waiting yeah so so so there is adoption going to happen at one point so slowly they're building they want they don't want to left you know Left Behind um so that's just how the industry is evolving so yeah the conversion points are just different okay yeah then quick answer Saro um I want to know where we're heading in the next like 5 to 10 years will it be companies like like yourself or like Leo like new players entering the market creating web 3 games or will we see traditional companies as well building web3 games and integrating new technologies or will there be two camps what is happening yeah it's definitely both it's basically following where the capital went so um a lot of capital went into blockchain gaming and that's now all in development now but additionally all of the the web two games H all have units and in fact numerous other Publishers do as well right okay great so building on that we work with Warner Brother Studios uh they're one of the biggest entertainment companies on the planet they make phenomenal movies but they also make games I don't know if you played their games like Arkham Asylum and there's so many others out there they build for web 2 uh they're working with companies like us because they don't understand web 3 and they they could use help and we can use their help absolutely it's it's it's a marriage right cuz we use their Studios for sound quality and stuff like that we can't build that level of sound quality Studio A we don't have the money or the resources or the expertise to do it so we're in Los Angeles you know over there you know recording and stuff like that uh so yeah you scratch my back I scratch yours so that's kind of like what it is and uh and I don't know maybe down the road they acquire us or not that's I think that's that's a a whole separate scenario because EA Games Warner Brother any any big Studio Ubisoft uh they have Deep Pockets and I don't know what the strategy looks like maybe maybe you converge maybe you don't you know that's a whole different separ of conversation so okay thanks you sounds good okay to wrap it up um just say I know you have a lot of projects you're working on you have a lot of uh exciting topics different use cases what can you offer to the people what ex what can you tell them that excites them what could you offer to the audience in terms of web3 ownership um what what what would they care about okay um what I believe is that any area you are working on um can benefit for the advantages of putting some sort of framework where you get a sense of security in any project that you want to launch that is done through blockchains for instance and I mention a couple of examples where I'm working different from the gaming industry where you can use blockchain um to to spread across the general public so um we have experiences is working in in the financing industry in the agricultural World um CO2 rights um copyrights um and also um uh in the um minting industry cool so everyone can benefit from that and our company can provide help uh to do that development no okay we have three ownership taking over the world thank you everyone thanks the audience to listening thanks the great panel have a good [Applause] one