EthCC 2: Logan Saether

hi thanks for joining me so I'm going to talk a bit about web three enabled social networks and also about the DAP that we've built kind of encompassing these ideas so let's start with Who I am so my name is Logan Sater I am a developer entrepreneur technologists and educator you can reach me at these social handles and you can also invest into me in the DAP that we built and I'll show you what that is and how to do that later so first just to cover like a general overview of what I mean by web 3 enabled social networks versus what we had before so what I'm calling the first wave of social networks or like the Facebook's the instagrams LinkedIn stuff like that so what they did was their monetization model involved basically capturing user data and capturing their attention by ads and kind of manipulating the feeds that the users would get so that the ad values would be higher and the reason they're able to do this is because they operated as kind of siloed dictatorships of the web so they were the ones who controlled the algorithms that gave you your feeds and they controlled who is able to be on the platform and who wasn't able to be on the platform and who could say what on the platform and who couldn't say something so because that's generally feels like not a good thing to be interacting with on the internet we end and now that we have the technologies to kind of make a better system we can democratize the social networks and what that means is that we give users back control of their data we allow users to have the freedom to curate their own feeds or to pick who is curating their feeds and we remove the ability for anyone to censor someone on their platform um so some of the tools that we have available to do this are curation markets - centralized storage and personal tokens so curation markets are one of the more popular examples of them are the TC RS so the token curated registries and these are to simplify them lists that are curated by token holders so it allows for subjective content to be staked on with real value and for the people who have chosen the best options and have staked their value on the best options to be rewarded back for picking the best options so it's it allows people to participate more freely into how their feeds are generated and it also opens up this interesting incentivization for users so someone who doesn't so someone who is doing the curating can actually earn money from curating which is a really cool possibility but it also gives the ability for people to switch so if they don't like how one TCR is being curated they can switch to another one and if more people agree with that that TCR could become more valuable so the next one is decentralized storage and this is kind of giving the data the power of the data back to the users and allowing them to choose what they'd share and how they share it and then the third one here are the personal tokens and these are in one aspect perhaps one of the more powerful tools that we have but also the most controversial and actually it's the one that I'll be kind of zooming into and focusing on for this presentation so to give a kind of high-level overview of what I mean by personal tokens is the idea - that we can tokenize we want it so it's taking the idea that we want to tokenize things to the extreme and if we want to tokenize everything so if we want to tokenize property we want to tokenize game items we want to tokenize whatever object why not also tokenize yourself and tokenize your attention tokenize your time so some of the use cases for these tokens are laying creators so an artists or musicians can attach the tokens to their future art and there's been artists who have done this already so they released tokens and they say this token is worth 15 square centimeters of one of my portraits that I will make in the future it could also be used to sell future event openings or tickets to concerts as well influencers can use these tokens to trade stuff like shoutouts during a video stream or placements into their their feed and freelancers can also trade their time and cost consultations for these tokens so besides the fact that it unlocks this ability for individuals to represent their time or attention in these in a fungible currency we also have the interesting property that it allows them to build communities so one interesting thing about tokens and as a token holder you feel like you have a stake into whatever community that this token represents so a lot of us like might be here because we hold ether or that we bought ether at some point and that has attracted us together maybe not but there is this potential that the people who hold the tokens have a certain sense of community it also because the token is tied to the creators timer attention it also allows people to share the risk of a creator early in their career but also to share in the success if that creator becomes popular later and as I mentioned before there's this idea is pretty controversial a lot of people think it's a really bad idea and they compare it to stuff like indentured servitude so like saying like if someone owns like my token for instance and I trade my token for my time then that does that person owned me because they own a token representing my time um there's also the possibility that this whole idea of tokenizing yourself turns into like a big dystopian nightmare and to be fair there's a lot of unsolved technical issues was involved with it and I mentioned a few here so there's a whole idea of like dispute resolutions when you trade your token how do you actually enforce that there's also the idea that without a good identity system we can have people basically running scams and the third one is just how do we see the value in to these personal tokens so its owner is so besides all of these really hard problems that people have pointed out we decided to go ahead and try the idea anyway and so we built a DAP called convergent and it allows for creators to launch personal tokens and to attach this token to their timer attention so to give a kind of use case overview I'll use on this penguin and let's call them Picasa the penguin I'm so Picasso the penguin is a gallery painter or is a landscape painter that wants to have his first gallery showing the problem is is that the gallery costs $300 to rent for the night and Picasso knows that if he gets his paintings in front of people at this gallery that he'll sell some but he just doesn't have the capital upfront to rent this gallery so Picasso wonders what he can do and he remembers that he attended at CC and he heard this talk about this cool DAP named convergent so he takes out his laptop he goes to the convergent that and he's presented with this big red button that says launch and so he clicks this button and he mints a new token and he now has a token on the ethereum blockchain and he can choose to trade whatever serve he wants for that token so because he wants to have a gallery opening he decides to trade an invite to his gallery premiere for his token now so this token is generated in like an interesting way so it's not just an ICO token that will just have a fixed supply and you have to put it on an exchange to have liquidity but it's tied to what's called a bonding curve which which generates this token continuously a longer price curve so this line on top represents the price of the token when someone buys it and the line on the bottom represents the price of the token when someone sells it and the difference between these two lines is the money that Picasso will get for his campaign of having a gallery showing so Picasso goes and he promotes his token he tells people that they can now invest into his future gallery and investors come and start contributing and buying Picasso's token so this just shows that the first investor at the bottom will pay 1/8 for the token and the price moves up linearly so that the second investor pays too and the third investor pays 3 and so Picasso now has enough eath to trade in $2 and to rent his gallery for his premiere so I'll go into a bit more about this from a technical perspective so I mentioned that this token is minted from what's called a bonding curve so bonding curves are yeah I guess I covered it before just this way to mint the token along this price path so everything under the cell curve in this blue reserve portion that's what's held into the contract that will incentivize cells it gives us nice property that this token is liquid from the start and and the person who launches this token doesn't need to worry about putting their token on an exchange or always making sure there's liquidity for this token but they can basically just launch the token and let the smart contract do the rest of the work so bonny curves are sometimes called automated market makers they were I think first widely used in the bank or protocol and that's where they get this name of automated market makers but they allow for the continuous minting and burning of the token and for people to just permissionless li buy and sell whenever they want so we built a the smart contracts for the DAP we called the contracts liquid since they give liquidity to the tokens and it allows for these bonding curves to have different slopes and different differences between them eventually we think it'd be cool if these would change dynamically based off of different factors and that's it's basically like a design decision that can be made by the individual so they can say that as time goes on from the deployment the difference between the curves so the amount that they they are getting from the purchases of the token can grow or shrink depending on what they wanted to do so the next question after everybody is able to launch their token is what - actually what can we do with this token so besides just fundraising in this cool bonding curve method what else can we do when everybody has a token um so we've thought of a few ideas and I'll just mention three of them that we've kind of we're kind of planning on integrating into our tap um so the first one is the feeds and we're calling these the Polaroids and the idea is to kind of have a like an Instagram attached to these personal tokens and the holders of the tokens can stake on posts from the Creator and the popular posts can reward the stagers into the feeds it also it unlocks this whole kind of curation market around these personal tokens uh you can also do access control based on these tokens so one thing that we've kind of seen lately is that with fundraising methods for creators like patreon they have the ability to deep lat form some creators so that got us thinking of how we can do better with tokens and how you can do that is so one thing that patreon offers is this kind of exclusive Zone on the website where only the supporters can view this feed so you can do that with tokens as well you can say that this post requires five of my tokens to view or this post requires ten of my tokens view or this entire section of my website requires 15 tokens to view and you can replicate this exclusive access zone and then one of the more experimental ideas is to have personal prediction markets or just polls on a high level polls but what they are are prediction markets that creators can use to kind of dictate career choices so the example I have here is that an actor wants to see if or an actor is wondering whether or not taking a role on this in a specific movie might make or break their career and no one has any idea whether or not this will actually make or break their career but there has been research done that when people put value in and bet on the outcome there is a greater chance to predict the truth then there is just from polling without staking any value so the actor can create a personal prediction market based on their personal token and their holders can stake their value on to this question whether yes or no and after the after the deed is done the creator can come settle the market and the the holders that voted the right way of the outcome will get rewarded for being right and the ones who were wrong will lose some of their stake so it reinforces it reinforces this idea of community and like true believers into the creator so yeah that's that's all I have the DAP is live you can create your own economy and launch your own personal token today I guess I can take questions so I can't give you a a lawyer's perspective because I'm not a lawyer and I haven't studied law at all but I know from our perspective like with convergent and the dap that we built we're not structuring this as a security anyway what we're doing is we have turns that when you use a dap you agree to these terms and the terms basically just say that these tokens are vouchers and they don't actually guarantee any mmm any right into getting these services but the creators and the influencers are offering these services and at any time can stop offering them yes so it's based on the creators side yeah so I think we have thought about it we haven't found a suitable solution yet so this was this isn't one of the really hard technical issues around this and I put this as dispute resolutions because I think what you were describing was this idea that like a closed group of people could upload each other and push content to the top that lets say a minority powerful minority wanted that a larger majority didn't agree with or something along those lines and so the answer is we don't have a suitable solution yet but it is something we've thought about and along these lines I've been looking a lot into auger prediction markets and how they handle dispute resolution auger [Music] so when you say so on our platform what individuals do is tokenize either their time their attention or their services so they don't or they have they they can but the idea isn't that they tokenize like material objects but rather something that they can provide