Human Algorithm:Building the Soul of Crypto|Marek-Celo,Lucy-Polkadot, Nanak-Holonym,Tomer-Stellar

awesome so welcome everybody we're getting ready for the next panel just as a reminder for everyone uh if you're on the socials the hashtag is eth Denver 2025 and so without further Ado uh let's introduce the next next panel it's called the human algorithm building the soul of crypto and our moderator is toor from the stellar development foundation so thank you so much uh welcome everyone to the best panel in the history of eth Denver in all times woo um okay so uh we have a bit of a of an interesting topic today um as youve probably noticed it's been a a difficult few weeks for crypto $1.5 billion dollars uh lost last week in the bit hack uh it's a blood baths blood bath out there in the markets um you know Meme coins going all the way to the top have uh been rugged uh difficult times but I think this is a good opportunity to kind of like Center ourselves back um and kind of like remind ourselves what it is that we're actually doing talk about uh you know the actual soul of crypto what we're here to do um and how we're delivering uh prosperity to people through blockchain uh so maybe we can start with uh a quick intro uh tell us uh who you are what you're working on and how you think in a few sentences how that's delivering uh Prosperity sure hi everyone uh so my name is marvi I'm one of the co-founders of cell and cell's mission is actually one of prosperity for all uh and we've been working on it now for for six years um it's an evm uh compatible L1 that's transitioning to an L2 and we're really focused on real world use cases in in emerging markets and so we have um a lot of really great um partners and um Builders who have built some incredible apps I'll talk about them later I'll just keep this short but the end result is that you know we see people who are actually using crypto the way that you and I might be using um you know typical Financial applications in in the west um but they're doing it all self- custodial on chain um and it's you know not for defi not for uh speculating on mem coins but actually for their day-to-day transactions and so yeah it's it's really exciting like you hi I'm nonic I'm one of the co-founders of holum so hollum builds human Tech which is like technology for humanistic flourishing you know making Tech that serves people rather than other way around and we feel that cryptography is a really good way of enforcing digital rights because there are lots of lots of places where there are not the same rights as in the west you don't have right to financial infrastructure you might not have a government ID even so how are you going to do basic things um and even if you do have access to finance there's censorship of where you can use your money so building cryptographic Primitives uh for enforcing digital rights is what we do and we see a lot of use cases uh for this especially when when you don't really have banking system or or identity hi um I'm Lucy I work with polka dot um which is the um the world's largest Dow founded by Dr Gavin wood who was the co-founder of ethereum which has brought us all here today um I have I started off at polka dot at parity which is sort of engine room of polka dot um and then we went through a full period of uh decentralization and I became a solo agent and which has led me to um be to spearhead the polka dot Ambassador Fellowship which is a community creating a community Hub within within polka dot and and within web 3 um to a greater extent so it will be the the goal is to become the largest onchain decentralized community um in the world and to be able to scale and be resilient um to up to you know hundreds potentially hundreds of thousands of people but find a way to really keep that sense of community and belonging through the good times through the bad times which I think exactly what we're talking about here today awesome sounds great uh and by the way I'm toer Chief product officer at the Stell development foundation uh a blockchain that's been around since 2015 really focused on uh real world impact and Mark I know we've been uh coming the same circles for a while now um you know you've been working on this for a while like you said Prosperity is literally in the mission statement um can you start off by giving us some uh examples of how adoption is actually increasing Prosperity yeah so I think in in our case we we've partnered with um Opera this browser company are you guys familiar with Opera anybody use Opera the browser cool um so as you know they're they're a pretty big uh publicly listed company um with about 500 million monthly active users across all of their products and we've been working with them now for a couple of years uh to launch um a fully self- custodial P2P payments wallet that is only only focus on stable coins and so they deployed this about a year ago and they've onboarded about 6 million users directly into their Wallen um and these folks are primarily in emerging markets and they're using mini pay um the way you and I use venmo for example here in the US um and um it's you can only custody right now US dollar um stable coins and so some people are using it to save and so it's a really useful way to hedge inflation in a lot of markets uh some people are using it um again for P2P payments uh other people are using it for remittances to to receive money from overc's um and so a lot of these real world use cases that uh again are really bringing Prosperity the people who previously you know maybe didn't have the same Financial infrastructure that many of us here take for granted so this is one I think example and it's very big again they've onboarded quite a lot of users there's about 600,000 uh daily active users um and so that's a very large amount of people um who are transacting day-to-day certainly by web 3 numbers and and it's growing very very quickly um and I think um with this kind of Base wallet and other similar wallets like Vora um suddenly we have kind of the foundation upon which uh other daps uh can deploy and so there's a bunch of lending markets that are doing uncollateralized lending haraka is a really good example of this they're alive in Kenya and in Ghana um and um you know there's a lot of really interesting experimentation happening um where again these stable coins are being used for these use cases that mirror traditional Financial use cases but are happening fully on self- custodial wallets with stable coins in those markets um there's two more that I think are worth sharing that are pretty cool um there's also a lot of refi activity happening on cell and so there's this really cool mix of refi and financial inclusion uh one of which is is Sylvie Sylvie uh is created a tree planting protocol where they're incentivizing folks to uh actually plant trees um throughout different deforested areas and so people are then paid in stable coins in these local communities um and so it's a source of income for many people but it's also a source of uh Rehabilitation for some of these deforested spaces and then in the similar vein there's a xprize winning project called gain Forest uh that's incentivizing people with stable coins to um record the biodiversity of um their um rainforest in in local communities in uh in rainforest uh regions throughout the world so they have a big program in the Philippines and a few others around the world in Brazil as well and it's just so incredible to see people actually using self codal wallets using stable coins to incentivize behavior that is furthering some really cool environmental cause uh and then also creating these mini economies in these communities you know once this capital is injected into these communities people are then not necessarily cashing out immediately but actually realizing oh this is actually kind of convenient I can pay for things electronically let me just keep this money here and then I can the money starts circulating in these communities and so I think that's probably the most exciting thing that's happening um between kind of all of these projects coming together very cool Lucy given your uh track record with the padat ecosystem can you share any examples that you've seen uh throughout your years in padat so I would say so our our open governance system is probably um the key thing that comes to mind in terms of um bringing Prosperity um so and it's also something that is fully active it's not just a concept so every every single dot holder has a vote on every proposal that comes through to the treasury so the future of polka dot what we spend our money on um what sort of direction we move in is genuinely down to every single person within the dot Community um we have a so we have become you know it's hard to argue that we're not sort of probably the most decentralized protocol out there with a I think we have a Nakamoto coefficient of 149 and we have a treasury of over 200 $200 million um including stable coins which members of the community have access to you put a proposal it's voted by all the dot holders and then it passes um it's no doubt that it's been and continues to be you know a bit of a struggle expect chaos is the um the Mantra that polka dot was built on but I think we're really starting to see increased participation um and and it's something for me as a non technical person which is I think I think what you know the the community up until recently within web 3 has been very technically based but there is space for for people that aren't and we need to bring those people in and I think the governance system and the sort of the educational piece around that and people being able to get involved and lots of different types of proposals that are coming through marketing BD investor related stuff events they're sort of something for everybody um and I think that's that's a real Win Win For Us and something that can scale beyond the web 3 world as well I mean it's it's a governance system that could be used all around the globe to bring a sort of more a more free and equal Society awesome and uh nanak given um uh you know privacy and identity is something that is often overlooked in this and I think especially when it comes to governance when it comes to real world impact uh you know things like proof of personhood become very important can you tell us a bit about your work in that space and how you see that uh affect Prosperity yeah so there's always a trade-off right of how secure you can be and and how well in in a sense there's a trade-off between how secure you can be and how private you can be because most secure you know who everybody is they verify themselves you can't have Bad actors but we're in decentralized world we have a situation where everybody's anonymous online so is there a way to keep those values of being private while preserving the security the identity verification brings ecosystems and I think this is where ZK is is really important in protecting the right to privacy as as systems become you know more and more incentivized to collect this data on people um so yeah I mean uh Cil attacks are huge huge problem in in governance um and so every governance protocol I'm sure you probably had to deal with civil attacks many times right like once there's any money on the line you get the most ridiculous things yep I mean I'm sure you have stories too we've definitely seen I think we had an only an only dot proposal um and things things like that St only fans on on polka dot things like that yeah all comes yep and you have people who is like okay well maybe I can buy somebody's ID for five bucks and you have people who will just like you know in some country they'll just like ride their motorcycle find a group of people be like hey I'll give you five bucks if you um SC your your ID and IGN your face and uh you know so you have all these challenges um and I think the other places where privacy is important or where there are no um like where you can't trust the data custodians um for example like we're somewhat Lucky in in the US and and you know most of the western world where um there's a lot of Regulation about what can be done with it and even then it's still uh messed up situation um but like often times like you know you don't want the government to know that like government itself should not be holding the IDS because sometimes the government itself can come after you uh for doing you know seemingly normal things um so there you know if you look at countries like Iran Myanmar you know privacy is like super important there um when yeah when your rights are restricted uh Marik I heard a rumor that maybe you also have uh something to share in the space of identity your shirt is a clue yes maybe I'll take this off so you guys can see um yeah now we're really excited so this week we um announced self uh which actually also launched uh late last night uh so self. XYZ um it is a ZK passport protocol uh if you guys are familiar with ZK passport um maybe some of you have seen um the demo over at Defcon there were a few demos going around uh but um if you're not familiar with it it it's pretty cool uh passports nowadays have uh NFC chips in them youve maybe seen these biometric passport logos on on the front cover of your passport um inside the NFC chip is um all of your biometric passport information um and it's cryptographically signed with a certificate Authority chain that goes up to your issuing country and so you can actually cryptographically verify the authenticity of your passport and um because we have we're living in a world of smart contracts you can actually uh verify that authenticity on chain without a counterparty and so that's pretty exciting um the only downside with doing that is you would be revealing your passport information to verify uh those signatures and so self actually does that verification in ZK so in zero knowledge and so you can use the self app uh which again you can find on self. XYZ to effectively uh scan your passport and then construct one of these ZK proofs that proves that you have you're in possession of a valid passport and so why is that interesting it's interesting because you can one prove that you are a unique individual so it's much harder to um you know Cil attack those governance protocols but it's also harder to uh Cil attack airdrops um or you know any incentive mechanism that someone might create uh you can also prove that you are not on the ofac list you know as you mentioned uh we had this very unfortunate reminder last Friday that there are a lot of Bad actors in our industry uh and a lot of decentralized smart contract based applications are the ones that are struggling with this the most um and now you can actually gatekeep those applications uh with um a proof that someone isn't on the ofac list and so that's pretty pretty exciting um you can also prove that you're a human in general who would have thought we have to worry about that but now with a agents suddenly this is becoming a problem um and so anything that you know is um um basically on your front page of your passport you can create a zero knowledge proof uh that reveals uh or makes a statement about U that information uh and you can do that in zero knowledge and so certainly the ofac uh proving that you're not in the ofac list is probably the most complex example of this where you're not revealing anything about yourself um not not your name not your country not your um date of birth but you can also optionally reveal small pieces of information so for example if someone wanted to create a bob coin they could and they could uh reward people named Bob um for um you know for their name you could reward people for uh on their birthdays uh if you want and so there's a lot of fun little applications that that folks can build and so we're really excited to see where this goes um but primarily we built this because um you know on the top of up Prosperity um one of the things that we've done really well as an industry is create incentives that incentivize people who have a lot of capital and can go and bootstrap uh a lot of these uh web 3 uh protocols with capital and that's been working well ever since the def summer you know we've seen a lot of really good examples of yield farming really bootstrapping Network effects but how do we incentivize people who maybe don't have a lot of capital to bring to a particular protocol how do we incentivize them to come on on chain and and use these web three applications you know this has been a real struggle for us I would say as an industry for a long time and Cil resistance is basically the solution to this problem and so that's why we're we're so excited about self because you can effectively prove that again you are a unique individual it's very hard to sible protocols that are using self um and the end result is you can create these incentive schemes that can you know incentivize payment Networks to grow or uh uncared lending markets to grow uh Commerce you know things that again don't relate to speculation but revolve more around real world use cases that solve real problems for people that's awesome and even though I'm a I'm a moderator uh just showing some examples that we see in the Stellar ecosystem talking about these real world use cases we're seeing refugees in Ukraine getting paid with stable coins and able to turn them into cash through uh money gram for example we've remote villages in Colombia uh being able to get uh paid for Gig work from the US and then uh turn that Into Cash in their own communities and we see this uh onchain effect we actually put out uh a video earlier this year with a wallet in the ecosystem called decaf that actually is a mini documentary that shows you how a specific Village gets transformed when they get once they get access to these um uh financial instruments so we talked a bit about the uh the identity challenges we talked about the governance challenges uh what other challenges do you see in the road for adoption that actually leads to Prosperity Lucy maybe we can start with you yes so I think um in my view as I kind of touched on earlier I think it's bringing bringing the web three world to the to the wider Community it still feels very um siloed and so I think the sort of the onboarding the onboarding process um not just to each protocol but to web 3 in general um is incredibly important it's important that we sort of we come we we work very siloed and I think actually it's a really good example of you're working on something to do with identity you've just released something on identity um Gavin and polka dot are working on um proof of personhood with tattoos um you know everybody having a tattoo of a kusama bird with a with a code underneath it so we're all working on the same thing and obviously we need competition we need to but but if we we came together more it feels very much still like there's many pieces of a puzzle on the table and we're still not kind of coming together and I think that's what's really necessary for us to go beyond kind of just us here at e Denver you know kind of which is great we're we're a great Community it's the same sort of people but you know and I I won't go down the you know your mom needs to understand it route but the younger generation coming up um like you know on boarding people this isn't going away now I guess you know and I think we need to be more unified uh somebody said to me that the rising Tide Rises all Rises all boats and so that's what that's what I think we sort of we need to do and that's what we're trying to do with the polka dot Ambassador Fellowship we have the polka dot technical Fellowship headed up by Gavin and some of the very senior engineers and then this is the this is the community kind of The Human Side so we're open to everybody um and we look to take each individual through um their web three Journey uh through different ranks um with different Educational Tools mentorship um and as uh the the until recently CEO of the web 3 Foundation said in the summer last week polka dot has been siloed for too long um and it's time that we we make friends and I think that's really the key to yeah to to pushing the prosperity forward for for the many not just the few I think one other challenge in adoption of of this Tech is on and off ramps like number one challenge hands down on off-ramps because it's just the fees are too high and the kyc is too much um and you know so there essentially two options one is somehow figure out a way in our regulatory landcape to get on and off ramps with like higher fees and I mean lower fees and um and you know less barriers less user friction to actually using it um because otherwise none of the value props of crypto make sense like we have all the value props people are using like you guys in like you have so many people in Africa and other countries like actually using this stuff and a lot of that is because um I mean I don't know the details on off ramps there but like you know you don't need to on offramp as much either if you're mostly holding it to hedge against inflation or if you're doing stable coin payments um so yeah you could fix it on and offrs you can get better um better like physical offrs where you can actually pay for real tangible things in crypto and South America people are starting to do that um and the other is also figuring out a way to build onoff ramps that are permissionless that you know don't have all these these hurdles uh Mark in a quick sentence because they're throwing us off stage yeah I mean I would say I agree with that I mean for me it's really three things on and off ramps we been investing heavily in an off ramps um for the last four years and I think it's made it easier but there's still a lot of work to be done um one example of what we've done which is really cool uh with the ecosystem partner is um being able to off-ramp directly into impesa in Kenya uh and so if you use mini pay in in Kenya you can actually pay anywhere where impesa is available and so whenever we travel to conferences there it's such a it's just so such a delight because previously you'd have to buy a local Sim and and actually uh top it up with imp PESA you'd have to bring your passport and here you actually don't even need to do KC you just uh bring your your self custodial wallet and get going um and so I think on and off ramping still a big onel problem we're chipping away but it's getting um better and better the other one is just ux right I think if we really want to do something that's easy for normies it has to be much easier than a lot of what exist today in crypto um and you know that's why we've focused relentlessly on this for the last actually six years even and so on sell you can pay for gas with tokens which is really quite lovely and so that experience that I mentioned by Opera uh doesn't require you to have cell doesn't require you to have eth everything is paid for natively with uh usdc or usdt um and uh that just makes the experience much easier and there's just a lot of additional things that just need to be done I think in the whole stack to make crypto easier for everyone uh and then finally I think probably the biggest thing is distribution I think most developers build these um products that are focused more on um kind of these speculative use cases because those are the people who are on crypto today and so if you want to have actual users you're kind of forced to go into that um that direction um but luckily now with with folks like Opera uh coming into crypto uh these big companies with these really large numbers of users right 500 million monthly active users across all their products suddenly these are the kind of companies that can bring developers distribution and so um yeah if you're a builder and you're thinking about okay I want to do something for the real world uh and I want to have lots of users and I would definitely check out mini pay thank you uh our time is up um if you have any questions uh come me US outdoor thank you so much it's been a pleasure thank you