Barrier to Entry: Overcoming Web3 Onboarding | Austin Griffith, Francesco Andreoli, Nader Dabit

ether night stage let's go happy everybody could find the location a little tricky I think personally for myself it was it's uh quite the contrast too from the other chill room we got the bright room and the dark room so yeah we're we're the uh purple room I guess um but excited about the next panel a bunch of my friends and great builders on stage barriers to entry onboarding web 3 users love to hear your guys strategies and how you're going to attack this um handing it over to Bianca from Chronicle take it away thank you so much Jimmy Denver hope you're enjoying the first day of the main event so far we'll be discussing about how to overcome web free on boarding uh we have around 25,000 uh monthly active uh builders in this space if you're looking at the data from the latest report from Electric Capital and that's a mere 1K additional Builders if we're looking at the numbers from the previous year so with that in mind we'll be exploring how we can attract more developers but most importantly how we can retain those developers before we dive deeper into that I would like to introduce myself and our panelists today they really they they need no introduction but just for the sake of it I'll start with myself my name is Bianca buza I'm Le at Deval at Chronicle uh the Oracle behind the team behind the first Oracle on ethereum and I have with myself another David director of devil at igen Labs uh Francesco androli director of devil at consensus and Austin Griffith founder of b y thank you so much bianka all right so going back to what we were discussing previously about uh developers the the of attracting developers and retaining this what would you say are the biggest challenges developer face when transitioning to web free and are there any teams uh that you've seen to successfully address these challenges I so I think it's complicated right like the technology stack itself is complicated you've got to learn new things but in a different way it's all open source and very approachable and composable and permissionless so there's kind of like two sides to it but you just it it takes a while to get in and really understand things I think and I think that's probably the the hardest part but it's not that hard like the tools are there the education is there in terms of developers coming in we've really paved the way and there's a golden pathway for for developers come into ethereum I think I mean Austin is very humble because you know scuffle E I don't know how many developers trained during the past I don't know like 10 years and you're shipping a lot of like integration kind of new Commerce it's it's really cool to be a web through developer actually going through this journey yeah um I came in through Austin's stuff early on so um that's why I asked him to get first because I know he has just a lot more like length of experience so I'm kind of Assuming he's seen things change and a lot more than obviously someone like me but um I found it interesting that right now there's like a lot of opportunities for jobs in the blockchain world like all these new companies that have received funding are just hiring voraciously but if you look in the traditional software world there's a lot of layoffs happening I think AI is like maybe the only area where we're kind of seeing a lot of like growth but a lot of my friends are having challenges being laid off and losing their jobs and and stuff like that in the traditional software world so it's very like it's surprising to know that so few new developers are coming into this space with so much opportunity I just don't know the I don't really know the answer to why we're still having such uh problems but we were just in Stanford like last week at treeh hacks hackathon 11,000 people sign up for this from the top universities in North America often like OB League schools and they only allow 1,000 participants so it's kind of like the cream of the crop and none of the people there were interested in building on crypto which was very like surprising to me um when I say none I mean like 5% or fewer right so uh even with all of the stuff that we're like in the rabbit hole of and excited about it's still like an somewhat like an echo chamber almost so um during this conversation I'm hoping to kind of like share some of my thoughts and hear some of their thoughts on how we can kind of change that I mean I think the only true wave of kind of like Web Two developers come into space right now is coming through like a agents I see literally PhD AI Engineers coming like from L llm kind of uh backgrounds uh because like the nature of web three rails right I don't know like what are kind of the other challenges that you see right now for for on boarding but I mean there are companies also do trying to push kind of the boundaries right I really like like stylus so we know that C++ developers are a lot people don't want to kind of use something else that is not python related so I don't know like there is a lot of challenges around these so going back to we fix the tooling we fix the education like if you are a technical person you can land and learn this stuff very well uh but backing up like why aren't there more people Landing I think and Nat and I talk about this all the time but it it probably has a lot to do with price and it has to do with like people getting rich and talking about it to their friends and there's just a lot less of that happening right now and also the people that are getting rich are grifters and we just have just like waves of grifters coming in and that's what people see from the outside that's what people see when when you're talking about something you you know that you overhear someone saying you know I Max extracted some meme coin on salana that's kind of the discussion right now that's the narrative it's not let's build on chain and get rid of the intermediaries and you know create this credibly neutral everyone can get to it always on technology it's more like how do I get rich and that's sad that is the thing that draws a lot of people in and just there hasn't been a lot of that these days there's not a lot of eth ripping up and people going what is that I want to learn about it and so I think that's probably kind of driving this stagnation of developers no I I want to say the biggest smart uh brain let say Capital injection I don't know how when when you call it I think is through a agents right now because if not we will not have anything in this cycle that is rather kind of like mcoin related so I don't know how how we want to call it if is it something that you see also around I think AI agents are dope and it's really cool that like AI agents yes like kind of are taken off sort of by the AI world but the guys who are pioneering it have kind of one foot in Ai and one foot in crypto and we're seeing guys like sha that you interviewed the other day like really push these really cool Frameworks and AI is kind of AI becoming the new UI and using AI to talk to crypto and using AI to build crypto things so the AI space AI agent space is very exciting and I do think it will drive some folks in an interesting kind of side note sorry about my tangents I jump on them all the time AI guys really love Python and we haven't really pushed Viper that much in the space solidity just makes more sense to a lot of the developers but I do think that Viper will kind of Trojan Horse a lot of developers in as they learn about AI agents they come in they start running these agents they try to put some stuff on chain they try to put a token they try to you know incentivize things and all of a sudden it's like oh this crypto stuff starts to make sense so hopefully yes hopefully AI agents do help push the the crypto narrative where is Patrick Collins with his Viper we need him here [laughter] yes but but neither youve been running a lot of like tutorials on uh actually like those AI Frameworks from like Kor Pro and stuff do you feel this this is getting more and more utilized even in web 3 yeah there's a lot of people that have used I would I feel just almost like Eliza itself has just brought in a lot of non- crypto developers into AI because it was kind of the simplest way to do an a social agent because it kind of hacked the Twitter API and and didn't require the API key so it was just kind of like a really low barrier to entry to Simply build something just experimental and fun and at least it kind of opened the door to to a few new developers uh quite a few actually that I've talked to a lot of the youngest like uh generation like gen Z people I've talked to a lot of them are kind of like dipping their toes into crypto through Eliza so that's pretty cool to see yeah I think we we covered a few initiatives that are bringing developers and are effective maybe now we also look at those that you've seen in in the ecosystem and you would say are not so effective and maybe we should do less of those any thoughts about those [clears throat] um are you asking like what's the the specific question I guess different [clears throat] initiatives you might have seen in the ecosystem that uh that aren't working exactly it are trying but they're not really bringing the results yeah I mean they're not kind of ecosystem specific right but when I see right now accessibility around for example Stark net or Rask based ecosystem they are I mean they're very difficult to on board if you're not a Ras based kind of like I don't know 10 years web to Dev I don't know what what is your opinion but I feel like ecosystem right now building also extra tooling if you're not building now this tooling you're actually leaving out the accessibility part of those developers when I was in um again when I was at tree haacks last week at Stanford and kind of seeing this new crowd of uh Builders coming up and what they were excited about um and then if you kind of look at what a lot of the discussions are on Twitter uh which is often the voice of of a lot of the protocols that that are happening there's often like really deep technical discussions around like how rollups work and ZK and like you know uh different ways of doing encryption and uh but there's no discussion around product building but all that people were talking about at Stanford were products like ideas and how to build those so I think uh we just need to focus on the tech stack and what you can actually build with that and not the underlying uh like arguments about like what's slightly a better L2 than the other or all this other stuff um and the stuff that was being built during that hackathon was was just incredible like a lot of Robotics a lot of AI a lot of drone stuff just a lot of like Hardware stuff um all types of stuff so like the way that I'm looking at it this year is is building um kind of like I'm putting together this idea of uh like the you know I would almost call it you know the next generation of the tech stack where we kind of have ai we have Cloud we have mobile we have blockchain and we kind of like present that to the developer and and now they have all these different tools that they can build anything with but we're not pushing crypto on them because they just really give a from what I've seen um early on unless they are like crypto pilled like us like we love this stuff right but uh another you know the average person is just interested in building like a useful product right so I think that's kind of the approach that we're going to take things things that haven't worked so the question was things that we've tried that aren't working I would say like the memec coin cycle is a an obvious thing there right like meme coins seemed like they were working and it seemed like this is like the new hot thing but they all went to zero right or zero is so I think meme coins was a structure or an attempt at something that failed and we we saw the cycle getting shorter and shorter and shorter it was you know a one week cycle and then it was a one day cycle and then it was a one hour cycle and now mem coins will launch and be done in 30 minutes right so I think that was a thing that failed I think if we could have figured out a way to capture more developers capture more value in a productive constructive way like that could have been way better but mem coins I think have been a a fa failed structure and a failed attempt I think that also as we moved ethereum to be more scalable we fragmented a whole bunch of things we've got a lot of l2s now there's a lot of fragmentation a lot of fragmented liquidity and experiences across those so in in trying to make ethereum and the evm faster and cheaper more approachable to mainstream audiences at the same time we've fractured a lot of it too and we've got some challenges ahead with that I I I definitely see and this kind of could be a fail but the road to MVP is getting accelerated like crazy right right so one things that I see is that as you kind of say like we get so granular in our discussion that we actually miss the point of building like DBS like faster or like shorting up the the life cycle right and how you do that is pre-build CLI examples tutorials and a lot of time we see so many kind of like protocol developer pushing for actually like you know protocol updates but we're missing the fact that a lot of web to developers want to build apps quick they want to Frameworks but also they want to have this kind of like you know more AI fine-tuned stuff like K or lovable all these kind of like things I think they're generating much more hype and I think we failed to attract um uh more DBS developers I think higher level developers they're not on the protocol level I kind of have a follow-up question for Austin because I think what you're doing with ble Guild is quite uh interesting uh if you look at the numbers you stream like 77 to it to 1,297 uh Builders after you do the ma you realize that it's quite a small uh amount of money and when you after you compare this with like what the numbers you see like at hackaton or at Grants this is like way way less money on the on the other hand yet it is more effective uh all these Builders you manage to retain them they're either Founders Builder Builders uh they either join protocols uh the point being they continue to be in the ecosystem what do you do different tell us the secret I I think so uh going back to devs will pass by crypto and it's our job to catch them and make sure they have a bunch of good materials and information and the ability to build and so it's it for me was like okay I can't control the flow but I can catch them as they're coming in and make sure we have really good content I mean going back to all the dev rail tricks of time to hello world and all the stuff I've learned from you guys I think that like it was about optimizing that for new devs that come in uh speedrun ethereum.org that take them through the sort of aha moments of like oh this doesn't work the way I thought it worked or it doesn't work this the way I thought it worked in web 2 like this is a totally different thing if I want I always use the example of a crown job if I want a crown job it's not about just having a box that checks in on a Cron job it's about incentives like you have to write the rules correctly but also provide incentives and developers learn that as they come in so I don't think I did anything special I think it was about being in the right place at the right time and having a lot of good content and being super open and having my DMs open and there was just a guy just now who came in who was like I got started in ethereum because of you you bought me an ens name like five years ago and now I'm working at hadera doing this other stuff I'm like that's awesome we're still buying oh thank you heart hearts we're still buying ens names like if you go to scholarship. build.com bidle gle.com you just see like a bunch of names and that's what like it's just like you come in we give you like 30 bucks and say go get a an ens name and that's like part of our program we have a batch program and a whole bunch of other things but I think the short answer is just like soft catching people and giving them all the content and tools they need to thrive and I think also how you do it right all this kind of gamification you know it started with crypto zombies and then I really like the guys from from node Guardians there is a lot of like Ed da cyh again like but I think the gamification is also one part of the the medal here and you've been also like running a lot of like videos tutorials I think gamification is part of a game what are kind of the other things that that you see that are like working the best to build resiliency in in Builders because a lot of time even with Eliza I see people starting testing out Eliza and then they actually like mov to the next things already like how you build this kind of resiliency in in the community too I feel like giving the developer the aha moment and that magical feeling of like success is as quickly as possible so better developer experience developer tooling better abstractions and just overall just giving them the opportunity to kind of build something that works as quickly as possible um because like early on when I started even um with everything that was out there it was hard to piece together how to put together an full application we didn't have ai ai and all that stuff but now we have like much better tooling so it's almost like you know no excuse for someone to come in and not become successful or at least to provide them like everything they need to become successful but uh you know just better abstractions and we're getting there it just takes time maybe also expectations like as someone comes in you kind of have to like show them the Dunning Krueger graph and be like you're here and you're going to go through the pit of despair and then you'll be you'll be successful eventually but I think if you set expectations with Developers early it helps them realize that this is a long game and this is not a Sprint you're not just going to like instantly get rich it feels like you might instantly get rich because you're sitting here programming money but really you won't usually just get rich and if you're here to get rich in the first 10 minutes like that's probably not going to work out well so setting expectations putting the timeline telling them they have to put in the time telling them maybe there is some riches at the end of this rainbow but it takes a long time to get there I think so I think expectations are good too I agree with that I have two more initiatives I would like to go over one is for nether and one for Francesco let's start with nether I think what you're doing with the universities across North America is very interesting the the recent Partnerships can you get us more insights on how different difficult was to set that up what results are you seeing so far and do you think that can be replicated Maybe by smaller teams yeah so last year we had a 200,000 I mean we spent 200k for our whole like year for all Deval activities and uh for in my experience that was like very low because I remember some companies we would spend like six times seven times that in just one event right so uh even though we spent 200k we still managed to have like the fastest growing blockchain like ecosystem um relative to to the whole to the whole whole world I guess but um based on that like we were we we really all went to Seattle at the end of last year and like brainstormed how can we really grow our our user base and Al also be like we have this idea of like infinite sum games or positive sum um initiatives where we kind of hopefully benefit everyone so we came out with three pronged approach for 2025 uh one of them was this University program that uh she spoke about so uh what we're doing is like we have a year-long um initiative to connect with the top students all around the world that are in uh you know in college I guess you could say uh this year I mean I'm sorry this month we're starting with uh North American universities so we've uh connected with all of the blockchain clubs with all the universities in North America um we've uh run I would say com almost like a contest within each blockchain Club in North America to find the top two students within that blockchain club and we' flown them here to Denver and we're running something called the igen games uh we have students from like you know Tennessee from Stanford from Yale from Harvard from like pretty much all the big colleges around the world I'm I'm sorry around North America here here and they're all like competing for priz pools here at e Denver but also our own priz pools uh we're taking them out to eat to meet all the top people in the industry and we've now like started seeing like all these blockchain clubs Twitter's Twitter accounts like tweeting about um all the stuff that they're excited about and that they're learning and they even talk about our company some so the whole idea though is to kind of like reach new people that are not typically like already coming to crypto conferences or not in the crypto space so like the University thing uh these are blockchain people but they've never really been like involved in in any of these events or stuff uh the other two are like outside of crypto one of them is going to be is is AI and the other one we haven't really announced yet but that's coming in the next month or so so but the general idea is to yeah like connect with um new folks and give them opportunities and uh kind of bring them into this world that we we love I guess thank you for the insights on that um fren just an awesome initiative I just want to say that's freaking awesome keep doing it yeah and um like 100% of the work is actually been done by Mustafa and uh his team who's like on my team he's devell but uh Mustafa is kind of in charge of that so I definitely give um him all the credit so he's doing an excellent job he's not here I don't think so he's looking at the streaming the next uh initiative I want to talk about actually it's for you Francesco uh Builder nights I think that's also quite amazing what you're doing uh would you say that's effective uh I know for sure it's effective uh for people who are already in the ecosystem would you say you're also attracting new developers and do you think that can be like something to emulate in other two other protocols as a way to kind of on board new Talent yeah I mean that's you did the homework amazing no no how many of you guys um have been in a builder night before yeah couple of people Al cool cool cool so basically like two almost like two years and a half ago we said okay every I mean not just Dev but anybody building on their Tex stack kind of like shiing to developers and we said okay let's try to actually do something different build kind of a safe space for developer to actually discuss topics so you can actually get all the players together and see how they're debating things online so we started with like 437 we went into wallets we we did layer twos fragmentation and we were very specific on on topics tonight we will do one on 772 but long story short is that we run 25 of those uh and and everyone is super excited to actually hear debates around specific kind of like uh uh you know could be architecture uh debates could be topics around actually how to enhance kind of like the developer experience so very general topics so the kind of three vertical is kind of like no Shilling we're also like encouraging every players to to actually come and actually no product specific discussion but actually verticals and I think this way you can actually really like rely on a strong top of the funnel you can actually get a lot of Web Two developers we actually saw a lot of like Web Two deaths and web two Builders coming because of the topic specific right instead actually pushing the tax stack specific and I think I mean every time is going well at the end of the day is just side events but this year we're spinning also this community Builder nights h on kind of audition right so we run kind of like the first couple of those in in Brazil so Hann is here like on on community Builder night kind of like metamask card Edition so we actually on board new users so locally but also create kind of like more safe space about how you actually on ramp how you actually uh offramp and also very basic uh uh developer skills like you know build your first D under one hour uh you know scuffle he check H da you know a lot of different Frameworks out there so uh that that was think a big win but obviously like there are different levels of the funnel where you want to engage developers and I think uh doing that on a safe space no shielding way at the beginning is probably the most effective one nice thank you for the insights here we don't have much time left unfortunately but I want to leave you with one final questions what trends have you identified in Dev recently and specifically related towards on boarding developers I think uh we spoke about the time to Hell world that was such a critical thing last year like making sure devs it's so complicated making sure they can come in and Dink around right away and get the AHA moments I think this year it's about you're not even specifically making content for humans anymore what you need to do is have like digestible information for llms so people who are Vibe coding on cursor which is most of them these days can easily get your information out of the llm so like an llms do text or an llms all.

text those those little files will go a long ways not just having a tutorial for a human but make sure your content is very digestible by llms and you get that information in those agents I don't know what an ll. text file is I just learned something just got invented check it out lm. text it's just like you know how you had like a a bot. text you know you know on Old HTML websites there was like a was it bot. Tex it was some kind of like go like Index this but don't Index this yeah it's this is something like this lm.

Tex is sort of like a here's like a no you know structure needed just a giant text file that will dump all the context to your your agents and that gets crawled by the llms interesting um yeah I will say one things that we're working on is pre-build CIS we did that on the SDK side on the linear side we we are working on different things on on embedded wallets so also providing this kind of seedless onboarding for for developer DS developer so I think like pre-build things is something that we are really looking forward to even like pre-built containers I I see start start seeing people sharing like perplexity containers where actually people take it and actually create their own flow on on on the llm it's actually super interesting so I think like providing this in your docks would be super interesting because one thing is the CLI to work on and then you have pre-build prebuild examples and containers for you to take it so verticalized tutorials so it's not just a tutorial but it's kind of like pre uh pre-built tutorial that you can actually take F this is another thing that like Frameworks are actually coming back in I would say that like last year it was hard to sell a framework because it's so complicated and if you're going to go to production you need to know everything about that stack and so developers would see a nice framework like scaffold eth and see like yes I could deploy something in an hour but I'd rather take two or three days to do it so I understand the full stack I think it's we're we're trending back now toward Frameworks because of AI agents and prompting AI it's a lot easier for me to prompt an AI agent and say go use scaffold eth to build this rather than how do I build this and and with scaffold e there's a lot of stuff that's kind of there already that helps provide context to the agent on how to read and write from contracts and how to you know make components and all that stuff I think one challenge that will come back will be Integrations because with Frameworks come also integration Challenge and which different levels and we see that already with specific CLI even with Eliza like some kind of integration are not done on the partner specific and they're waiting actually for the na integration I think this will come like will become a challenge soon yeah I think we're getting close on time so I'll I'll just wrap up with saying like two things I guess one on that part on the whole framework thing we were we had two people in our company that were building agent Frameworks me and Nema back in 2024 at the end when we found uh Eliza and then we were like oh just like scrap that this actually works much better for the thing that we were trying to do and it's like way ahead so yeah like there's like hundreds of contributors now to Eliza and um yeah I think like building a framework is just so much work doing all these different actions and orchestrating things with cron jobs and everything and it's just so much so it's cool to see that we have some nice Frameworks to kind of to to start with but in terms of like what a technique that might be different that works well it's not really Devo but I think distribution is like becoming more and more important if you look at what abstract is is doing they almost have like an app store type of thing that's pretty cool that might attract Builders I think Eliza does a great job of amplifying everyone building in their ecosystem so I think finding some way to give your your Builders distribution would be a form of Devo that you can kind of do to help and that's something we're also trying to work on a little bit so one thing that abstract is doing really well is uh the self- custody model like you used to have to have a seed phrase and all that and now it's just like a smart contract wallet with some good recovery and now people can just fingerprint their way in and do whatever they want on chain smoothly seedless on boarding right this this become big for you Bianca what is the most exciting things that is happening soon yeah I think unfortunately uh I'm getting signs that were a lot over time so we need to wrap it up here let's give a l a round of applause to our panelists [applause]