7. On Chain Graphs and Funding Public Goods - Taipei 2023

[Music] thank you so much for having me uh it's great to be here it's my first time in in taipe uh so yeah really excited to be here uh today the title of my talk is onchain graphs and public goods cool okay let's do this so uh I spent the last uh 15 years studying networks um and uh the first few years of my career actually I was focusing on a very different form of networks I was focusing on Music Creation networks uh how artists interact with other artists how new zoners of Music evolve and how artists interacts with listeners and then the last uh five years I've been uh obsessing with with uh open-source software dependencies and uh the networks that this forms so so graphs really fascinate me um and one of my favorite graphs is this one actually uh so this is coming from the Nyx package manager for the software engineers in in the room uh this uh this runtime and build dependency graph is probably not a a surprise for you but what I really love about this graph is that you see this in software more than anything else you see how our world is so interconnected and how everything actually depends on on on everything else uh so so I really think that this graph reveals a profound truth about our species um and that is that we are all interdependent and our success hint is upon the success of others so when I started uh getting involved with ethereum in 2016 um I got really excited about this vision of the world computer uh having this one database with cryptographic Primitives cryptographic identities programs on chain was something that was really uh really really exciting for me uh I thought that the composability and the transparency of ethereum would enable killer applications uh to be built specifically when it comes to to to public goods and if you think about this especially so many years later ethereum is a graph right and I don't mean I don't mean it in the technical term that etherum is a graph database uh but I mean this in a more mathematical term that ethereum is kind of like a graph structure where you have accounts right cryptographic entities interacting with other cryptographic entities and then you have uh this accounts again interacting with programs right that that we call them smart contracts and any of you that have spent some time on ether scan you can probably feel that right you can take an address and then start navigating that graph and you know finding yourself in in in weird places um so I always thought that this is this is this is brilliant for funding public goods and using that data set but unfortunately so many years later it seems that it's mostly companies related with ontain analytics that are really leveraging that graph and there's not much else happening at least on that scale um so so I've been thinking you know can we go beyond that can we actually build something more meaningful that is leveraging this graph structure of ethereum so some of the some of the projects that started you know experimenting on on on on that vein um started to appear uh one of the more interesting uh projects that came out I think four years ago uh it's called circles uh so uh this is a project coming out of Berlin Germany which is also where I'm based in and uh what circles did to was to take an old concept which is this idea of a web of trust right that every human has a a a a a a trusted group of peers effectively around them that they interact with and then use that to disseminate information um and in the case of circle Ubi uh actually they they they created an interesting um mechanism where effectively they would incentivize connectedness they were using personal tokens and a universal basic income in order for you to actually you know reveal your social graphon chain that's one way to think about this and I think it was really the first application that tried to do something uh that was leveraging this network view on ethereum another project that really sparked some uh uh basically like really inspired some some of the work that we doing with drips was mirror uh so mirror is a uh decentralized publishing platform and um in 2021 um they um of course had had the ability for you to uh share content and then use the centralized storage for that but then when nft started to to to take off they also started um enabling effectively auctions around nfts and one of the really simple things that they did that was very inspiring to me was to actually uh bring this graph structure um like bring this at the Forefront of the UI so for any auction auction that was taking place they had this view of what they called the split list effectively where instead of you know using only one address of who was the the person behind that uh that that um that blog post effectively they started having this lists uh where you can actually like on chain specify you know a group of people that potentially you know was responsible for that for that um piece specific piece of content and a split configuration so any proceeds that would would be raised uh from funding that non uh from from funding that nonf fundable token would be programmatically splitted with a bunch of different addresses and it was one of the first applications that actually um you know leveraged this this graph graph based View and brought it at the Forefront you know it's it's the simplest structure but what mirrored it was to actually bring it at the Forefront of the user experience so moving to some of the work that we've been doing with drips I always you know kept thinking can we use these onchain graphs to fund digital public goods and specifically free and open source software and the problem that I've been obsessing over the years is uh I believe that is really like you know illustrated by this meme this is an internet meme uh that effectively what you see here is that you have all shiny modern digital infrastructure and then you know these little boxes are its dependencies and then you see at some point that you you know like like your sest infrastructure actually depends on a single person somewhere you know like uh somewhere in the world that you know like is really in the night you know keeping like try to keep the lights on and try to keep the software patched and you know up and running and I really feel that this is one of the biggest gaps that we have when we're thinking about funding public goods there's a lot of experimentation a lot of interesting things that happening within within the blockchain world uh with regards to funding public goods a lot of interesting experiments uh with quadratic funding a lot of interesting experiments with uh retroactive public goods funding but I really feel that you know solving this finding a sustainable income for for that one individual and making sure that our structures are actually stable uh is one of the open problems that uh we as a community need to solve so uh so so when when you know when I realize that this is one of the things that uh we collectively need to solve I started working on something that's called drips uh and drips is is a really simple idea uh and it's a toolkit for effectively for you to fund your critical software dependencies the way it works is the following so at the core of the user experience you have this uh list uh anyone can create any onchain list effectively give it a title and then these lists uh contain either ethereum addresses or ens name names uh and one of the innovations that we bringing to the table as you can see there uh these are GitHub repos so you actually have the possibility to construct a list in this case this is a list that my organization has created we call them drips dependencies and then uh effectively start funding it right so what you see there is a bunch of different projects uh and and amount and one of the interesting things that uh we're doing with drips is that you have the possibility to either fund this as a one of payment payment a single donation or actually stream into it so you have this continuous flow of funding uh that is taking place um now if you look at the dependencies there uh the third project is a really well-known project called ethers DJs uh this is one of the projects that most of the crypto projects actually depend on and um in in our case this person is receiving 133% of whatever you know funding is going into that list and um the interesting thing that we're doing with it is um continuing to operate in that graph based mindset so the moment this maintainer actually gets to claim the funds we ask them to do the exact same thing we basically tell them like hey you can you have a bunch of income come claim it and then when you do that specify who are the maintainers and who are your your own critical software dependencies and through that process effectively a graph emerges right so you have these lists of lists we funded ether JS and then ether JS basically says that whatever comes to my wallet uh you know 12% will be splitted with ens normalized tojs uh ensuring effectively that funding will reach the lowest levels of the stack funding will reach this one single random person that is tirelessly maintaining a software package somewhere in the world so um yeah and and as I mentioned you know you can do this as a oneof you can do this as a continuous stream of funds uh you know create creating a sustainable form of income effectively for that so yeah so so so these are some applications uh and uh and and I want to take the last part of my presentation to talk about what these onchain graphs really enable for public goods funding um if you are an organization out there what could you be doing with with onchain graphs so the way the way I like to think about this is that uh blockchains and the applications that emerging around blockchains enable new behaviors and and because economics a Behavioral Science as a result they also enable new economics some of the some of the um ideas that I'm really passionate about uh are are these the first one is I feel that we are about to see a lot of a lot of organizations a lot of dows and a lot of traditional organizations that are programmatically and transparent I think this okay we're back great uh so so uh so yeah so so I feel that we are about to see a lot of uh Dows and a lot of traditional organizations programmatically linking their own profits with the public goods that they depend on and again ethereum provides an a brilliant infrastructure in order to do this uh and um luckily we have already started seeing some of those um examples um one of the most fascinating ones that a lot of people are talking about at the moment is coming from the optimism Collective the optimism colle Collective together with vitalic buin created this idea of retroactive public goods funding and and what do they do is that they provide a layer two on ethereum right and um and then the more demand there is for Block space that translates into Revenue to their own sequencer and what they do is now they actually start channeling some of that Revenue back into uh retr pgf that effectively funds a lot of public goods that are being created that further fuel the growth of the op ecosystem right and I think up to date they have allocated I think something around $50 million in fact so significant amounts of funding uh you know start into uh like are being put into this this fly will will another great example uh that is taking place at the moment is something called protocol guilt and oh no worries can you hear me okay yes perfect so another great example that is taking place at the moment uh of similar of of the similar idea is is coming from a project called protocol Guild uh so uh protocol Guild is a collection is basically a group of ethereum maintainers that go together and and and they realize that the incentives are not there for them to keep building the infrastructure for ethereum these are really you know low level the lowlevel stock behind what you all see as you know the ethereum network and so so what this what what did these maintainers do they basically said like what if we actually you know curate a list of all of the different individuals that maintaining critical parts of the ethereum infrastructure and then we go around and we effectively ask for money uh so what the they've done is they went to to Dows like Lio or unisab and they said like hey you all benefit from our work what if you actually start channeling some of that uh Capital back to us and that started taking place and I was very excited about that but then a few months ago another very interesting thing happened which was a traditional organization called Vanek based in the US uh that was actually uh working on an ethereum ETF they came out with an announcement that says that whatever profits they have 10% of those profits from that ethereum ETF will actually be put back into protocol Guild so it effectively they became the first traditional organization to actually programmatically Channel some of their own profits into uh into the ethereum digital public goods and that's very very exciting I really think that we're going to see a lot more organizations do doing the exact same thing so another thing that I believe that's now possible is is a similar idea but is slightly different uh for the people in the room that you already operate in a DA that has a governance token um I think you should all consider you should all consider allocating a portion of your governance power your decision-making power into your own dependencies um we think that it's a really cool way for you to give voice to the people that actually enable your work that make your work possible and then slowly start introducing them to your own community finally the last idea I have is that you know hypers certs you can absolutely use them but you know you can of course use them in a more you know um one degree out type of way but you can also use them in this more graph way where if your funding actually has uh a big impact in a lowlevel part of the stack we can now acknowledge that with hypers search we can make that visible um yeah we're having some technical difficult uh but I'm almost done um so yeah that's that's that's pretty much that uh if I can close with one idea uh this is the one we are all interdependent and our success hinges upon the success of others uh if your organization is interested in funding public goods please come talk to us thank you so [Music] much