The Diversity Index - Maggie Love (mod) and Alana Podrx

hey everyone um thank you so much for the introduction lane uh thanks for danny and all the organizers um finding us time to come and speak to you about bringing esg to crypto and values based index uh my name is maggie love i'm gonna be moderating the panel the two things i do in crypto i work on an infrastructure project called web3 cloud and then i also educate women and onboard them into the community through a program called shify um and so we're here to introduce you to something that we're all working on together and hope to get you excited about it and collaborate us collaborate with us on it i'm going to moderate so first i'm going to have all the panelists introduce themselves thanks maggie hi everyone my name is elena podricks i'm earning a project called eve wealth which is the first wealth dow so we forget focus on on-chain investment and education onboarding women especially from the trad five world hey my name is rebecca carmelo i lead the growth team at xerion which is a d5 aggregator i also have a background in doing community currency research so looking at the intersection of universal basic income and crypto and working with these amazing women on bringing esg to crypto hello my name is joy sulini i'm the co-founder of investera we're an education community that's helping bringing those that are underrepresented into the space by developing like good ux and tech solutions with education as an on-ramp my background is in financial inclusion in emerging markets great so the first question i have and all these wordmen are working on this values-based index token um so any of you can really answer the question um but like why did you decide to tackle this problem or what were you trying to accomplish like what sparked the idea yeah happy to kick off so what i think is super interesting is it actually started off as a coming together of amazing women in the space so it was actually 10 of the top female crypto educators investors just meeting together and realizing that there's this onboarding problem and in particular this barrier to entry that often has to do with values a lot of the women and non-binary or underrepresented folks that we spend a lot of time educating and onboarding we're really looking for guidance and curation and we were spending a lot of time doing that so we thought what better thing to do than come together and actually help try to come up with a point of view on what that could look like what the criteria could be and how to help guide you know the people that were focused on helping the best way possible so these are just four of us but there are ten total uh representation from sheep i women in blockchain and many other great organizations okay great so um we're trying to solve the problem of bringing more values based investing into crypto and to date what have you been doing to try to define what those values are so i think that there are a couple of things when we talk about values investing a really good place to start is to look at what's happening in traditional finance and take from the context there which is that you've seen this wave of retail investment becoming a lot easier for people so think of apps like robinhood coinbase but the next generation the next question in that really is what are people investing in and why right so access is one thing but then the kinds of investing investments you're making is another and what we see is that esg style products have become increasingly popular the size of the market has grown almost exponentially in the last couple of years and i think joy can speak to that a little bit more but when we think about how it applies to crypto the first obvious things would be looking at diversity of your teams right so who's on who's in your leadership how many of your employees are either women people of color minorities and then another one that would be really obvious is climate impact and this is super exciting because there's so much going on in crypto right now around regenerative finance looking at things like carbon markets but when we talk about values i mean that's that's really broad and i think that's something that people also define for themselves and so we envision a world where that can really open up beyond these two categories um and that's you know part of what we're doing and sort of learning in public is really getting that feedback from the crypto community and asking what are the things that we could be categorizing as values based investing in the space because so much is still being defined and that's a really exciting playground to work with but i'd also really love to hear from joy on just what more has been happening in esg in general in traditional finance yeah so i think if we zoom out a bit and look at why would we tackle this through index funds if you look at tradify and what happened there index funds allowed people to see it as a low barrier entry to investing and something's well diversified lower risk so we saw massive movement of retail investors into index funds and then with esg which has been around since the early 2000s it only gained traction like in about 2019 where the volume quadruple there's a couple reasons for that but you saw a lot more women and millennials getting into the space and demanding wanting to know like i want to invest but only in a way that aligns with my values so it's time now for index the time is right to index funds to enter into the crypto world and right now you mostly have to be an accredited investor in order to be able to participate in centralized crypto index funds decentralized exchanges though provide that opportunity for anyone to get involved and right now there is not a index fund crypto index fund that looks at values based investing and so we don't want to wait two decades like tradfi did we want to start having this conversation now and we we up here we don't have the answers yet this is a work in progress we're very much making it a community solution project and inviting people from the community to contribute and so i guess what projects are like what tokens were you looking to include into this index fund or like what areas have you examined and kind of like what have you learned from trying to like understand like how to pick the types of projects to put in this fund yeah it's been a journey of like learning and figuring out how to choose and figure out the criteria because data right now is super limited it's also limited in the traditional financial space so companies like diversio have manually created their rankings and listing for their fortune 500 evaluations so we kind of took that same approach saying we wanted to start somewhere like collecting the information and seeing what data was available what part was automated what was not and when we thought about the methodology we looked at things like followership on twitter what percentage were female using different social media analytics tools we also looked at github contributors we looked at scraping linkedin data to look at employee gender equality and then even women on leadership teams so it was actually a manual process of the community coming together to create those scores for each of those dimensions and then rank by market cap each of the protocols on how they were performing on things like planet and people and from there we start to look at the composition of what would that look like for a layer one protocol to give people exposure to a basket of protocols that they could feel good about so we had a first proposal the planet and people combination was a lot and also a lot to market and would be a lot to maintain from a data standpoint so we're in this evaluation process and definitely building in public to get ideas of what that could look like and we'll be publishing the results of the scores that we've already started to pull in and then we also did try to look at women-led d5 protocols and we came up with ten so uh we did scour the twitter sphere for that and uh you know very proud to know that there are projects like open and apricot an enzyme but obviously if you guys know of some we would love to get some feedback and we actually have an open survey live right now to collect contributors to work on naming and to also really aggregate more data more sources of protocols that we should be considering so yeah so if you want to get involved you can help us collaborate on our survey let us know what you care about what you'd like to see in a values-based index sounds like we're leading leaning towards layer one protocols to include in it and i'm curious how do you think about balancing the values the esg with also like performance of some of these assets how are you thinking about that when you are building this product so yeah this is something that we thought about really strongly as we're putting together the methodology and obviously we had the exact same criteria that you might use in any other index right so looking at market cap looking at things like volatility i mean you can get really creative when you look into d5 indexes and the kinds of strategies that people are using and so we don't see that as being any different we still apply those methodologies the difference is that we're changing things like weighting based on certain criteria and i think that what what's really interesting about this question is that there is an underlying challenge of where does the data come from in the first place so alana told you that we were looking at things like twitter followers and your percentage of your leadership team that's women and i think she's being she's kind of brushing over how difficult that was completely manual yeah it is a completely manual process uh some of the times your half the team is anonymous so we don't know if there's a women on your leadership team um you know employee data that's not on linkedin and so an underlying question to all of this is how do we standardize making this information more accessible to people right there is a precedent of when people know what the sustainability criteria or sustainability sustainability impact or leadership is on a team they will move money so when morningstar published climate metrics for the first time in 2018 15 billion dollars moved away from mutual funds that were not classified as sustainable towards ones that were and i think that this just points to the need for that data to be available in the first place and how do we standardize that for protocols and token projects i mean that's kind of like this two-pronged uh challenge that we're trying to rise to because it doesn't seem that anyone else is doing it yeah and i just want to reinforce this is not for like a check the box sort of thing like studies have shown the financial benefits from an investment perspective in tradify of those projects that are mindful towards esg including diversity and equity it brings big financial returns and there's a big impact on bottom line so performance and doing good is not mutually exclusive and we want to like be talking about that now in this space and making sure it's not just check like checking boxes and we we see that with our communities right like we're all leaders of communities of people who are on boarding in and this is not a check box for them this is a requirement a lot of the time for them to even consider making a first investment is understanding the climate impact understanding the people planet profit equation and so and your research so far and like then and people who've responded to your initial survey um because you were saying like eventually we'd like to tackle all of the areas of esg but maybe not for the first iteration what have you found that people are saying like these people that care about certain values like what is coming out is maybe something people want to prioritize now versus later or how are you like what is that feedback been yes well still collecting a lot of information so i want to show that it is still open and would love to get more feedback but we have had you know multiple hundreds of people complete the survey so far and the thing that's really interesting is understanding how things enter public consciousness first right i think 2017 we started to start seeing the conversation around carbon credits and crypto so clearly that's just become more popularized and we've seen that in the survey right the the first highest interest esg problem that people want to tackle in an index fund are protocols that look at planet so climate dao has done a lot of effort there we've seen some really great initiatives with toucan the thing is that the market cap and the liquidity for those tokens right now make the profit uh equation more difficult so you know us going and back testing and seeing what would that look like in constructing this index we obviously originally felt like it would be great to do something with a gender equality lens right because we were all coming from communities with that in mind but really focused on more just creating a really great basket of layer ones that could be something that we could offer to our communities um and it be designed with a feminine lens so yeah i think to answer the question the the results so far that like the gender equality thing maybe it's insufficient and i think partially right now that's because you know an eth address doesn't have a gender and maybe we're even trying to move beyond you know into a post-gender world but still um i think we're seeing a definitely huge amount of momentum and interest in values-based basket index products and that's where we're really excited to play a role in collecting the data to decide what that looks like yeah you mentioned this earlier a big part of this is curation right so we all have experience onboarding educating women and non-binary folks new people to crypto specifically like a lot of our work is bringing more people into this space and a big part of that is you know facilitating that we are experts and we have put work into this so um allowing people to kind of you know get exposed to crypto and maybe through like a lens that they understand more like values and then over time maybe learn some more like the nitty gritties of like the different uh layer ones i think that's gonna be super powerful um in onboarding people and we only have a few minutes left so i guess i want to kind of touch on how can people get involved into this process what how you have a name i know and a twitter so some of you want to start getting people involved if this interests you thinking about valuing protocols and values were definitely want to collaborate with everybody and would love to see more interest so um i'll let you guys take it away yeah so the first place to start would be follow us on twitter we are at values index um spelt as it's pronounced and we do currently have our market survey that is still up we really want to maximize the number of people who are answering that so we've been sharing it in our own communities but we want to get in feedback from the d5 native crowd we want to get feedback from the power users from the newbies from the nft artists i mean this really is an effort that is for everyone and i think you know we've mentioned this a couple of times but we are really doing this in public we are learning in public we are building in public and we are doing it because we've seen this immense community demand for something that is aligned with values so when we tell our friends hey invest in crypto and they ask us how do i invest in something that is aligned with my values on climate and diversity we don't want to just hear crickets we want to give them something and that is what we're doing so fill out that survey there's also a contributor interest form we're going to be sharing some of the conversations that we have and we're just really looking to engage with anyone who's interested in this topic i would also add to that that if you are part of a project that is having these kind of discussions please come talk to us because we did a lot of digging and it was really hard to find that kind of information so we want to hear what you're doing what's in development so we can put you on the platform to acknowledge what you're doing great and just to close it out i guess maybe one person can answer you can all give your own perspective but like what are you really hoping to achieve with this esg values focused index token yeah maybe we can each cover i think for our community in particular i definitely want to be able to lead people to a destination that they can feel good about and not knowing that this doesn't exist right now is really motivating to come together with an incredible group of female leaders to develop something that that we can feel good about sharing and to be leaders in the space to create something really new i think getting the message out there that you don't have to compromise like performance expectations or your values and what i'm really excited about that isn't in chat phi is the ability to be able to turn like these index funds into tokens that then you can actually utilize the utility behind that and i think that's going to draw a lot of attention and bring a lot of interest to this space um i think this is me personally but we probably share this is that money is power and information is power and so being able to translate that information in the way that people invest is really important we can educate as much as we like and expand the community as much as we like we want to see money moving in the right places we want to see money moving towards projects that are practicing better diversity standards that are practicing better sustainability standards and so we use this as a vehicle to shift the narrative not just for anyone who's interested in the index but for the standard that we set for this industry as a whole okay great well um thank you for joining us i guess i'll have us say our names one more time so you can find us my name is maggie love elena podricks rebecca yeah and contact us reach out to us if you have any questions we'd love to answer or if you're interested in collaborating thanks so much