EBC22 | User sovereignty: the Web3 promise

from france just to come here so welcome welcome everybody [Music] thanks a lot to you victoria what a great time i'm really thrilled to be on stage with fantastic panelists bringing together social media payments and identity is really where it's at and central to what we're all going to be doing in in the future um again i'm charlie i'm from from a vast company was founded in 1988 with the theme of digital freedom and amazingly 1988 to 2020 um 2022 we're we're back to this theme of user sovereignty and and digital digital freedom um we're going to explore in this panel really the the hope for web3 the promise of web3 are we headed in the right direction uh do we are we finding ourselves with kind of claims going on in the industry about this from big platforms what can we do be doing about it we've got three very innovative companies that are kind of center stage to the true um really true decentralization and really looking forward to it um i'd like to first uh point out to andra uh who's the co-founder of district a decentralized professional social media network uh max is the co-founder and ceo of infinity swap to really swap tokens across blockchains hold tokens in an application wallet and then dan is a new entrant the race for digital identity and web3 really foundationally critical to actually make things go he's the founder of identity labs located in new york so i'm going to turn to our panelists andra first then max then dan for a quick intro of yourselves your company your direction and your opening statement thank you um district is not only a decentralized professional social media network it comes with a cool twist that i think in the web3 industry or in the blockchain industry we all kind of hoped for for a long time which is everything is 100 on chain so no reliances on web 2 no centralized third-party implementations uh district incl everything including the assets of the user um everything including the all the data of the user lives 100 on the internet computer and this is what got us excited about starting this project and the fact that this means that we can give the user autonomy sovereignty and the right to decide about really key things regarding their digital presence and social interactions online so district also i would like to point is a project that's being sustained and maintained and developed by the open internet foundation which is a swiss not-for-profit foundation and our mission has been very clear since the beginning we want an open decentralized platform where users feel that like they get their power back thank you hi guys um yeah max here from infinity swap and we're essentially a dex platform which is targeting the cross-chain space so right now on ethereum what we've seen is this proliferation of layer 2's proliferation of coins on you know lots of different blockchain ecosystems and we're leveraging some really amazing technology uh in the cross-chain world built on the internet computer which will enable you to swap uh coins tokens from different blockchains in a completely decentralized way um funded by polychain capital through their beacon fund as well as a few other high-profile vcs um and i think you know what this kind of technology really enables is um for for creators uh for communities to create their own tokens we've seen that and we've seen you know the growth in different communities and it for me sovereignty is all about enabling the community to earn and you know own the value that they've created so that's that's the promise of tokenization and having all these different blockchains are kind of like their own different tribes in the web three space um you know and and their own their own different groups uh they all want to create value they want to they have an engaged excited user base and you know we're excited to kind of bring them all together through our decks application let me first say it's surreal to actually meet you in person because i've only seen this guy in in on video so that's awesome andre met you a few times but charles also uh damn coven uh so a lot of us are here because we really believe in web3 we believe that web 3 is going to usher in a new society and we uh at internet idea labs are building the infrastructure to for people to become citizens of this new society and taking a step back civil society has evolved over time to help people thrive and survive within it but the system that it operates in suffered and has always suffered from uh human uh concentrations of power and it's always made worse with bias and corruption it's a it's a human problem uh with web 3 what we're all doing what we're all building is we are refactoring the flows of power and providing people with agency what we're doing with internet identity labs is uh building that infrastructure and building the interface through which people will execute and express their authority express their agency and so how we feel about sovereignty is actually twofold there's user sovereignty and there's internet sovereignty andre and max both have talked about the sovereignty that a user has within their their applications within district within the social media application within within the decks with their the sovereignty of their tokens and that is sovereignty as a user of that application it's the authority that they have that the the individual human has with that application what we're concerned with as identity uh is not just the one application that a user has sovereignty with but across all applications that user t the users should have sovereignty with and that's that's how we view identity from that lens that ultimately what we're building is the interface through which you will express your sovereignty across all applications and for example you you you want to switch hospitals uh it's a huge pain in the butt to actually provide data from one hospital to another we all know this we've all experienced this and the sovereignty that you have is the ability for you to just share the data that you want with the next hospital without granting another hospital permission or if you're if god forbid there's a war in your country and you're escaping violence sovereignty is the solution to the problem that you can't have your resources be portable that your money is custodied by banks that your credentials and your critical resources are custody behind other applications that you're used or that rather that that you use and in so many words how we view sovereignty as a whole not just as a user of one application but as a human being using all applications across the internet is that you have an interface through which you express your authority and uh ultimately don't require permission from anyone but yourself in order to do it so so dan and max and andre thanks so i i i think for for the rest of our chat now we'll talk about the p word the promise and i think we would all tend to agree with within this room that that this notion of user sovereignty is where we want to get at we're not there today i think wonderful wonderful innovation going around in the world for for a number of years how do we bridge that gap how do we cross that chasm and do we find it hijacked by big tech i i've seen enough being talked about where we're big tech in the the veil of of really really slick silicon valley marketing is is beginning to recast some organizations as decentralized uh i i might claim fake or false or or decentralization and i'm wondering your your views on this like how do we take innovative true web 3 user sovereignty views and and turn the turn the tide how do we get there what are your views on on on crossing that bridge maybe andre to start i think this is a very interesting question and a bit dangerous like how many people am i allowed to piss off it's um i would say because you mentioned in the beginning something about um you know the first instance of the internet how funny it is that we now came full circle right and i always think about wikipedia and web one and that basically the web 3 promise is just the recycled vision of the original internet where we could have peer-to-peer communication and you know we went from we kind of need to go back to the basics i think it's where i'm getting at and and and remember that shift of power when we went from being communicated at from a television screen or a radio to communicating back via the internet and we did a switch and we like suddenly even as consumers our citizen as everything we had a much more powerful forum to express our opinions and and take agency over what's going on and somewhere along the road basically silicon valley came and glorified words like value capture and you know the middleman economy and made them sound like the dream of every you know tech entrepreneur and i had that dream and it was weird to say the list like my previous startup failed in web 2 because i kind of read all the books and aspire to all the things that that this the tech entrepreneur was supposed to do and i kind of find found them empty of meaning and empty of value for the user for whom i was doing all this and losing you know precious leap and investing all my energy and money and time and it just wasn't worth it so web 3 for me even as an entrepreneur and as a person that wants to serve a certain uh demographic and type of of user um i think it's promise and it's sovereignty lies in the fact that we need to let go of our ego and just get out of the way and build something for them make sure we don't fall into the trap of thinking we're necessary that necessary in our users lives and start from day one with design decisions we were very lucky at district we we then the team we put together from day one only made decision according to our values and and most of them are here in this room and they know like cassie there she's our head of design and she designed the product and from day one we knew exactly what we would allow and why we wouldn't and kind of stuck to it even if it was hard i'm not saying it's perfect i'm just saying it's an experiment that's worth doing even though you maybe don't know if you're going to be as profitable as you would be if you would value capture which is parasitic by the way i get rid of the parasitic mindset as an entrepreneur and it trickles down well andre you mentioned uh the tech entrepreneurs in silicon valley came in and kind of hijacked all these terms but my question is why did it work and why is it still working and i i think the answer is because the experience is really good for people people really appreciate that like a one-click sign-in is a dream and we don't have that with web3 like it's so hard to onboard anywhere and i think until the experience of onboarding the experience of using it the experience of really appreciating web3 is simple and intuitive no one's going to do it people are they trend towards convenience that's what we've seen and and these silicon valley folk take advantage of that because that's just that's what people want they want convenience you ask them in studies do you want privacy yes okay do you use google yes but you just said you wanted privacy so it's the it's this convenience part that i think uh is the big stumbling block in web through right now and something we have to get over people need to be able to get in and experience what it what it means not just because of the fact that it's available to them but because it solves their problems not and and solves the problems in a in a seamless way when we get a seamless way of solving people's problems of having portable identity of being able to have access and own all your posts on district of being able to swap your tokens easily instantly and permissionlessly on infinity swap and being able to take this anywhere without anyone's permission and you not even knowing that you're doing this it's just like available to you and with one click you do this you don't have to be signing every transaction waiting for things to either succeed or fail and then if they fail you have no idea why maybe you lost interconnection maybe something else happened you have no idea but this experience is is a a huge obstacle uh to adoption and and dan it's it's it's i'm almost reminded now of the pre-95 uh power that that existed with with microsoft and all of a sudden we began to see amazon and facebook and and they won because it was cool for people and so i think what you're saying is for us to kind of win it's not about selling self-sovereignty it's selling cool stuff for people i i think that's the point absolutely yeah no no one cares about something that's uncool that's not very cool max your view your view on this and in thinking about payments how how do you get the cool how do we get to cool um i mean i think blockchain is cool i think crypto is cool it enables you to kind of share whatever token whatever ecosystem uh it could be a d gen play it could be an nft it could be whatever else it's definitely you know what is hip right now and i think it really what it comes down to is the fact that a lot of these tech giants people in industry are trying to hijack what is cool for their own marketing purposes and in so doing also i think they're kind of twisting the ethos of what blockchain was all about because when in the early days of the internet as you said charles and andrew you got this sense of the world opening up like anything was possible you could do your own startup you could create something new and we kind of got that same feeling with blockchain as well and the world of crypto the hegemony of the incumbents was being broken down and it was a new world is being created so i think the question also comes down to like how does the crypto world like kind of organize itself create the kind of governance structures that are needed to actually ensure that you know they vouch safe exactly the kind of principles that they want in the in the crypto world crypto community and um you know that's part of a grassroot that roots effort as much as it is about ensuring that user experiences are really you know down nailed down to a t um anyway that's that's my that's my two cents on the thing so when we uh when we think about the old world and how they how they got started i mean facebook started with something simple it was sort of grassroots and uh i could talk to you you can talk to dan dan could talk to andre we can kind of share stuff and there was no business model and and that kind of got going and amazon lost money forever and ever and ever doing what they do selling books and then selling stuff so the question is what ends up fueling the promise where does the money ultimately come from from doing great stuff is that centralized in the old way that is the venture pe community is going to get behind small innovative really really cool companies is it grassroots behind it what's the model how do we get to commercial success because at the end of the day we know money in one form or the other is going to be needed to fuel the innovation i i believe but maybe correct me if i'm wrong i would just i just like to you know come in there because i think that's a great great point you know we think of things as you know being vc driven big money flows in to drive innovation and progress and yet that's the exact opposite of the software world you know you've got an open source community uh building great things on ubuntu or you know whatever whatever software stack and the progress really is grass roots so you know i think it there is kind of room for both and it really comes down to you know um you know even what small entrepreneurs can do you know with their with their startups and making progress in the field and i think we already can see a few case studies in the web 3 ecosystem where we saw massive how can i call this an influx of vc money in certain networks that made them experience this massive growth that wasn't organic and that was at a very accelerated pace and that's very hard to sustain it's not impossible many of them could continue to be successful and be like one of those few that are going to be you know the new web three giants um but you kind of see where they're at what they're doing and how that affected the whole health of the network whereas we have very little examples of uh networks and and dabs and that went the other route mostly because it's compared to other industries honestly it's ridiculously easy to raise capital in web 3 with a good project it doesn't have to be great you just need to be hard worker and you know you have a fairly good chance of getting funded that's not a bad thing we need to fund innovation but we haven't really seen you know a bottoms up type of project that kept to it and didn't reach the point with money where was thrown at it and and kind of spiraled a bit if you know what i mean i think that would be interesting we're kind of trying something similar district is 100 self-funded um and we intentionally decided to go this route even though it is a big bet it's a huge bet it's not just time money and work it's also our own capital um but it was because we looked at the entire ecosystem we were privileged enough to be in a position to be able to do so and we decided that this experiment hasn't really been done as far as we know and it actually has chances of working out very well and be successful so maybe will be that case hopefully one of our identity maxis because that's what we are we're identity maximalist and yes we do have that twitter handle uh he likes to talk about uh the data model for the internet and he likes to say that for over the last couple decades really since the beginning of the internet the data model for the internet has been very much uh an application-centric perspective that the data exists in applications but web 3 inverts that model and the data model in web 3 ends up being an identity centric perspective where the data is with the identity that the identity is the holder and owner and ultimate authority of all that data i mentioned this because in web 2 if we learned anything it's that data is extremely valuable and so in the context of your question about how like where is the value created how can we monetize just where's the where's the economy it's with this data as it's always been it's just that now the data is inverted it's a new model and so when it comes to identity from our perspective the only thing that really changes is who gets the profit from all the data from all that value creation and it's the identity it's the it's the human behind it so you have now an opportunity in web 3 and and this is why it's hard because the data model is inverted to create models that put the individual in the middle and so let's take even uh advertising for example that's that is the economic model of web 2. in web 3 it doesn't it doesn't mean that we can't have advertising it just means that it's the human whose data is being sold by these other tech companies that ends up profiting from it and they get to decide how much of their data they want to sell at what price they want to sell their data and these are just conversations and topics that we could not have in web tube that we can have now so we have opportunities to develop these new economies because there is an inverted data model so it's interesting dan this this fellow doc searles who you may have read about had written this book the intention economy quite quite some years ago before we were even talking about web 3 and i i think you're almost alluding to this notion where we just turn models completely on their head listen we've got a few minutes left maybe in kind of rapid fire view the promise of web 3. let's fast forward 10 years from now or to 20 30 eight years from now where's the world going to be at um what do you think we're going to see maybe max starting with you then to dan and andre to wrap up yeah i think um well is going to be a much more open place in terms of people building finance financial applications so all the protocol builders that's really accelerated the rate of innovation and progress in the financial sphere um it's an open world you know you it's no it's no world garden it's not like the big banks where they have their proprietary tech and you don't have access to it it's an open world where anybody can plug into a protocol for lending borrowing whatever financial application copy trading they can build make their own improvements on it and ultimately it's transparent to the user so you know your money you know exactly what you're doing with it you can you can see what's happening you you own it much more than any other kind of centralized application so i think that's the direction of travel and um you know i think that's going to be a much better place for financial innovation and user sovereignty i don't know about 30 years from now but certainly our vector our north star and the real root of what it is that we want to achieve i think all of us in web 3 is a better world and how do we uh how do we get there like what is that factor what are we working towards and with that i think we can even look towards maslow's hierarchy of needs and there's just this there are things that people need as a basic as basics physiological needs they need to survive they need to eat they need to love they need to have esteem and they need to self-actualize that's just like you have being able to realize your full potential and that is the prog that's civilization progressing forward every step that civilization takes makes these needs easier for people to attain and what we ultimately all want as individual humans to attain is self-actualization so perhaps not 30 years from now but the only way to get to self-actualization is to break all the barriers that that are obstacles for us to get there and those are now these central authorities that are preventing us from being able to get there in a lot of ways they're creating obstacles because there's bias there's corruption within systems of government within all central authorities until human decision-making bias and corruption is removed from all of that then we can't all achieve this sort of like enlightened sense of human spirit uh but that's our vector whether it's 30 years from now no probably not but that's where we're going andra i would say the biggest promise from the point of view of the of a social media platform is privacy and owning your own data controlling how it is managed and also governance so basically deciding if the algorithm that district would like to use to show you um posts is okay with you and you like it and you approve of it which is an option that you don't really have right now and this is i think one of the root causes of misinformation so people could have an agency regarding updates of the product itself which will happen by the end of this year with district actually this is exciting and 10 years from now tokenized autonomous sovereign communities so imagine facebook groups where you don't have any middleman where your community can be reached without paying a fee to facebook because right now even if you have an organic audience that you built yourself and you want to communicate with them you know facebook and other platforms actively block your communication towards them unless you pay them advertising fees which is basically a mob shakedown mentality that we can get rid of in web 3. so i this is why district is called district because you're going to be able to spawn up your own district tokenize it give it to your community is going to be very empowering for small businesses to to build around their products and services and be autonomous you know put the a back in dao because it's not there right now great thanks so so it's about building in the bear market and breaking the mob thank you to all of you it's great thank