foreign
[Music]
and communication at consensus where he
has spent the last five years telling
the story of ethereum to journalists and
the individuals around the world prior
to consensus change work in public
affairs and lead us U.S politicians and
journalists on delegation to China to
improve in understanding between the two
countries
James is an enthusiastic member of the
queer underground New York City dance
scene and also it's a volunteer Street
tree Steward in New York City thank you
and welcome thank you so much
um so that was a nice introduction
um
do I have a way to flip through slides
this thing
there you go
so a lot of this talk is really setting
the stage of 2021
um beyond the bull market that was
really the year in which I think web3
ethereum all the things that we've been
talking about at the last five devcons
really ascended into you know a lot of
the popular narratives in pop culture
but with all that new attention came you
know a widened aperture of critique so
first of all one of the things that
really brings attention is money
unfortunately and that's when we had
2021 was record VC investment so 40 of
the 47 web through unicorns were born in
2021 we also had web3 outpacing biotech
as a sector which to me is wild
considering what we've achieved in web3
so far and similarly a lot of the deals
at least in Q4 2021 happened in the
United States you see outsized you know
deals going to the United States
compared to places like Latin America
and with a lot of popular uh
understanding of web3 came celebrities
also changing changing their profile
pictures to board Apes
um I encourage all of you to see if they
of their pfps we also saw a lot of media
doing like what is web 3 crypto
explainers nft explainers and so in a
lot of ways this you know web3 is
already part of the popular imagination
and similarly Brands started rebranding
so you have metaverse becoming or you
have Facebook becoming meta for whatever
reason because they think the metaverse
is the future you have Radio Shack I
don't even know what Radio Shack is
doing but if you check out their home
page they seem to be a crypto company
that is doing swaps and yeah also Square
became block a nod to blockchain
but with any frenzy sentiment turns so
um you know there's a couple people I
have shown here this is Molly white she
had a whole little feature on her in the
Washington Post she's a very prolific
Wikipedia editor and now has devoted a
lot of her time to maintaining this
website called web3 is going great which
catalogs all the the stuff that we'd
rather not have reflected on our
industry
uh Ben McKenzie he's a pretty washed up
uh actor from The Orange County he has
also created an entire online Persona
around critiquing web 3 and really and
really pointing out scams and and
critiquing shills of of crypto
finally Steven deal I think a lot of
people if you spend any time on crypto
Twitter have seen him get dragged by the
crypto Community but he has you know he
has submitted an entire paper to the U.S
Congress you know urging them to resist
crypto's increasing lobbying efforts in
uh in Washington DC
um if you want to see I mean there was a
crypto policy Symposium last month these
are the the sort of Who's Who of people
who've really made their entire online
Persona being a crypto critic you have
jamai McKelly if any of you work in PR
don't respond to her emails at the Ft
she's not gonna listen to you in good
faith there are people like Jacob
Silverman though who's actually he's
doing a podcast with Ben McKenzie
talking about the latest crypto scams
um we have Francis Coppola who's as she
describes a banking expert but there are
a lot of these people that spend day in
day out uh critiquing web 3.
and it's to be kind of understood so
water and music analyzes music and
technology and how they intersect and
recently the founder Sherry who has been
really focused on music nfts which I
think is an interesting way of looking
at Pop Culture intersecting with web3
narratives so they released this report
last year
sort of analyzing all right if you're a
big artist and you're doing an nft drop
what were the reactions on Twitter they
used various Twitter tracking tracking
tools to understand sentiment and as you
can see there were very few nft drops in
late 2020 mostly in the genre of dance
and electronic music and then all of a
sudden in the second quarter of 2021 you
have all these major labels taking their
their artists and saying how do we get
into this this seems to be a big chance
for a cash grab Let's do an nft launch
and as you can see perception started
shifting but overall you could say most
of it was positive sentiment
that doesn't explain though then a lot
of the artists some artists that I
really love all of a sudden deciding to
drop their plans for an nft
um these are some of the things that she
analyzed in the report and some of the
things that she noticed so one Twitter
has not proven to Be an Effective
platform for artists to address fan
concerns around nfts especially around
environmental and financial concerns and
she she says Twitter is not exactly the
best platform for nuanced discussion of
complex topics
also Twitter data ultimately does not
provide a complete picture of a Fan's
experience with music the fear of
adverse Twitter reactions alone can
certainly dissuade an artist from
experimenting with the technology and we
saw a lot of that whether it was Jacob
Collier had a pretty exciting nft launch
planned dropped it and Niels from who is
a Pianist who's German
also spoke out vehemently against nfts
after he started learning from his
community of uh people who were saying
he shouldn't do an nft job
um but you know one of the things she
also noticed is that negative sentiment
doesn't actually doesn't necessarily
affect the financial performance of an
nft drop
um Charlie XCX ended up getting a lot of
blowback from her fans but sold her nft
for 20 youth
um similarly even if you have an active
Community it may not be the best way to
sustain Community engagement and
Community Building experiences
okay so clearly some Brands thought okay
we need to confront this nft stigma you
have Royal calling nfts limited digital
assets finopoly calls them digital
Collectibles and Cirque calls them fan
passes so already there's an idea that
you can shift perception just with a
name but I don't think that's all there
is to it
narrative shape our perceptions
narratives and then our perceptions form
our realities which end up influencing
our choices and actions people hear a
good story once and remember it for the
rest of their lives so that's why I
think narratives are important these are
the four tactics I'm going to discuss
for the remaining 20 minutes and
hopefully have some time for questions
these are just tactics and and actually
Florian's talk prior to mine set this up
pretty nicely because he was kind of
describing in the ways in which there's
already such a Negative sentiment among
mainstream uh regulators and how is that
affecting the way in which people
understand web3 in our space so I'm
going to go through each of these but
first one is we need to better
understand Global sentiment around web3
and that happens through polling and
brand analysis we also need to celebrate
the inspiring stories of web 3. every
day there's going to be a hack every day
there's going to be a scam they're going
to be grifters but there are many
stories that are inspiring and I've been
going to a ton of talks here and I'm
hearing them every day we also need to
win over environmentally conscious
consumers and companies and finally we
need to inspire with knowledge that
Sparks action so how do we better
understand Global sentiment around web 3
I have to say crypto polling has gotten
better but it's really limited there are
you know there are a number of
mainstream polling companies like
morning consult that have regular crypto
polls uh Gemini actually did a really
good one called the global state of port
and it surveyed 30 000 people in 20
countries but one of the things that is
important is that they were only asking
questions around crypto as a digital
asset it makes sense Gemini is in
exchange people buy and sell eth Bitcoin
and other assets they weren't thinking
of web 3 Beyond buying and selling and
speculating on these as assets
um this is another one that actually
came out not too long ago from morning
consult
they had a lot of coverage but I'm just
focusing on this one
seven of the top ten adopter countries
have some form of capital control and
that's only something they realize
through doing this survey and so Nigeria
actually leads in cryptocurrency
activity with 55 of the of adults
responding to the survey saying they buy
or sell crypto at least once a month
contrast that with the us only 16
percent say they buy or sell and then
most of Western Europe fall below the
median uh cryptocurrency usage range and
then you also have a quote some
countries such as turkey and Argentina
have expressed or have experienced
extremely high inflation in recent
recent months which may be encouraging
the retail use of buying and selling
cryptocurrency but I have to say again
morning console is defining usage as
buying and selling not using your web 3
wallet like metamask or rainbow
connecting to an account buying an nft
that's not included in this so again
people are only thinking and pulling
around
buying and selling of cryptocurrencies
which to me is only a partial story
especially when we talk about web 3. so
for that reason we at consensus have
actually uh earlier in Q2 of this year
we did a survey of 22 500 adults in 15
countries I just noticed a typo but what
we wanted to do is actually contrast
this with some of the other
surveys we've seen out there which are
just about buying and selling assets and
think about actual web 3 usage the
report is going to come out later this
year but I've actually highlighted some
interesting data so for one we asked do
you own a non-fungible token is a pretty
simple question and some of the
responses you could say yes I own one or
several no I don't know what an nft is
look at Vietnam it's pretty remarkable
in that of the respondents although this
this was a survey conducted online so
there's a bit of bias in terms of people
who have internet access 50 said they
own an nft contrast that with Western
Europe very few people have an nft or
even know what an nft is I think that's
pretty telling given that this is a
global community and there's a lot more
adoption in places that aren't
necessarily represented by those early
statistics I showed a VC investment
similar we saw similar things with Dow
awareness and participation
Vietnam India Indonesia all are higher
than any of the other countries in terms
of awareness of what a Dao is and yet at
the same time in Vietnam there's so much
awareness of what Taos are potentially
through Reading and and just general
interest in cryptocurrencies but a lot
of people aren't involved in any
and I think that's a huge gap for us to
approach as a community
this I don't know if any of you have
been following the discourse ahead of
Devcon but it was pretty uh discouraging
to see some bigger names in crypto
critique the ethereum foundation for
hosting Devcon and Bogota I think this
is actually a perfect place to host
future devcons including you know maybe
in the future Vietnam
maybe we could have something in India
or Nigeria
and so um I saw Cami write this this
article which is really timely it came
out a few days uh before we all left and
she's like the dead end of Euro Centric
crypto and you should read the whole
thing it's on mirror I hopefully you can
see in the top left but some Choice
quotes
um I believe emerging regions are where
the next trailblazing use cases for
crypto and blockchain will originate why
necessity breeds innovation
the financial political and social
issues that so-called developing
countries experience paired with the
maturing blockchain ecosystem will
result in an environment ripe for the
development of some of the most high
impact applications of our time so I
think when we go to our next segment how
to celebrate the inspiring stories of of
web3 I think a lot of the inspiring
stories we haven't yet seen yet because
I think a lot of the applications and
use cases are currently being developed
in places I need the most and we can
talk about remittance payments we can
talk about all the novel applications of
Dao's so when I was talking about Molly
white earlier this is her website web3
is going great it's a running log that I
have to check once a week just because I
need to know I need to feel the pain but
this is just this week alone you know
the ussec is investigating Yuga Labs we
have mango that that hack happen I
believe yesterday and then you know
Celsius their their masquerading as defy
as C5 and their yeah they doxed all
their customers it's it's really messed
up so there's just a Litany of all these
stories that come out often and so when
you think about web3 and we want to
encourage everyone in our industry just
to really share the stories of like
utility and action and positive benefits
it becomes hard when it's drowned out by
all these negative stories
and I don't want us to just be these
sort of uh people like you know Carl
Menger who say Bitcoin fixes this I
don't think that's that's where we're
going I don't think we should just say a
dow would fix this you know a multi-cig
would fix this ethereum fixes this
instead it's got to be real use cases
um I'm gonna I got his name wrong but
Max yesterday gave a really exciting
talk on the ways in which Ukraine has
been supported by ethereum donations and
cryptocurrency donations in general but
if you think about it it came out of
necessity
the National Bank of Ukraine made it
difficult to transfer funds from Ukraine
to the EU what is an always-on Network
24 7 Financial access it's
cryptocurrency but then already we've
seen impact from crypto donations I
thought it was fascinating that more
than half of all the donations have
actually been spent in cryptocurrency so
it's not people immediately switching
them to Fiat they're staying within
crypto and spending
um and using it and using crypto
um and there's been many different
estimates but elliptic said around 77
million in crypto donations were given
to the Ukraine war effort since uh since
the War Began
45 being eth um
and you know we talk about refi a lot
especially in the git coin Community but
one thing that I liked after each
Barcelona was this there was not bad in
coindesk from a professor who said
ethereum is to act as a laboratory for
broader political project or for a
broader political project and a site of
economic experimentation although Pro
markets the aim of web 3 isn't
exploitation but regeneration
and a lot of what um you saw at shelling
Point were projects around regeneration
you could even see in Bitcoin grants 15
all the different environmental projects
and I donated to a lot of them but it'll
be interesting to keep following up with
all these groups and it wasn't just
groups in the US it wasn't just groups
in Western Europe these are groups all
over the world that are using an open
funding platform to Source funds and
hopefully solve environmental issues
either on very local levels or on
broader levels like you know turning
carbon credits on chain
people may have forgotten about
Constitution doubt but a lot of the
ideas around Constitution Dao last
November about a year ago have really
still like I keep thinking about when
are we going to see the next
Constitution down for something that
isn't so frivolous as buying a copy of
the Constitution there was a really good
write-up in FWB from Drew Miller and
Kevin Munger and these are these are
people who study social movements and
right and they said here was a group of
people staking a claim for web 3 as a
tool that could be used to build a world
with new rules by purchasing rules of
the old one
Constitution Dow represented a
super-sized version of something that
the world they created would be
extremely good at so what what is web 3
extremely good at Mass mimified
mobilization
and you could see in how much money was
raised just for this really fun activity
of buying a copy of the doubt not even
knowing what they would do with it after
and not even knowing that they could be
outbid because all the funding was
transparent but think about what we can
do when we have that ability to quickly
fund across borders not needing to
require ACH transfers and actually
moving money and and coordination at the
speed of the internet
um I don't have time to talk about this
slide but I've been on the Susu Tanda
Hue however you call it uh trained for a
long time so if anyone has ideas for uh
rotating savings account please talk to
me I think there is an easy way to make
a pool together that actually is sort of
the same Financial tool that people have
been using all over the world for
hundreds and hundreds of years prior to
the prior to Banks and lending
um yeah it's an awesome idea and I think
it needs to be made at some hackathon
sometime
so step step three is to win over
environmentally conscious consumers
we merged proof of stake that was a big
deal
um
it was
I I had been writing about it for a long
time I'd been off by the date and I said
coming soon coming soon
um but when we did this survey uh
earlier this year we actually hadn't
even gotten to the point of proof of
stake and now we have a network that's
using
99.995 less energy and I say 995 because
we actually did a survey or a report
with the cryptocarbons rating Institute
to actually understand not just
um in in theoretical back of the
envelope math but by running validators
and comparing it with the proof of work
ethereum Network and what they actually
found was that beyond the energy
reduction CO2 emissions are down
99.992 so from 11 million tons annually
to 870 which is about 100 U.S homes
that's incredible and you know the
overall the consensus marketing team
said how are we going to get people who
are maybe not that interested in
ethereum maybe don't know what the merge
is to care about this uh environmental
fact and so we did this big campaign
around the merge we also tried new
tactics such as paid media across like
earned paid partner and we really I
think this is one of the first times as
a community
overall there was a lot of messaging
alignment You Know Carl at the EF
started with the 99.95 more Energy
Efficiency a country's worth of power no
more but what we ended up seeing is that
90 uh what we found is that 90
I think it was I don't have it on the
slide but 98 of the articles that ended
up covering this were either positive or
neutral sentiment we ended up taking out
a full page ad in the Wall Street
Journal you know Joe and other Talking
Heads were on mainstream media and so we
had this moment to where the world's
attention was on ethereum and we could
actually reiterate this environmental
message but it shouldn't just stop there
um and and I think just to put this in
context this is maybe the largest
decarbonization event of any industry in
history and it really aligns well with
what's happening at cope27 there's a lot
of Industries trying to figure out how
to decarbonize and the ethereum
community did it in a decentralized way
across hundreds of different companies
thousands of actors and so it also shows
us that really really complex Global
problems like you know the Earth
swarming climate can actually be solved
in outside of necessarily using
governments or Industries
um so it was a pretty cool story that we
need to keep telling
fourth step we need to inspire Inspire
knowledge that actually Sparks action
and this is about not just using you
know cryptocurrency to buy and sell as
an investment but thinking about the
actual novel use cases that web3 enables
everyone and I've heard a lot of talks
everyone is talking about how education
is a challenge and we have some amazing
groups
um shifai for example 101.xyz Rabbit
Hole there's a lot of people focused on
educating people about the web3 app
ecosystem
and from all the polling we also see
that you know globally people are more
likely to you know try and use a wallet
if they understand what you can do with
the wallet
um so more than half the respondents in
Latin America 51 said educational
resources make them more comfortable
purchasing cryptocurrency
so what we're doing is we're building a
learn website for metamask
um I'm going to give you a little sneak
preview but we're really excited about
this because in a lot of ways and what
we're going to hear Taylor Monaghan is
giving a talk later sort of about the
original sin of needing uh seed phrase
and and how challenging that makes it
for mainstream adoption
um but given that we still need to teach
people about where web3 is now and we're
going to do so in a way that prioritizes
you know simple messaging but isn't
talking down to our to our readers we're
going to have it available in multiple
languages we're hoping actually 10
different languages based on where we're
seeing the most metamask usage and
that's not places necessarily that you
think it does represent some of the
places we saw in uh the map earlier such
as turkeys such as Vietnam such as
Indonesia and we need to meet Learners
where they are in their own language and
finally we want it based on experiential
design so the idea that you're not just
reading pages and pages about the theory
of web3 you're actually able to test it
out without having to download a wallet
without having to load it up with eth
and actually risk financially what you
know maybe you clicking accept for
something but it's actually going to
give you permissions to drain your
wallet or give someone else permissions
to turn your wallet so this is an early
look at it don't Focus too much on the
3D because the these are all changing
but the idea is that we're going to
start out very simple this V1 of the
site it's going to be a web 3 101 course
teaching you what a digital identity is
how to keep your secret recovery phrase
safe
what what a crypto wallet is and then
introducing people to Dows D5 nfts and
every single lesson is going to have
some experiential component where the
user actually gets to click through and
experience what for example doing a swap
on metamask or another site or where you
know we're going to have it try to be
fun and and engaging where you know for
example on the nft side you're going to
get to use a very simple illustrator and
make your own nft and go through that
process
again this is a work in progress we're
hoping to have this out by the end of
November so we look forward to sharing
this with with all of you soon
um I'm going to end with a quote if this
will switch
so
um just as kind of a closing thought or
a minute for questions
there's a tendency to treat technology
ethereum as agency that has some
essential property rather than as a site
for struggle
where people are fighting both
internally and externally to it
so I don't think that there is any
inherent
indelible principles to ethereum I think
that technology is technology it's
neutral inevitably it's this community
it's all of us here at Devcon it's the
people that use and respect our
technology that are going to be applying
and describing values to it it's a site
of struggle
crypto can be used to scam people of
their money but it can also be used to
fund uh recovery efforts in Ukraine
crypto can totally be used to sell
monkey pictures online but it can also
be used as you know a novel way of
transferring digital ownership across
different metaverse worlds and so it's
not there's no fixed State it's always
changing and it happens with narratives
and so I'd love to talk to any of you if
you have ideas and uh thank you so much
for having me Devcon
[Applause]
um I think we have uh one minute for
questions
if anyone has any
any questions yeah there are alfida
welcome Fida she's a nft artist from
Colombia welcome
bearded guy in the back
hi hi
hello I'm the person if the artist from
Colombia so congratulations welcome to
my country do you like my country
I I love Bogota I can't say I have been
anywhere else besides Bogota this is my
first time but I have to say it's like
anyone who is worried about safety is
hasn't been to Texas where there's a
shooting every single day
thank you for having us
[Applause]
okay any other questions
no we don't have any time well if you
have any question please look for the
speaker
um
oh yeah and in the white jacket she's
been avidly okay Bob but quickly please
hi thanks for your talk my question is
it appears that the general sentiment
for crypto and ft is from Western
countries is very positive it's very
negative but from developing countries
it's very positive what do you think are
the causes of that Divergence
I think that a lot of the nft sales I
mean we look at our metamask statistics
and a lot of this the marketplaces have
been created in the U.S so you talk
about Open Sea Foundation
inevitably you know
there's going to be a wider aperture of
critique if you have more people
participating in them and also in terms
of like pop culture board Apes were
really like a lot of people if they
think of an nft they think of that or
they think of you know you go on Twitter
or Instagram and you immediately have
thousands of people saying by my nft a
lot of bots I'm not sure I think you
know I've lived in China I have
experience you know on WeChat groups and
I think there's just generally a
different understanding of what it could
be used for in the future
you know that's something that deserves
further investigation that's a great
question
um I think why I brought that up though
is to say in our efforts to popularize
mainstream ethereum applications people
should not be overlooking East Asia
especially Vietnam India Indonesia
um there hasn't been as much nft
adoption for example in Japan