foreign
[Music]
thank you for coming to hear about
hyperserts um those are actually quick
question have how many people have heard
of impact certificates generally
in the audience okay
um so this is
going to be a proposal for a system that
looks very very different from what we
have now economically I I want to come
to you as if we are people in a barter
economy discussing what money could look
like and if you imagine trying to
explain the mechanics of a supermarket
does someone from a barter economy you
can imagine how weird and
incomprehensible some of these things
will be at first I hope that you'll bear
with me and then eventually we'll get to
something that
uh seems very compelling it makes a lot
of sense and feels like the kind of
thing that you know where you could take
this and start building on it extending
it incorporating this into things that
you're working on
my name is Evan miyazono I uh lead
Network Goods formerly PL research at
protocol Labs protocol Labs you might
have heard of for ipfs filecoin lip P2P
one of our many other small projects I'm
talking about none of those what I'm
talking about is going to be a new
project that's about uh
we proposed this about
uh I think nine or ten months ago and
we've been uh sprinting on it I'd say
for the last six months or so uh overall
the structure for the talk is that I'm
going to talk about the over overall
structure is going to be
what was possible yesterday what is now
possible today and where we think that
we should bring
tomorrow
starting off generally with the claim
that
we didn't really have much in the way of
tracking of actions yesterday compared
to what you might imagine yesterday
people did things you might even say
people just did the things instead of
trying to do additional things in
addition to
doing stuff
um I would
I would generalize this to say that like
specifically I'm thinking that you can
make things you can talk about things
you can Fork projects steal things
modify them share them
but there is a scene and unseen impact
and all of you have are familiar with
the kinds of things that I would say are
seen if you if you're talking about
things that are seen by the economy this
is really obvious you have things that
people can pay for or not
um when we talk about things that are
unseen the specific framing is
uh these are externalities these are
indirect costs or benefits
um respectively negative and positive
externalities that
affect third parties based on things
that are done somewhere else
you can see very concrete examples of
these
um I have two things that you might do
create a parking lot or create an apple
orchard with both of these there are
clear costs to making it there are clear
benefits to making it and then there are
also some things that you may or may not
be able to capture or describe very
clearly
um parking lots and asphalt generally
has been shown to raise the temperature
of the city just because it absorbs more
sunlight Than Dirt does similarly an
apple orchard might reduce flash flood
risks compared to parking lot but it
might also create issues around uh
the chemical treatments used to grow or
protect the crop there's no way
currently to track or reward or even
like there's no handle that the market
can get to grab onto to think about the
positive externalities like the oxygen
that is created by by this apple orchard
and you'll frequently see tables like
this talking about rival risks or
excludable Goods when we talk about
these externalities often they fall into
the non-excludable category of public
goods and Commons and you'll see a lot
of discussion of these These are
rigorous economic terms with formal
definitions but I think that talking
about them in terms of externalities is
a really clean and simplified way of
saying like there are things that
are hard to track hard to reward hard to
say like you did you did great here
here's here's a prize and like
prizes themselves all like the Nobel
Prize for instance is like a way of
tracking the externalities of the
benefits of scientific research you'll
see a lot of themes resonant with the
public goods funding models the retropgf
stuff
um the get coin regen Finance type uh
like all of these things sort of end up
thinking about and talking about the
same types of models the same types of
goods that are really hard to
incentivize support the creation of Etc
I would also highlight that this is a
very simplified model I really enjoyed
this talk about uh
how you might frame different types of
goods in addition to rivalrous or
non-rivalers you could have semi-rival
riskings you can also have
anti-rivalrous things and these uh
this framing is
useful to approximate but really I would
encourage the focus on externalities
people do it these impactful things and
you can imagine that there is one action
that results in a uh
possibly uncountably infinite number of
impacts externalities positive effects
that result from this and there are ways
of thinking about how you might want to
try to track all of those effects
you could try to track those
I would claim that it is far simpler and
far more effective to just talk about
accounting for this initial piece of
work
and
let this and potentially specify some of
this but mostly just track the things
that people are doing and if you have
that then you can start building off of
that to understand what
the impacts of a specific action are and
talk about whether those are good what
are those impacts are good or bad and
whether or not we want to support them
incentivize them Etc
uh today I'm pleased to announce that we
have an ability to track actions in a
novel way we're calling them hyper certs
these are a specific interoperable data
layer to account for actions that are
expected to have positive impact you can
think of it as
roughly analogous to equity interest in
a non-profit Enterprise
naturally if you think about like a
startup that is expected to have profit
the value of the equity is proportional
to the uh
present discounted future cash flows of
that Enterprise that you might expect
with some uncertainty tact on and if you
expect to have impact that is not
profitable maybe you're going to cure a
disease or develop a mechanism to
incentivize the Earth being carbon
negative or net carbon neutral then you
could imagine that because there's no
Revenue there might not be a value to
these uh
to the equity-like analog of those
systems and instead we have a an
expectation that we could design and
Implement a paradigm shift that is a
tool this tool actually coupled with
really a philosophical change about how
we think about and how we reward things
that we think are useful or valuable and
if we have both of these together then
we can potentially create a shift where
you're not just uh
you're not just paying for things that
you can personally own and take home
with you you're paying for things that
you can enjoy in the same way that we
all enjoy either rule of law Clean Air
National Defense uh or
things like software infrastructure a
like fairly cheap deeply subsidized
access to block space on some on your
particular blockchain
when I say that this is specific there
are six data fields that we think are
sufficient to
specify what actions were taken with
whatever resolution you might be
interested in really and
specifically the contributors would be a
like robustly identified ideally but we
should be able to deal with identity
that is not cryptographically verified
in these
hyperserts the scope of work would be
being able to say like oh it was work on
this project or this other project or
this aspect of this project community
outreach software development Road
mapping the time of work would be when
the work was done in contrast to the
time of impact where you could
potentially
uh talk about how this particular work
had impact
that was at this time like last year
versus the impact that it will have in
five years and think about those as
separable objects in addition to the
scope of work where maybe your apple
orchard both uh reduces flood risks and
uh
and provides carbon sequestration and
oxygen and the rights would be this
generalized field in which you could
incorporate bragging rights along into
embed and transfer bragging rights IP
rights Etc with the uh with the
hypersert object itself and these aren't
at this point wholly abstract oh
actually I'll get to that moment one
thing that's very important
um when you're talking about these this
data structure in this data layer is the
ability to do robust accounting you
could imagine that the way that you
would generate these might not be
splitting them in the ways that where
the pieces are most recognizable and as
valuable for their output so you could
imagine generating these as the work you
do on a project quarterly but the thing
that you really want to support as an or
something the thing someone really might
want to support would be specifically
like one one feature that was built and
that's the feature that makes this
product particularly useful for them or
you could imagine
uh one particular type of Outreach that
led to a huge growth in users that uh
and a whole new use case that made this
project particularly valuable to a user
or a community or a company
um I say Accounting in that this is
roughly analogous to uh
Double Entry bookkeeping which I would
claim is another fairly revolutionary
structure like coordination mechanism
among humans at scale uh this is not
some hypothetical thing we actually have
a pilot app that is live on the girly
test net the back end is an ERC 3525
which extend extends 721 and so these
are these do exist as nfts
um we've partnered with uh Kevin owaki
and others at gitcoin to make uh fairly
nice uh
rendering svgs for these so that when
you look at them you can see not just
some set of text Fields but this is very
generalizable
and my claim is that tomorrow people
actually uh
yeah you so you can go on uh to
pilot.hypersearch.xyz and create mint
these play with them and
I will be sharing the roadmap later on
on what this looks like and uh what our
plans are for a broader launch and the
claim is that tomorrow people will use
these to coordinate in new ways this is
my hope I think that this would be if
possible if adopted a significantly
brighter future in which anything from
creating novel knowledge to open data to
uh scientific breakthroughs to Community
Support to a carbon sequestration could
be things that you can suddenly support
efforts from in the same way that like I
can't as an American citizen support a
particular NASA mission
because there isn't a like physical
affordance for me to do that in the same
way that I can support food banks and
homeless shelters and hypersuits should
generalize that to be able to support
any kind of action that people are
taking
it is worth noting that when we talk
about hyper certs and impact
certificates people typically think that
all these actions have to have happened
in the past and I want to hopefully
disabuse you of that notion and explain
that there is a incredibly impactful way
that you can influence future decisions
with retroactive funding and that is
what we're targeting for our first use
cases for hyperserts specifically you
could imagine that
uh oh I do not have a I do not have a
laser pointer I do not think
um so
this is a diagram that shows progression
of time you can imagine that typically
when these actions take place that you
want to see uh the impact before the
public is willing to provide to provide
money to this for having been successful
and it would be really nice to be able
to take that money from the future pull
it back into the present and use it to
fund this action whenever you see this
as an economist or in finance you can
see that this bottom line This role is
played by an investor typically there's
some benefit that is expected to be
taken because there's some likely some
possible possibility of failure and so
you expect that risk to be offset by
profits but generally you could imagine
that there could be impact investors who
are investing in activities generally
and I think that we should try to and we
are targeting the creation of
a particular Bounty slash prize programs
with uh non-profits who fund science or
environmental programs to set up
programs where they will fund or they
will pledge to award the team that
succeeds most in pursuing some goal and
they will reward not just that team but
also anyone who contributed to that team
and do so in a proportion that the teams
and contributors and collaborators agree
is fair at the time of collaboration so
you can start to see the analog to
equity interest in these projects
um the only like there is no
profitability of these it it would just
be a chance at potentially sharing in
the reputation and funding from a prize
but you can start uh
benefiting from all of the de-risking
that you get from retrospective funding
there's like the the grant maker who's
funding retrospectively knows exactly
what the outcome was and so they know
exactly what they're get that they're
getting what they're paying for
um but they also get the causal impact
of prospective funding where they can
actually de-risk this for more people
they can make it easier for people to
take on these in large Endeavors because
suddenly they've pledged not just
support they're not just fund
retrospectively teams that succeed but
also anyone who provides them with
workspace or resources or collaborations
or introductions and so it should really
facilitate the ability for these
contributors to a priority go out and do
these useful things
so uh overall you don't I will admit you
do not need hyper certs for this you
could do this with napkin agreements in
the same way that like many cap tables
are set up initially with like a signed
napkin of like okay the founders it's 60
40 or 50 50 or whatever and that's good
enough that is possible here the reason
hyper certs get interesting is because
I I foresee and predict and hope to help
create an ecosystem where it's not just
one-off programs sometimes you'll see
these programs Cascade where maybe the
contribution to a small scoped
retrospective funding program
ends up being integral to a much larger
effort and you can imagine this very
easily for some particular carbon
capture technology that becomes integral
to a larger program around capturing at
gigaton Carbon scale uh globally and so
I think that these things will Cascade
in time and you'll see these embedded in
each other and when you start doing that
having a robust and very formal and
consistent way of accounting for and
listing all of the pieces of impact
becomes very useful because you want to
be able to either trade or exchange or
share or attribute within each program
in a way that is visible to and
measurable in the larger program
I expect that these will also
have a property where you'll have
multiple funding programs simultaneously
running where the same activity could
apply and when that work is being done
you'll need to do splitting and merging
of these contributions to say which
parts exactly were being rewarded by
which grant program even though it may
look like a monolithic activity from one
company or one team or one Dao
I also will claim that this should
generalize so far I've talked about how
a grant program looks like you have
teams or activities being funded with
grants in some kind of
historical pay and prey as a grant maker
you kind of just have to send the money
and hope for the best
and this could be done by some simple
format and I'm proposing that we use
hyperserts for this of course
uh actually I should mention that the
breakdown of these into categories I
think are useful layers of abstraction
because for many of these you can
actually separate or you can replace the
component with other things that you
might want to use depending on what
you're trying to achieve what level of
consensus you might have
I think it's very important that we also
be able to fund things retrospectively
so not just teams and activities but
also outcomes outputs and the impact
that those outcomes have and when you
have this it starts to become
interesting to look at how instead of
grants for retrospective funding you
could have bounties and retrospective
evaluation for these uh
sorry grants for prospective funding you
could have bounties and retrospective
funding for uh the retrospective
outcomes or outputs and there is no real
bound to the type of decision mechanisms
you could use for this and so to name
two completely different things
that definitely don't cover the space
but just give you some inspiration of
how you could start thinking about using
these you could imagine having a
retrospective funding program on a
subsequent Bitcoin grants round where we
use quadratic voting to price the
hyper certs for useful breakthroughs in
cryptography for instance and in
addition you could have you could
imagine bringing on
or bring salience to those projects for
prospective funders and impact investor
types to subsidize future work that
could be incredibly impactful but
perhaps cryptography researchers can't
spend time on because Grant makers are
focused on what Google and Facebook and
Amazon think are interesting research
projects within those countries
um alternatively you could imagine
actually just using hyperserts for
internal performance tracking uh I'm
interested like my entire team working
on this is interested in using this to
attribute and share and track and list
like oh thank you for helping me with
this project I'm going to give you five
percent of the impact certificate that I
have I'm minting on this work that I've
been doing internally that doesn't even
need to be sold just having a useful
metric to track what is what people are
doing and look back on this in a way
that is consistent I think will be
profoundly useful and there are many
things you can imagine in between of
uh High net worth individuals wanting to
fund programs of uh non-prof endowed
non-profits trying to use this for
increasing the impact that they have in
their Investments or you being becoming
prospective funders in these and I think
that this becomes incredibly impactful
if we can convince at some point
um that or if we can convince
nation-state scale funders Sovereign
currency issuers that they can fund
these because I think that there are
certain aspects of modern monetary
theory that imply robustly that this
could be scalable to fund all sorts of
public goods at a scale that we haven't
actually seen yet and cannot curling
sustain in our current economic Paradigm
so that's getting a little bit abstract
as far as timeline the plan is to do run
a security audit and launch this
possibly this quarter ideally within the
beginning of q1 on mainnet and have
people start to actually use this we're
going to be deploying hackathons
recruiting program managers and Grant
programs funders for both prospective
and retrospective funding for impact
certificates
we definitely plan to integrate with Git
coin and the get coin passport because
of our current collaboration and their
enthusiasm and we don't yet have full
merge and split capabilities yet or the
ability to have attestations I didn't
get into at all the fact that you need
external evaluators to decide how much
they think how valuable they think the
impact for an outcome actually is that
needs to be a deeply subjective thing
and in the same way that like
I can look at strawberries in the
supermarket and say do I want to pay
that for it or not is do I think this is
worthwhile you could imagine having a
robust market clearing price even the
absence of robust inter-subjective
agreement on the value of some of these
things because if someone's willing to
pay for it that economically will set
the price of that positive externality
or that the work that results in that
positive externality
um we do have a road map that has us uh
supporting the allocation of 50 million
dollars in Impact certificate in in
hypersearch specifically by Q3 of next
year I would say we are roughly on track
for that and I would love to encourage
you to like keep on us to make sure that
this is happening this is not a business
model this is a pure public good we are
not taking fees we have no plans to take
this and extract money from it we think
that this is just going to enable a
revolutionary coordination model for
humans in terms of the people actually
doing this uh my team or my sub team the
network funding team and we're also
working with Ray Guild and uh
Kevin owaki and Octavian at Super
modular and obviously I have to thank
protocol labs and Juan for their support
and
um would definitely encourage you to
take pictures of this I think we'll link
this talk and the slides on
hypersearch.xyz once uh the video is up
and in addition
um I also wanted to plug funding the
commons it's a conference we're running
uh fairly frequently I think the target
is to do roughly 20 next year two large
events many pop-ups a large number of
community events this is actually the
shirt from the one that we did on Monday
at shelling point and other than that if
you are interested in helping implement
this either tooling front end back end
helping audit the smart contract we're
putting together a
decentralized organ a permission
decentralized organization to try and
make sure that when this is ready for
Humanity that it is in the most useful
form
um I am at 50 seconds left so I'm happy
to take one question
at these at these uh I reminded like a
stock ranking at companies where
to show like your performance you have
to show individual contributions like
okay I did this I did that have you
talked about people on these sector
about this like discussions informal
whatever I I don't think that we've our
our plans currently have been that you
can Define these at whatever resolution
you want so if you want to Define it for
your team and you never want to break it
down into individual individuals you
don't have to the idea of being able to
merge and split these is purely because
in the same way that it's easier to
create a liquid market for art if you're
not selling an entire collection all at
once it might be that people want to
support individual contributions to a
project and it like it's unfortunate
that we you have to decide based on uh
roughly
it's unfortunate that those who have
money to buy these get to decide
whatever they want to support but it's
also the reality and by creating this
the hope is that we can make it easier
for more people to support more things
and we will have to lean into
making it easier and uh encouraging
people to support things that they see
are valuable
I'm curious about your decision not to
have a viable business model around this
and whether that's kind of short-sighted
for long-term impact
um and I don't know I see this a lot in
crypto where there's these sort of very
short
um projects that don't have really like
long-term
sustainable you know structures I
suppose so I just I'd love to hear why
why you've chosen to do that I have so
much thinking about this and I'm really
glad you asked um I will not get into
all of it I would be happy to take
additional questions in the hallway but
uh the top the top level take is that my
team within protocol Labs is actually
intended to fund unprofitable impactful
work and the only reason that works is
because we can roughly draw a boundary
around an ecosystem in the same way that
a nation can draw a boundary around an
economy tax things within the economy
tax certain things within the economy
and then fund infrastructure I am the
fund infrastructure side of that
equation we have other value capture
mechanisms that exist within protocol
labs and so this is roughly deeply
subsidized by and supported by filecoin
um if other people would like to support
the creation of this that would be
obviously welcome and we have plans that
using hyperserts can make certain
subsets of networks or economies so much
more productive that
strategic investments in those
ecosystems can provide the revenue and
the business model that we might need so
we have no value capture in within
hyperserts but if we invest in things
that use hyperserts because that is
their competitive advantage that becomes
a business model and that's just one of
a few different ways you could think
about trying to make that sustainable
I'm curious um also about the
duplication of credit for one in One
impact moment so for example if you have
a million vaccines that are created and
the funder the vaccines gets a hyper
cert for funding them the transporter
gets you know a credit for that the
injector gets credit for that like how
do you ensure that you're not giving
away five million vaccines worth of
credit for one million vaccines worth of
execution the hypersearch itself should
include specif like specifically what it
was that they did and then if you wanted
to you could merge the whole thing
together
um in proportions that the initial
issuers thought was fair merge it into
one thing and reward the whole thing
monolithically there's also an important
factor where you need to be able to
scope or you need to be able to have
anyone to say I think this is the impact
or the value of this particular
hypersert and if it turns out that like
there was it was only valid because the
transporter rushed it through and like
made it in time then people might like
people should be able to subjectively
evaluate that and say I'm putting this
subjective subjectively quantifying the
value of this as higher for these
reasons and then the people who are
funding these might decide that is or is
not aligned with their value metric
hey thanks for talk uh I'm Marco I'm
with ssvidel and uh I'm wondering uh
have you thought about
how if it this would be a good tool for
dolls like d5s or dowels in crypto
General to implement and
um how easy would it be to to implement
something like this or what could be the
the benefits I really do hope implement
this I think that they are like Dows are
going to be closest to understanding the
and extrapolating the potential for this
framework I do think that there's a
challenge around the fact that this does
not this is not a source of funding and
if that was reach for hyperserts as a
way of raising money no no I mean like
the dolls that have money but allocating
yes we want to like help to grow the
ecosystem right we need yeah a lot of
structure built for the Dow that that
could be that is chemical being built by
by Grant you'll be able to identify
perfect analogs for this but I'm really
excited about one application where for
uh a file coin conference or an ipfs
conference we could say 50 off your
ticket if you have a hyper cert that
that shows you've supported either one
of our like either ipfs or one of its
technological dependencies and then for
a 50 discount we sell all of our hyper
search for 55 so either you're donating
five dollars to us or we are subsidizing
you onboarding and funding the projects
that we depend on
and then you can demonstrate that
support by bringing a hyper certain
saying look I decided to support this
particular by JavaScript library that
live P2P depends on that ipfs clearly
depends on and as a result
um I've like protocol ads can
create a network effect and start
subsidizing the creation of public goods
in this way and I would hope that Dows
and other conferences could start doing
this and you could see this start to
spread and really increase the amount of
public goods that are funded hi Evan
I've been involved in quite a lot of
long-running and some short-running
non-profit projects where further down
the line it's very hard for everybody to
remember and Achieve consensus on who
made what contribution and is there any
any sort of Deadlock resolution or
conflict resolution in the job of in in
the system for you know when you're
trying to get around to quantifying the
subjective as you said yeah I think that
it needs to or does that just stay in
the human sphere I think it lays in the
human sphere um
quantifying this objective since 2021.
um I I think that it needs to be like
taking only what is incredibly important
to have in the data model itself having
that on chain and having everything else
be something that some evaluator has
attached to one of these impact
certificates and saying like this is why
um
like this is why this is the person who
actually contributed this thing or like
this contribution was the most important
and then at some point because these
exist in a market hypothetically then
the market would decide which of those
sub components are valuable you could
also and should also have robust systems
where eventually Sovereign currency
issuing countries are deciding that they
are using their governance structures or
even uh Network States could be issuing
their own currencies and doing this
where they're supporting the creation of
infrastructure as they see fit and then
you can see more robust governance
systems other than just markets showing
up for that