foreign
[Music]
[Applause]
well I'm local I'm from Bogota and I'm
so excited and it's an honor to have you
all you to have all you guys in in my
city this is like a dream for us so
we're very thankful with the ethereum
foundation because there was a lot of
effort I know the the work that they did
for for for having all of us together
here and it's an honor also to be here
today with these amazing leaders that uh
we we are going to discuss about what
they are building and to learn how uh
and this is the name of the planet we
don't have it right now but uh wept by
the way my name is Mauricio Tovar from
Tropicals and Colombia guy and uh we the
name of the panel is
um
web free
it's uh going great
and I want to start asking that
is webreed going well
and I'm going to introduce our amazing
panelists Brian from zero s Park
Foundation
Guild
uh Jacob from eth global
amazing weekend we had here in in Bogota
and Romina crypto chica from Atlanta
uh let's start with that question guys
if you agreement do you want to start do
you have a microphone okay we we need to
share I can share it with you
uh so you have either it started we can
start with you
um yeah for sure so so um it's a hard
question to start with
um
I'm sad that I came last to answer it
first but basically yeah I think it's
well there's a lot of improvement to do
but even like when I look one year back
to where it was
um I think there's been a lot of
improvements and um yeah I'm just very
glad to have entered the ecosystem and I
think there's again a lot of
improvements to do but it's yeah there's
like many steps which are kind of
incremental increases
let me know what do you think
um I think that web tree is well right
now in all latan because I'm from
Argentina well a lot of people who are
there knows me and there is people from
Honduras Ecuador Mexico
and a lot of people from from different
countries from latam and we
I think that wet tree in the present is
is a good tool for us to have an
alternative for the different for the
traditional system between I mean the
the government the bank system we we
really use crypto and blockchain to in
our day in Lego DNA that
and then in a dated in a daily basis
yeah just if you wanna
send value or send money to your friend
or family or whatever so I think that we
we are not thinking in the future
we are thinking in the present
um it's a different approach
what do you think Jake
I think it's an interesting question
um I think there's also a satirical
Twitter account called web3 is going
great which posts about all the hacks
that happen all the time so
um so I mean it depends on how you look
at that sentence
um I think like overall like having seen
the last kind of five years of Youth
Global hackathons and also just like in
general watching the ecosystem
I think like a really good signal is
just a lot of really smart people have
kind of come to the space and stayed
it's like a really kind of interesting
environment where it is the frontier in
a lot of ways and I think we don't
really quite know exactly what we're
doing
um but that's actually like a really
exciting opportunity for smart people to
come in and like think about these
problems think about how they conserve
you know underserved communities how
they can kind of serve like what these
new um kind of Primitives that we've
been building in web3 so I think like
just overall like seeing kind of the the
community grow significantly and having
smart people stay and and continue
building is at least a really positive
great sign so I think uh from that
aspect web3 has been going great and I
think there's a lot of other aspects in
which it is
right right
yeah um I think there are a couple of
different dimensions along which we can
try to answer this question
um first off I think that you know to
Echo what the other uh folks on the
panel have mentioned there are a lot of
things that we should be very proud of I
think there's a lot of really promising
seeds around Community uh I'm really
excited just to see you know with Devcon
being in Bogota and just looking at how
much Global activity there is worldwide
around ethereum development I think
that's you know so so promising to see
at the same time I think it's important
that we're continually taking a very
like critical uh perspective on what can
we doing better what can we be doing
better what value have we really created
so far right like at the end of the day
this is technology that has to impact
end users and I think that's been one of
the challenges you know for uh web 3 for
you know a long time I mean it's really
fantastic to see that payments uh
actually have taken off and are serving
so many uh financially underserved
people you know when our crew from Xerox
Park came out here to Bogota I've been
super surprised by how many of our you
know transactions actually involve
people requesting us to send
cryptocurrency that's like a really
encouraging sign at the same time when
we look at like various Industries for
example crypto gaming I would wager that
there's like despite all the speculative
hype around that there are fewer than 10
000 people in the world who have
probably had a fun time playing a crypto
game
um and for the size of that industry the
industry that's actually something that
we need to be really critical of and
that we should be continually raising
the bar and challenging ourselves on so
I think that there's a lot of promising
seeds but you know like um
Eda said there's a lot to think about
improving on
okay
um I want to talk later about the Latin
American and real users but first of all
I want to
um for the audience to understand what
are your products your projects uh what
are the problems that you're trying to
solve
and uh what kind of impact does your
team hope to live on the web free
ecosystem and the world in general
uh maybe we're going to start with you
yeah for sure so I mean my answer to
this is going to be a little bit perhaps
hypocritical given what I just said
about the importance of of um connecting
end user but I do think that there is
actually really a very deep and
important connection so the Xerox Park
Foundation focuses on what we call
application Level research and
development and that basically means
trying to understand what are the
Technologies today that enable use cases
perhaps two to five years out Thinking
Beyond things like you know I know in
the last couple of years there's been
this massive Bull Run and all this
activity on the application Level but a
lot of it looks like you know quite
incremental improvements things like oh
you know let's build another D5 app
that's at like the sixth level of
financial engineering or let's build you
know and accessibility is very important
but once you get to like here's the end
wallet application with like a
marginally better mobile ux or something
how do we encourage the space to think
bigger about like how might things like
zero knowledge proofs or things coming
out of you know cryptography academic
literature impact the ways that we think
about privacy and and you know digital
transactions online
um so that's mostly what we focus on uh
and you know we're just hoping to start
planting the seeds for impactful
technologies that that might reach those
end users two to five years down the
line
right Jacob
yeah sure
um yeah so I work with youth Global um
what East Global does is primarily kind
of grow the ethereum developer ecosystem
uh by bringing in web 2 developers
meaning where they are helping them with
education uh through the hackathons that
we run like youth Bogota this past
weekend and then ultimately kind of
helping them through that Journey
um if you think about it joining what
three is always like a very kind of
stressful situation there's a lot of
stuff that's happening lots of noise
Heath Global kind of tries to be the
signal and then the other thing that's
really important about us and of course
the second part of our name Global is
that there are talented people all
around the world whether Latin India
North America Europe whatever
um there's just like tons of talent in
the world and not everybody has the same
opportunities to kind of travel the
world or go to the right institutions or
or whatever so what do youth Global also
tries to do is bring our events our
community the ethereum community in
general to these places all around the
world and help kind of kind of bolster
their local communities as much as
possible through our hackathons and our
events so that's what we've been up to
for the last five years
later
was created this year
so we are so young it's a young project
and I think that it was created
with the vision of the road to devcom so
I think that we had a lot of community
in latam I don't know Chile Peru as I
said Honduras Ecuador Argentina all the
countries has leaders
um
has a communities so we try to
improve the connections between the
countries and the communities and the
first step was create idlatan Buenos
Aires to to have a big event Argentina
has a strong Community with builders on
ethereum but we never
we have never been we have never been an
event a big event we have never had an
event yeah I have problems with distance
but well we had it Global in 20 2018 but
we had a big pulse a big so many years
without nothing just small events and
now now well yes it did on Mondays we
had it
and it was a point of uh meeting
umro for all the leaders and we had to
create our identity uh if Latin is
growing is uh
is involving so we don't have to
we don't have the the the objectives or
the goals we are creating because we
we have never been in touch together
between the communities or yeah
I think that we we were in our countries
with our ideas with our context but this
is the first time that we are talking
between us and it's amazing in person
in person yeah in person and we now we
are uh we are working like idlatan with
all the Latino americanos and Latin
americanas and we are trying to
um
find what are our problems how to solve
it uh it's a hard-working a hard work
but we are walking to the
to the wolves
amazing they're doing an amazing job
between the communities I have to say
that either yeah so I'm part of build
Guild or but get all
um basically what we are is we're a web
3 developer Community
um we think a lot about onboarding
developers and providing the right tool
set to them like giving them opportunity
to learn and prototype uh as well as
like while doing this also earn some
income at the same time we also have our
hackathon starter kit scaffold eat as
well so we maintain that we create like
different prototypes and it's a way for
developers to kind of start
experimenting without moving full time
and you know it's kind of a way where
you know you can graduate to either
building your own product or also go
work at a web 3 Community as a developer
um so yeah that's kind of what we're up
to
great well one thing that is different
from web 2 is that web3
have a very important
actor in the in in in your projects is
the community right
what is the role of your community or in
the decision making of what you do and
how you
listen to them and what they they want
uh let's start with you this time you
have the microphone yeah
uh yeah for sure so I think
um actually a big part of Youth Global's
Journey over the last little while has
been kind of realizing actually exactly
this that Community is centered to what
we do and actually thinking about
actually Global the company is more of
kind of a a project that helps service
that existing community that we've been
able to build
um so yeah from that perspective we're
certainly thinking a lot about different
things in which we can do to help
support them so we actually just kind of
publicly announced this past weekend at
East Bogota a couple of new ways we're
thinking about doing that uh so we've
been doing hackathons obviously over the
last few years but now we've also
launched guides which are kind of
self-serve education platform
um kind of think of that as like kind of
maybe the minus one to zero the
hackathons then being the zero to one
and then we also want to help people on
their Journey from kind of going from
web to building in web3 for the first
time and then joining a web 3 company
with jobs so we just announced jobs as
well so this is all kind of based on
feedback that we've learned from our
community and just sort of what we've
seen over the last few years that
um you know we've been able to see kind
of a lot of awesome people come through
our doors stay
actually in the audience so hi everybody
um and uh and and then yeah actually
kind of come into the community and
either build something great and kind of
have that be part of the community and
their way of kind of impacting it or
joining an existing project in the space
and and taking it from there so uh we're
just trying to support people within our
community now within you know more
different ways than just the hackathons
we've been doing traditionally and in
your case Heather
um yeah so basically
what we tried to do a lot is
um so we don't yeah like I think it's
nice for developers because we don't
provide them like a specific you don't
have to do X Project but you have the
flexibility to kind of choose what
you're interested in and kind of build
that so let's say you know you're
interested in integrating with lens
protocol you can do that you can have
different Alternatives in that sense and
you can kind of yeah it's a very free
community in the terms that you know
every developer is welcome to build
whatever they're interested in and kind
of earn money for their contributions
into the community uh and all the all
the resources we provide are completely
free and accessible all online we also
like it's a yeah it's a public good for
the ecosystem that we don't like take
anything from the developers
contributing or
um yeah it kind of just you can meet
other people you can network with other
people create different projects
together so yeah I think it's a very
core developer-centric community in that
I'm going to introduce you in a moment
I need to find the info and um until
that please uh your the role of your
community and how you listen to them
yeah I I think that something really
powerful happens when you approach uh r
d or development from uh a bottom-up
rather than a top-down kind of
perspective
um I think that there's you know one
world where you can imagine a lot of the
research being done in the space uh
being instigated by like monolithic
organizations that have top-down
research agendas which they hire
researchers for and then you know manage
them to hit specific research outcomes
and I think that this early on in a
Technologies life cycle you know a
technology so early and promising as
ethereum we can't predict no single
person can predict what the most
interesting directions are going to be
and so we rely very heavily on our
community and you know we frame
ourselves as largely in service to a
community of people who are really
owning their own Visions so what we try
to do is we try to educate folks
um I think there's a lot of similarities
here for example with with youth Global
but we take people in we try to educate
them in a lot of these new tools and
then we have some general areas that we
think are interesting to explore for
example like zero knowledge machine
learning that let's take a machine
learning specialist teach them how zero
knowledge works and then leave it to
them to start to articulate like a
research agenda or vision for that sub
domain and then our role starts to
become like connecting them with the
experts on the cryptography side or
providing financial support via grants
or educating or those kinds of things so
I think the Community Driven development
here is really important
I agree that that's what made uh web
pretty different welcome Aaron
can you please introduce yourself and
the question that we are answering right
now is what is the role of the community
and how you listen to them to make
decisions right I started being like
everyone I I got double books
um but uh yeah hey I'm Aaron from
Cleveland uh in terms of the role for
for the community I I guess very much
depends on the the context or what kind
of uh
yeah the context
um in in the context of clear fund I
think the the role of the community
there is essentially helping to uh
allocate funds to public goods projects
so uh quadratic funding is this really
neat mechanism where you take uh inputs
from a whole bunch of different people
uh in in the form of contributions to
projects that they value and then
quadratic funding uh the CLR mechanism
essentially spits out an allocation that
reflects both the preference and the
strength of preference of all of the
individuals in the community that
contributed to projects that they value
so in the context of clear fund I think
the community's biggest input is that is
helping to allocate funding to public
good
great thank you and Romina Latin America
the Latin American communities
um I think that we have to create our
own uh flows our our own criteria to uh
start creating metrics and how to
um
uh to measure to mention the the impact
for example I was talking with uh Carlos
Melgar from Honduras he's from an
Iceland in otila and we are I'm
collaborating with with the quadratic
funding team the of the ethereum
foundation and we have to the applicant
has to pass a kyc and Carlos say he he
told me two days ago I hired cryptachika
how are you I applied to the quadratic
family brown but I'm a bit worried
because
they I they are asking me for my account
and my address and I don't have address
and I said what uh do you I I don't
understand and he told me yeah because I
live in a in an Iceland so I don't have
an an account we don't have address if
you want to go to a house of a friend
you have a reference but you don't have
a on a street or a number
and I don't have a personal account bank
and we paid our electricity and lights
in a prepaid way so it's very different
of any capital or big city they have a
specific requirements and we have to
know
like eat Latin like leaders of latan we
had to
talk a lot with our communities and with
other communities to understand
where is
the starting point the starting point
because I think we have a lot of
pre-concept and some now Notions Italian
but I think that we have to
check with numbers and data hard data
strong data and then we need to start to
design the the solutions but now we are
exploring and we are trying to
understand
Where We Are
sorry because I am a bit nervous this is
my first time talking in English in a
panel
don't worry
Ramina if you want to know more about
her there is an EA and the New York
Times article
so good
that presented the story of Romina
around cryptocurrencies so I encourage
you to to read it I
I listened to you to your page and your
projects and everything is perfect
what are the challenges that you're
facing
who wants to start
uh I mean for us we're building on
really novel technology I mean ethereum
itself is a very novel technology and
then we're kind of taking that a step
further building on top of zero
knowledge proofs using may see this
minimal anti-collusion infrastructure
built by privacy and scaling solution to
a team funded by the ethereum foundation
and this uh yeah it's it's bleeding edge
technology it's uh it's really
incredible it basically allows us to run
a quadratic funding around or kind of
more generally run a a vote in a way
where the inputs are secret and you have
no receipts so you cannot tell how I
voted I cannot tell how you voted and
because of this quality it makes it much
less effective to attempt to collude to
bribe to coerce people into voting or
contributing in a way that's different
from how they would like
but building using this stack of Novel
technologies that uh upgrading
frequently and uh not yet audited have
not yet been tested at scale
um is a constant challenge we run into
uh
hiccups and roadblocks and whatnot
constantly uh but
I think that's part of the challenge
that's part of what we kind of sign up
for when we're again building on this on
this stack of Novel technology on novel
technology on novel technology and the
the reward is really worth it uh you
know ultimately what we're creating is
this this system for uh permissionless
trustless and private voting quadratic
funding which is a a really really
powerful tool to enable all kinds of
communities from from kind of the
ethereum community to the broader Latin
American community and
outlet and onward from there
amazing Jacob
do you have the microphone yeah that's
fire waste I should stop holding the mic
um
yeah I think on on our end
you know I think one of the biggest
challenges is you know we haven't
actually found a sort of ceiling for
demand for our events like they've been
continually growing we've been doing
more and more
um but you know as a small team we
probably just can't Service as many
different regions around the world as as
we'd like to like Ramiro pointed out
like we we hadn't done an event in latim
until this year since 2018 sorry for
that by the way
um and uh but you know it's not for a
lack of caring about these markets and
and also um you know Focus just
literally we just don't have enough time
or people to run more than six in-person
events a year it's they're all huge
undertakings
um so yeah I mean on our end I think uh
you know trying to find ways to make uh
each Global more efficient as an
organization to empower other
organizations
um to uh frankly just hire great talent
internally to be able to do more and
more of our mission I think those are
probably some of our biggest challenges
right now is just just you know trying
to do more of what we're doing and to
support our community
um even more it's not only difficult to
find it so expensive right now sure yeah
it's very expensive right now yeah
either
um yeah I could actually also double
click on what Jacob kind of mentioned
um so at Bill Guild like I think we
think a lot about developer and boarding
developer tooling and education and we
like create different content or tools
to do that but also like try to
understand what is the most effective
like sometimes you know we try to gather
a lot of people in a telegram group but
that's not the most effective way to
communicate so we try like different
ways to approach like to create new
projects highlight the prototypes we're
building
um yeah I think like those are some of
the main challenges because it's like
very new we just try to experiment with
different things see what's going well
and kind of continue with that but again
we're also limited by size and the
technology is kind of all new so
building on new technology with small
team with everyone learning they're like
a lot of challenges which you kind of
face and determine what to do next at
that point
Brian yeah I'm gonna maybe
um highlight another dimension of uh
like some of the challenges that these
kinds of orgs Might face
um so I think that in crypto and web3
broadly
um there's this massive Iceberg of value
creation across different levels of the
stack whether that be from Community
Management uh or from you know
maintaining infrastructure open source
software uh research and development
that kind of thing and only a small kind
of you know relatively small tip of this
iceberg is is capable of being value
capturing
um and so one thing that is just a
difficult problem to face is the
incentives problem of uh you know for
example if you have folks coming into
the ecosystem how do you get them
excited about contributing to all of
that core infrastructure that
um actually you know kind of powers
everything like it's both from an
incentives perspective as well as from
the fairness perspective as well as from
a resource allocation perspective it's
not necessarily going to be sustainable
if you have people coming in and uh you
know there's a ton of work being done by
open source developers Community
managers Educators a lot of grant money
coming in from non-profit foundations to
help support or instigate these new
kinds of
um you know whether it's like product
directions or whatever else it is
and uh all that all those resources come
flowing in and then afterwards you know
like a venture capital firm like swoops
in and sort of takes kind of like all of
the upside from that and it goes up to
all these LPS and not saying like there
isn't a like that Capital markets are
not important they're very important
actually for driving specific types of
progress and Innovation but then there's
this big looming question around like
how do we continue to incentivize people
to work on the things uh that power this
whole thing that are kind of under the
surface that don't have as direct of a
value capture mechanism and that's one
thing that we've been you know trying to
think hard about and I I love these
experiments like protocol Guild and you
know everything that clear fund is doing
around supporting these public goods
um popular popularizing those mechanisms
is just as important also as the
technology that that powers them so I
think that's a really big Focus as well
not Andrew Romina
um
well eat latan at the at the time we
only had to even in the past but we we
had a lot of goals some priorities one
of the of our
priorities the education
uh right now we have some companies in
latam Who Made Who make customer
acquisition in our communities so we try
to create communities like public goods
with uh
cooperative and for free for everyone
but we don't have an external
alternative so one of the goals of in
the future for idlatan is to create an
educational Hub and it's very important
for us because here in latan there is a
lot of ghost chains and scammy chains
and we have the opportunity to
um connect with the users and the
builders again in when we experiment in
the past the defeat summer a lot of
people know cetheidium and knows nfts
and then the
expensive gas fees Alejo
push away a lot of people just because
the people couldn't deploy or send money
or whatever in on chain so if we uh
create a strong
opportunity
to
share the knowledge about layer 2's and
public goods I think we had a an
historical opportunity to onboard a lot
of Latino americanos
that's true the education in Latin
America and in developing countries is
so important as from Intervention I have
so many top topics to talk
but we are out of time