DappCon 2023: Closing Remarks - Stefan George

Transcript

hey everyone thank you for coming to Devcon and thank thank you for staying until the end I'm uh I'm very excited that we that you were all coming I think this conference has been a bit different than the others uh has been I guess a bit more calm very focused and I think very interesting for me always one sign on like how interesting something is like what kind of questions are being asked and how is the engagement of the audience I think uh this year I would say there was definitely a focus on quality versus quantity and I'm actually very happy with all the presentation that I could follow and uh all the people that were coming I think it's the

most Builder focused conference uh see hardly anyc here not against Reas but de facto here this was a very Builder focused conference and I appreciate all your input and uh all your contributions and um I think I I saw like a couple of uh Trends also during this conference but also uh Beyond this conference and I think one important trend is and we had a couple of presentations on this here as well is how do we connect what we have been building over the last couple of years almost a decade with the real world and how can we get more people into our ecosystem and uh I think we made tremendous progress on all the kind of

basic requirements to get there I think italic uh wrote this block PST about like what are the fundamental problems we actually have to solve in order to get to much bigger adoption obviously scalability is one but we have now plenty of layer twos and scalability is not really the issue user experience also mentioned uh account abstraction is a bus word here um I think we have very good solutions for that today um privacy being the third one a lot of people working on it I think we have interesting approaches to it they're not scalable yet but they're definitely on a level where we can experiment with them and I think they will be a clear path on

how we can also accomplish privacy on a large scale and I think the presentation that we had connected to connecting to the real world um like monum for example they show that we can make the integration of of trefi and defy seamless and that we can offer user experience which is not different different to what users are used to if they use a Neo Bank like revolute or n26 and so on and I think now we finally at the stage where we can build something that is on par with what users are already used to the obvious question that then everyone is asking and this question also comes up when we talking about nosis playay for

example um assuming that you can do everything and you can do everything in non custodian environment like why would the user actually go and switch from revolute to what we are building and uh I think that's a question that we kind of have to answer as an industry as well I think it's great that you're finally at the Forefront where this question is can even be asked because previously where you could always find an easy excuse for not answering this question because you could say well usability is terrible you're not scalable enough privacy is not possible I think we kind of solve the fundamental is issues and now we have to probably answer the most fundamental question okay why why would

people even move over and actually do most of their transactions um on chain and like Vos pay we like to give this example of Skype right I think I've been talking about it a couple of times Skype was also kind of a similar situation where um like obviously in the past everyone was using landline then Skype came out and Skype allow peer-to-peer calls uh but they only really got a lot of adoption once they were bridging into the old world and today everything is actually peer-to-peer or like voice over IP and uh yeah I think we are able to get to something similar but we still have to answer the question what would make

retail users finally move over and obviously not everyone here is using Skype today I guess actually hardly anyone's using Skype anymore it has been entirely replaced it's more like the core fundamental infrastructure is now voice over IP everything goes over the Internet we are not even aware that it goes over the internet and I think in our industry obviously we are very much focused on where we come from meaning majority of development and funding comes either out of Europe or us and of course a lot also out of Asia and uh we naturally tend to of course build the appications exactly

for those jurisdictions and I think to be honest I think those are the hardest where we could get natural adoption in the end because many of the problems have been solved and uh we have to get really creative in order to gain adoption in these jurisdictions and I think there's not a single answer on like what will actually drive adoption jurisdictions for crypto Beyond speculation um but maybe there's also not a single answer because there are many different user groups and every one actually appreciate something different maybe nfts play a role here maybe I don't know like trading plays a role here you don't know I think there was one interesting experiment that that happened this year

which uh I followed also quite closely and I'm also personally quite critical about this experiment but it showed kind of kind of proofed a point that was worldcoin um so worldcoin finally launched and they initially at least get a lot of adoption and it kind of proved also like the jurisdiction is which World coin G of adoption were not necessarily Europe and uh and us actually I recently just came across like an or here in Alexa and the shopping center here in in in Berlin no one cared to be honest no one dared to even sign up see the same thing in Lisbon but it was in the news in for

example Africa and Kenya where people were really queuing up in order to do the iris scan in order to get a wallet in order to get some funding and that kind of proved the point to me as well like um we have to go where there is a bigger need and we have to see like how can we solve problems that are really so fundamental that people really do everything to switch over to systems that are better than what they have and uh today we are still living in a world where where about 2 billion people actually do not have a bank account and that is because it's costly and they don't necessarily have let's say the documents required to do this meanwhile we have been developing

technology that allows everyone to create an account permissionless Le and uh yeah be on boarded to our ecosystem and uh of course there still like especially also in these jurisdictions you face a lot of issues I think worldcoin also was facing massive issues I think the Kenyan government eventually said like uh nope you should not do this but this kind of leads me to the second uh Trend that also also here discussed at Decon which is um alternative currencies so ultimately if you allow everyone to open up a bank account by clicking on a link and having a wallet and so on that is one step But ultimately obviously in

order to do anything users have to have some sort of of value in their wallet and right now this would still require like onboarding with the centralized exchange depositing funds so you kind of back to the to square one you need a bank account to deposit and so on and yeah I found it very interesting to see quite a few uh presentations here DEC call in which we're talking about Ubi like Universal basic income issued in a permissionless way which allows everyone to have access to some sort of capital that would not not require you to go through like centralized process that that eventually can be shut down and I think circles is a very good example of this the circles is a

completely permissionless uh UI and uh it can be used anywhere on the globe anyone can sign up contrary to worldcoin you don't need this Hardware device to scan your iris to to be eligible for it but you can just um click on the link and get your own tokens issued and can make them fungible but by uh yeah by trusting other people and I think that is in my view like the biggest opportunity uh overall is to see how can we build technologies that are accepted everywhere that allow everyone to be on board to our ecosystem and ultimately benefit from The Innovation that we have been creating over the last

decade and uh yeah that's what I would like everyone encouraging to to think about I think again like a lot of the core fundamental infrastructure has been build now it's about how do we distribute it ideally to those where we can actually make an impact in their lives and uh I think that is the exciting thing that we also try with noses um so we've been working or we are working on a wallet that should everyone allowed to easily be onboarded that has the user experience that people are uh used to from from other wallets maybe or like from other more web2 like applications and that will allow everyone to permissionless have access uh to Capital that doesn't require any sort of centralization and

yeah that I think is uh for me very encouraging um I think ultimately of course it's required to talk to to talk to Regulators to actually get to get to a larger scale but sometimes I think it is better to First innovate and demonstrate things work and then actually use this as leverage to negotiate and actually make things legal and accepted that's I think how Innovation usually scales faster um yeah that was my final thoughts for this conference uh a few other announcements first of all there will be another depc next year it will be a bit earlier it will be in May um and will be at the same venue

second announcement uh we actually there is a raffle going on for a depth note so anyone who purchase a ticket via unlock protocol you can check uh unlock protocol to see if you actually winning this step note and this step note obviously you can run notes for nosis chain and ethereum and other networks and the third announcement I would like to make is um we there's the Afterparty at 9:00 p.m. today at Prince Charles and would be amazing to see all of you there and yeah that's that's it for this year thank you all for coming and I hope I see you at the after party than