DeFi by Design EP#96: From Payments to Overthrowing the Government with BEN leader Erick Pinos

Transcript

foreign up Nation welcome back this is podcast number 96. we are closing in on episode 100. um super stoked to have the founder of the blockchain education Network on today um I go way back with uh with Ben the blockchain education Network because at my University uh you guys helped me out uh got me to some conferences really got me started in in the whole uh space so um definitely want to express my gratitude for uh the work that you guys do um certainly Pioneers in the in the education space for defy and uh

blockchains in general so um Eric welcome to the podcast man hey Robbie good to be here um common misconception I'm actually not the founder I've been running it for five years but uh the blockchain education networks actually existed since 2014 founded by Jeremy Gardner at the University of Michigan I came from the MIT Bitcoin club which is how I got involved eventually became the president of so um you know there's a lot of Legacy with this organization right as as you said like flying students out the conferences helping students start companies even just reaching out to the general public and educating we have over 50 000 50 000 people that uh listen to our our videos watch our videos follow us on

Twitter on Instagram you know listen to our podcast so definitely have a wide wide reach and we've affected a lot of people over the past 10 years yeah and it's a common thing that you see you know as a foray into blockchain like I think it's really common to you know if you're a developer maybe Tinker around on chain deploy a contract here there um financially you know over the last few years people get involved just by buying a token and watching the price go up and down but uh this is very different because you you entered like blockchain education network is is a space for for people to learn whether you're a developer you're an entrepreneur a student um and interact like with with the

landscape in general so you know perhaps we can kind of like talk about like how like maybe your background like what is your background in in blockchain and then ultimately like how did you get involved with the blockchain education Network yeah it's It's tricky to accommodate for everyone because there's a lot of different kinds of interests in blockchain right there's people that are Traders there's people that are investors people are developers people that are founders so if you talk too much uh about investing or you know Finance or the government and policy then you lose a lot of the heavy technical people but if you talk a lot about development or just do developer tutorials then you lose the people that are interested in more on the on the

business side so I think fortunately you know I've had a background in both because when I went to MIT I was first I was CS for two years and then I switched to business so I got half and half of like both you know completely not opposites but like very different kinds of fields um and then even the MIT Bitcoin Club itself was founded by business student and by by a CS student so I've always been exposed to uh staying open and and having a bit of both worlds or kind of like walking Both Worlds and so that has helped us with with Ben the blockchain education Network to always keep that in mind and to just keep uh keep trying all different kinds of Education to make

sure that everyone is getting what they want out of it um in terms of how I got started in blockchain I was actually in 2014 with the MIT Bitcoin airdrop so that was an initiative where um the MIT Bitcoin club before the MIT Bitcoin club actually was the MIT Bitcoin project they air dropped a hundred dollars worth of bitcoin to every student on campus and Bitcoin was 200 at the time so every student got a hundred dollars worth of bitcoin just to like get started and try to like you know hopefully spark interest of what is this Bitcoin thing Bitcoin every student yeah a hundred dollars so I mean if you just held you know that's a pretty that's a pretty nice airdrop could have paid tuition for

like at least a year um oh semester maybe but um yeah that that's quite a way for for people to get involved and I remember at the University of Florida we did like kind of similar stuff where we would do like kind of like an open bar we would air drop people Bitcoin and then they would have to use the Bitcoin to pay for a drink at the bar so like the drinks were sponsored we would pay for them but they got you know it was it was uh starting to build kind of the familiarity with using a QR code seeing a transaction confirm and then you're like okay that's like your your credit card getting approved and you're good to go um which I think is is just kind of in the direction that we're heading like um with using tokens as a currency like

you know what what is what is your take like on on where we're going like are we headed towards like a multi-currency world um like how do you see uh like digital currencies playing a role in the future of of Commerce yeah I think my interest in blockchain have always been um Beyond using blockchain or using tokens or as currency the first project that I worked on was at the MIT media lab which was actually tokenizing renewable energy credits and also tokenizing green energy investing in microgrids so that was like I mean that was more using tokens to represent you know for every kilowatt hour of

electricity produced through green energy it would mint the token and that token would be a credit so I've seen other uses and then after that was using blockchain for decentralized identity and I've always had a big interest in nft so tokenizing intellectual property or tokenizing like event tickets tokenizing assets inside of video games and virtual reality in the metaverse right or even tokenizing the land as nfts so you know my area of Interest has always been like those kinds of use cases I do think that payments is still at the Forefront of a lot of a lot of people's minds and a lot of people's developments are like digital currents sees as for that I mean I think people have tried a lot with like stable coins

because the number one thing that you would want in payments is the stability but you know there's been a lot of pushback against that so I don't know it's It's Tricky like if even if the technology works really well like lightning Network or Layer Two like scale-ups and Roll-Ups and you have the infrastructure for it uh at the end of the day like if the token itself like if it's just ethereum ethereum works really well as gas but if if you're using if you're able to denominate things um I guess you were able to denominate nfts in the price of ethereum but still right the oppressive ethereum fluctuates every day so if you want to do payments I do think you need some kind of stable coin or or you could just wait I guess you could wait for like Bitcoin or

ethereum to get big enough that it's not as volatile then you could denominate stuff in Bitcoin or maybe I guess satoshi's at that point but yeah I think it's an interesting field but I think that there's so many more use cases Beyond payments that even if it doesn't end up working out we're all not transacting in Bitcoin you know in the future it doesn't mean that they're still using a very very important role for Bitcoin to play as like a store of value or as like or for blockchain to play as like a decentralized ledger where we keep track of other assets yeah yeah and and those those use cases have kind of like evolved over the last few years once developer tooling got there um the more robust applications started to scale beyond beyond just the payment

one where like back in 2014 1516 like there was only a few coins out there Bitcoin was obviously the most well-known but like the the idea of smart contracts didn't really evolve until until like 2016 and 2017 and that's when I think we started to see like more blockchain application like we really started to see use cases evolve out of the 2017 era when projects started to capitalize on on like icos and it's it's interesting to hear like your your background in CS and then in business because that's what we see is like as the the combination in most of these applications like at the infrastructure

level a lot of it is software but then you have almost like software um secured by business because of the economic incentives that keep the system running um obviously Bitcoin is proof of work ethereum's proof of stake so there's there's lots of like like combinations of elements that keep a blockchain system alive whereas payments is just just a very simple use case and we're now kind of evolving past that um I'm I'm curious like just kind of like how how you see the adoption of of blockchain like I guess my understanding is is and I've

talked to some other people that have come on the podcast about this like one guy uh the founder of coin gecko was on just a little while ago and he was talking about basically tokenizing the world like we're going to end up tokenizing everything nfts are going to tokenize IP and digital assets are are kind of like where assets are going in general blockchain may just run in the background and users probably won't even realize that the asset they have in their in their possession is running on a blockchain like where where do you see blockchain fitting in to like our landscape of of like what we call ownership you know do

you think we're going to end up going into a world where like everyone is is using self-custody and those assets are running on on chain um it's a pretty abstract question but like I guess generally do you agree with kind of this tokenize the world concept and then when we you know if you do um how do you see kind of like currencies relative to other currencies affecting you know how we transact on a daily basis yeah I think I think blockchain is more of a tool for developers like we're going to see a lot of these Innovations on the back end just to like make systems more efficient more uh scalable right more Global more International and then the benefits get passed off to the user because I I mean

yeah I don't think the average person really cares that much that they're that they're interacting with the blockchain right or that they're interacting with cryptocurrencies but they do care about usability they care about saving money they care about privacy so as long as those benefits are there you know they'll use the uh the apps that are associated with it we don't necess we don't need to put blockchain front and center right it's like when we had you know when we had like a new database Technologies like my sequel right like people weren't you know playing with mySQL Kitty there was no MySQL kitties right or like my sequel punks like it was just what is the brand and then use the technology in the back end right

Facebook oh I use Facebook I log in I talk to my friends it's the same with blockchain like people wouldn't use I mean we would because we're like Geeks and nerds right but you know the average person is not going to use a decentralized social network just because it's on blockchain they'll use a decentralized social network if their friends are on it or if it loads faster or if it's cheaper or if they know that their data is being kept sick right that's why people like are using signal I think like more and more people are actually switching over to signal so there is is about the benefit for the end user and it's up to us as the developers and as the early adopters to make sure that it gets pushed out there and that the technology itself is not

the reason why someone should use it but it's the benefits that they get from using it um that would be the reasons why they start using it they start adopting it yeah yeah and and some of those are the incentives that are passed on by using web3 like if you know I can get paid every time I tweet you know it that made that may kind of push me over the edge from a web 2 uh and YouTube is another is another great example of this like um like there's there's a bunch of content creators that are streaming on Twitch creating videos on YouTube and then they see like yeah they might be making a solid chunk

um based on the ad Revenue that that they realize from some of that content but then YouTube and and twitch and some of these other web 2 social platforms are are kind of just hoarding a lot of that cash and they they provide the service for the the platform and the content creators to kind of produce content on their platform but it's almost mind-boggling like how much money these web 2 social platforms are are keeping internal and not passing back on to the creators when we we see like a web 3 social platform and how that could kind of basically provide the platform almost as a public good

for Content creators and then that that opens up a whole new just so much more so much more value for the people who are using this on a day-to-day basis to create content and and the unlock of value could bring like uh some YouTube Creator or some twitch streamer from their platform like onto onto web 3. um and I I think I think that is a pretty significant use case that like we just haven't we just haven't unlocked yet we just haven't brought data from being like us giving data to these to these web 2 service providers for free them mining that data selling it to advertising companies I don't we just

like haven't seen a killer app that has been able to pass that value back to the the people who actually have like who are giving their data yeah like why why do you think that is I guess it was always kind of an intuitive application like for me that like I can basically take back the value of my data rather than give it to a web 2 company for free well I think for creators it makes a lot of sense right like even in the gaming world look at like Roblox they take 70 of whatever a Creator makes on their on their you know for their Marketplace like whatever assets whereas whereas in blockchain you create an nft and you already have you know it's already supported by all the

marketplaces um I mean then there's a question if they could they can de-list you if if you want if they want but but no matter what right it's exists on chain so you can go sell it on a different Marketplace um maybe and and the fees right the royalties or the fees for the marketplace are usually done at the marketplace level not at the contract level so if I meant my own nfts first of all if I create my own assets on like Roblox then I have to sell it on the Roblox server right or the Roblox Marketplace but if I mint my own nfts and open C is taking 7.5 fees then I'll go to a different Marketplace like blur or looks rare where they're selling it maybe for zero fees or whatever so

there's a lot more freedom for small creators not only to to create assets but also to get it in the hands of their users you know as for why it hasn't been really Mass adopted yet is I think it's still very very early people are still waking up to the use cases for what nfts can do there's also the negative reputations right because a lot of a lot of the the people love covering the controversy so like the nfts I got the most attention what are the scams not the uh people that were using nfts for like really cool things like to to to have music nfts that you unlock them or like nft Arts that changes color depending on whether or not you attend an event like there's a lot of really cool use cases that we've seen people do with nft he's an artists have definitely

been using it in interesting ways to connect with with fam I think fan engagement is a big untapped use case for what nfts can be doing yeah yeah that that that there's a couple cool ones that that you mentioned that we just like haven't quite seen yet and it's almost like the the technologists are the ones that are dipping their toes in because they're they're curious like that I think that's kind of the point where web3 and blockchain applications are is we've we've gotten the Curious people in to like look around see what's up and see what they you know see what they like about it but we haven't gotten

the pragmatists yet like there's not a pragmatic application that makes sense to convert some user of a web 2 application into web three um the content creators are almost there um there's like some some cool uh applications like you're saying for events and ticketing and fans but just the general purpose application like a social media application we just haven't seen it crack uh like the Monopoly that uh that Facebook YouTube like these web two companies have on social media um so I I think you know the Curious content creators are going to have an edge

anyone who who starts to Tinker around if you're curing us curious enough to Tinker around with lens protocol or some of these other web 3 social media platforms like they'll have an edge when the use cases do convert the pragmatists Switching gears a little bit um what would you suggest to a student who you know is a little bit skeptical because of the controversy that they've maybe heard on mass media um you know what would you suggest to a student about how they should enter this space well I think that I mean the media is skeptical of everything right like you you show them virtual reality and it's oh we're all going to be in The

Matrix you show them crypto and it's like oh it's all scammers you're showing Ai and it's a Terminator or the AI overlords right like if it was up to the media we'd all be like playing with sticks and riding horses like there's no you can't do technological advancement that way but I think that you know you read into it yourself right like read people's white papers look at the technology look at like I've you know I've seen the I think like some of the smartest Minds that we have are are working in blockchain right even even um for a long time like I've seen like professors like entering and doing research and creating projects out of the research starting companies out of the research you know for a student getting into the space There's an opportunity here that because it's so

new you can very quickly get to the edge the bleeding edge of it and you can very quickly make a name for yourself by doing something really really crazy right like either minting your own nfts or doing your own dap or writing your own smart contract or I think we'll touch upon this a little bit later getting involved in governance that's a whole other use case another side of blockchain is the Dows is using blockchain to coordinate public opinion or public or coordinate like polls and get people's voice to be heard and then use that to make actionable decisions and that's something that is also seeing a lot of development and it's probably going to be one of the leading use cases of blockchain yeah yeah let's dive into the governance part of it because

um that was one of the one of the main like uh like really just a real sticking point for universities especially recently um there's been ton of tons of universities that have gotten delegations from like a16z delegated a million uh optimism tokens to like seven delegates six of which were universities um and I think you guys played a played a role in that um could you could you talk about like what the the trend for uh delegated democracy is um and kind of like what what your role is so yeah we we talked with day 16z in 2021

uh to do some delegations to some University clubs so Harvard Law School and blockchain at Berkeley had already had theirs so we hosted an event inside of the Central and actually um with in partnership with the Central and University where we brought in Berkeley and Harvard to give a presentation to other clubs on how to be a good unisoft delegate and then the clubs that express interest we introduce a little intro email to a16z and then they hit it off with clubs that they they thought had enough time to put towards this initiative to do those delegations so we saw a lot more delegations come through that quarter and so now you know different clubs have different uni token delegations and they

started participating more in governance and I think that's a great Initiative for students to be involved in right like being able to put on your resume that that you you participated in a proposal or you created a proposal or you made your thoughts on it you wrote a report on it and then at the end end of the day right it doesn't matter whether it passed or not but if it did pass then wow it's like actually impacted the entire ecosystem and this is the unit swap is a project that manages billions of dollars so it is a very powerful one thing for it to have as a student I think it also represents something in terms of how we're going in terms of uh of democracy like I think that there's one thing to just have token weighted voting where everybody has a token and

therefore they get the vote and then their vote is represented by the amount of tokens they owe right that's kind of like the base level of like how Dows have been which is good in a lot of ways because if you have a big stake in the project then you're probably going to vote in the direction that you wanted that that is good for the project but I think there's also delegation which is very important because even if you have even if you're like one of the largest stakeholders maybe you don't know what's best for the project you don't have time so being able to delegate is very important to you know picking a representative that you like and you trust um and then the same on the delegate representative side that maybe you don't have a lot of funds to buy into the token but you're very smart with

governance or you have a lot of experience with it so being able to Rally other people behind you and to get token delegations I think is all around a great feature and then lastly that even if the well I don't remember the third part but I'm able to remember like in a minute yeah yeah I mean looking at it from from the token holder standpoint of getting like a really convicted group of group of people who are interested in making an impact on this protocol it it's almost a no-brainer to delegate some of these tokens and involve more like people in terms of these University groups to act as like a a lobbyist for

the protocol um and I think it's I think it's also very clearly a benefit for the University group like this is almost one of the best internships that you can get which is actually permission permissionless like you don't really need to go apply for an internship I mean maybe it's it's similar but if you can get some delegation and build it up in a certain protocol and you can act with you know maybe millions of dollars in tokens that that token holders and delegate to you you're making a significant impact on a very like robust industry and that is massive for for a student's resume so it benefits the

student who's in this case is a delegate and it also benefits the token holder because they're able to almost diversify their token voting power across a certain amount of delegates and get like a little competition of ideas within their own subset of tokens and I mean I think it's very clear like they the capitalist um kind of theory is that more competition is better for like the population because the you get you get these competing ideas you're not in an echo chamber uh and it's almost like a decentralized network of people that are contributing their ideas and making decisions about

what's best for the protocol it's more likely to advance the protocol than everyone's saying the same thing and ultimately going that way by kind of a diverse uh pool of ideas you're able to pick out the good the good parts about one idea uh the good parts of another idea and combine those whereas you know everyone's saying the same thing is ultimately gonna gonna just kind of lead everyone in the in in One Direction like sheep so I I think it's really interesting the trend that we're seeing in delegated democracy yeah and I remember the I remember the point so um another key point of of what makes this so different is the fluidity in being able to delegate an undelegate

right as opposed to like electing someone for a term where now they can do whatever they want maybe they don't do what they say they were going to do you can't do anything until the next cycle in in Dallas and in the way that a lot of these Dows work with their delegation is you can undelegate at any time so if if you know you don't like the delegate or the delegate goes inactive or if they're not holding up they're not they're not uh representing you the way that they're supposed to you can just undelegate at that point and then find a delegate that's more representative of what your views are so I think that that's a really cool way to see it holds these delegates accountable to be active and to make sure they are participating and they're doing what they say they're supposed to do

um in in that in a way right it's like capitalism amongst the the delegates because it's like I I want to make sure I have I get these delegation I keep this delegation so I'm gonna do a good job I'm going to represent the people that have delegated to me or I'm going to you know not well yeah represent them in the sense that like I'm going to do the job that they put me to do because I know there's been controversy around a16z telling these clubs what to what to vote or which direction to vote but I can certainly say that they're not telling them to vote Which Way or Another like you've seen these clubs vote against each other they have delegation from the same organization but they vote Yes and no on certain proposals so they are like making their own independent decisions because for

some delegators that are giving them the tokens it's not about voting a certain way it's more okay come up with the best decision of of what should be done in this instance and then you know vote in that direction and and you can tell that it's working because they haven't withdrawn those votes so their desire is to see project to see just the best analysis and the best decision being made not not being voted in a particular direction it's really it's really interesting to see like how the the model of Dao governance is is obviously modeled after um a form of democracy where uh like it's kind of evolved over over like you know our our entire lifetimes and just

like human coordination in general we've evolved to this point of like Dow governance where it's um it's still these representatives in this case delegates uh on chain representing their constituents but the clubs have the same constituent you know like the token holder who delegated their voting power to the to these to several clubs is all the same token holder but the clubs have different interpretations of what's best for their constituents and I think I think that is that speaks to like just the level of experimentation that we're able to to

see on chain with Dows and and it's almost like this yeah like almost like this capitalistic governance government kind of uh coordination structure where a16z is able to like and we'll set up like like a a governing governance league and have these like competitions between University clubs to see what we'll bring about the best outcome for them yeah because you could I mean if you did want to because you have the tokens you could delegate the tokens and if and then whichever clubs vote against the way you want to proposal go you could just undelegate right like you have that right as a token holder I think that they're taking a good interesting approach where let

you know make the best decision at the end of the day the protocol needs to survive and grow like that is the ultimate goal and there might be different ways to get to that so they trust universities with you know students that are working in policy or do research and policy or spend all their time like doing you know deep academic work to come up with informed decisions to do the research put the reports together to do the analyzes but there are other non-university groups too like I know there are individuals that have become very popular that they spend a lot of time researching the governance there's other um you know non University organizations that have gotten massive delegations and they act so it's cool that it's not just like it's not just a group of like 10 people or like something or a group of

50 people even but is a mix the the delegates are a mix of University groups or a mix of um you know non-profits they're a mix of individuals uh and then the the constituents are also a mix is a mix of VCS and individuals way of crypto whales that have a lot of the tokens so it's it's it's it's it's a whole different group of or it's a mix of people yeah the delegates to specialize in a certain area where a16z might may not know what the best method to achieve a certain outcome is so they're able to kind of spread their bets and test out experiment like okay Harvard has this method

UCLA or Berkeley or you know whoever has this method we're not really sure you know how we we could accomplish what's best for the token holder so let's leave it up to the user University groups who have the time to specialize on how to bring about a certain you know a certain outcome that's best for the token holder Community whereas that's not really a16z's Secret Sauce you know like they're they're a VC they're an investor they certainly have a lot of time to do the research but that's not really their prerogative of as a company um but they are able to delegate the voting power to delegates like University groups who can specialize and and do the research and and put out reports uh to actually

specialize maybe in a certain protocol or you know a certain a certain class of um applications and then put the that research to work in the in the kinds of proposals that they put forth in the Dow um and a16z is able to kind of test out different methodologies to bring about these outcomes you know I I almost see this as just like uh incubation for what could be a better form of of Municipal like Municipal governance I think we're kind of testing out like different Dow governing structures and ultimately like if you know we represent

a congressman or a president in the U.S like if we elect one of these guys and they don't stick to what they what they do you know take there was I don't even remember his name but there were some like Congressman or Senator or something in New York who just came out as like an out and out liar like he lied all over his resume yeah I think he said he was Jewish he wasn't Jewish he said he was doing all this stuff it was just it was just totally random about like him just lying his way through uh the election process but then he gets elected and I guess he didn't technically do anything illegal so we can't really like unelect him and I don't live in New York so I'm not like super tied to this guy but it just seems

it just seems like backwards to allow this guy to continue representing his constituents when he just out and out lied about what he did in the past and that ended up getting him elected so we're stuck with these people you know like we we don't have the ability to undelegate our vote after someone's elected you know if it's if it's a senator it's maybe two years a president is four years if they don't do what they say they're gonna do they're still in there and as you know the population we're not really able to do anything about it um so I I see uh like Dow government says almost like a testing ground for ultimately what we may see in like

government politics of of nation states later on um once we can almost like prove out this kind of model and I think vitalik had a an article about this in like 2015 or 16 called the liquid democracy and he he described kind of like how this the like you did the fluidity of voting power we could delegate to specialists in their field and you know it brings up like what is a very obvious question in hindsight but we didn't really think about it like I guess when we were setting up kind of this Democratic process um you know why is one guy or this group of like 500 people in the house making

decisions about a whole array of different stuff like the environment and economics you know why aren't environment Specialists making decisions about the environment or economic uh economists making economic decisions you know why do we have why are we stuck in this like the structure of delegating all the decisions to you know 500 people or however many in the House of Representatives or congress like I I see blockchain as the infrastructure for human coordination which enables a more robust form of democracy we could call Liquid democracy which may increase the pool of representatives from the 520

however many people in Congress to like thousands if not millions of people and allow all of those people to specialize in one particular area and then us as a population can delegate our voting power to those to those Specialists for a more informed voter thank you it's a it's a crazy thought I know but it seems like that's what we're doing in in Dow governance right now with delegated democracy and I I see that as one potential application of of blockchain in the future where we even we even heard you know there was lots of you know what I I don't even know like left or right doesn't really matter but

like people are claiming voter fraud and you know preventing people from voting like blockchain seems to give the infrastructure for provably fair voting so you know we have we now have the technology where we could let people vote like on their phone like we could let everyone vote on every decision rather than you know electing people to Congress and only allowing them to vote we now have the technology to scale governance to that level and it just seems like you know we're kind of just perpetuating the cycle of power in in for instance Washington DC or you know whatever other Democratic Nation um keeping the centralized group in in that

in that Powerhouse and not decentralizing it to the entire I think I think it starts small right because I think it's you know if you're in power you want to stay in power like what was the what was the issue with the machines or they they claim that the machines were we're faulty that they're the voting machines they suit them for it but then but then they the reporter asked that person like I don't know if it was a congressman or whoever it was but it was like but wait but those same machines were used during your election cycle so are you questioning the valid the validity of your election and then the guy that was no no no no for us it was fine for me it was good but but for but for the other guy you know that was a fraud right so like people just say

whatever they want to say to benefit them I think we really have to take it in our own hands as Grassroots people to just create new structures that are run in this better way right like you could even argue that like nation states are going to become less powerful and and you already see like more power of congregating the hands of Corporations so it's more important that this technology is used to build corporations than nation states right like we should be like and which is what web 3 is right like most of these web3 organizations which imagine in the future they're going to be some of the most powerful organizations they're starting now being uh being uh you know decentralized so like if unit swap becomes bigger than NASDAQ one day and it's being used to trade all sorts of things then it's very

good that they're starting from now having these kinds of structures in place which are going to be very difficult to remove later so it's one thing to try to change the existing systems is another thing to create the new systems with this it's probably easier to create the new systems and then the new systems are going to replace the income events if the incumbents don't adopt the new technology that's really the only way to get them to adopt the new technology yeah yeah I I do I do like I think you're right like you know we haven't seen it play out in practice but the concept of creating a new system and onboarding people into this new system rather than changing the old system um you know the old adage is like it's easier to change yourself than change

the world or something like that so like you can actually build a new system rather than changing this old Antiquated system that already has its power dynamic in place rigidly um you know create like this new kind of power Dynamic um and it starts off completely completely open and avoid and people will will end up flowing there um it's also interesting the point you bring up about like companies already having more power than governments and it it kind of gave me an idea where like there is there is a lot of power in like the ethereum nation state right now and the ethereum nation state is providing public goods for its citizens just like just like you know uh

like in America you know the government basically provides public goods like the road or you know certain subsidies um in in ethereum there's certain public goods out there as well and um the value offered to a citizen of like the ethereum nation state could uh it could all outweigh like the value of of someone participating in like their nation state um like government structure it's really interesting just like how how do you think um the ethereum nation state will ultimately

I don't know like how do you see these nation-states interacting with like online nation states um I mean there's probably gonna be a lot of the the regulation right trying to regulate it uh which could stifle a lot of the innovation uh but I think that stuff like the ethereum nation state has done a good job thus far of allocating uh Capital towards things that need development right there's a lot of Open Source development open source has historically been very like unprofitable so being able to use ethereum or use Bitcoin like even to to fund core developers that wouldn't make income other ways or to like create Committees of people to just do the jobs that like

no one will pay for um I think it's been helpful to add a layer above the the base level which is you know start a company that is very profitable in the space and make a lot of money right like there's there's other types of jobs that are needed that um someone wouldn't pay for like core development or core education right about the protocol itself so I think I think ethereum has done a good job there um yeah I mean in terms of how it interacts with the existing structures right now it's I mean it's been mostly negative right like the government doesn't understand what's going on so they want to regulate it they want to ban it as opposed to adopting it and then scaling themselves along with it

yeah and we're seeing like um new generations associate more with uh online organizations than political ones or in-person ones like anyone anyone who's born now or you know going back like 10 years has been basically a child of the internet like the internet's existed the entire like their entire lifetime and a lot of a lot of kids I mean spend a lot of their time online like even even iPad kids you know where they kind of have like there's like a connotation um where they're a little bit too plugged in but

I think I think overall we are spending more and more time online so it's important to build these systems and coordinate uh uh us like provide a system of coordination that allows people to organize together for the greatest good online um because there's a lot of negativity online but you know we can also build a lot a lot for good and I think blockchain it enables both you know because it enables scammers to take advantage of people but then it also provides the infrastructure for um like really robust human coordination um so I I I'm really interested to see like just how the Dow governance

structure uh like evolves over the next like you know a few years and ultimately like if it starts to make its way into you know kind of kind of Bring It Up uh something that we talked about earlier on the on this podcast site so I'm interested to see kind of the evolution of governments of governance and Dows but and if that ever makes its way into like the non-web three world but then if you see how like as we talked about kind of like the world is tokenizing itself more and more uh like web 2 stuff is becoming web three more off-chain assets are going on chain

like Dow government slowly takes up more and more of the assets and the mind share of these these systems so I I could see a world where like we end up like having delegated democracy in um in like some uh like state or national government because if if we do go towards the direction of like okay you know you're you're uh assets are on chain uh maybe your equities are also on chain because it's this global settlement layer uh you know the next natural step after web three Dows maybe uh corporations and then you know if your

Equity is on chain maybe you you instead of a traditional shareholder meeting or shareholder voting you just use your your Equity represented on chain to you to vote you know as you're as you're sharing this company and then slowly we can see how Dows to to uh level to to companies level to like someone's place in a population whether that is a place in a com company or a place in a country they have like this representation um they're they're represented by something on chain and then they can use that on-chain thing for different utility maybe one of them is voting you know

transferability uh and more and more uh function functionality is enabled by adoption of blockchain infrastructure into these existing human coordination system yeah I like the um the evolution of voting power and seeing how it's going to change like um uh say like reputation weighted voting as opposed to token weighted voting so instead of just like how many tokens you've held maybe every time you vote in a proposal your vote gets magnified so now you're incentivizing um repeat voters in a healthy way because you don't want to incentivize voter turnout by paying them because then there's bribes or that could happen so instead incentivizing by increasing

their voting power now you have a system where the more active voters get rewarded and it encourages people to go and vote or let's say if the system is a very technical system then you you waive voter reputation by your voting power you weigh it by like GitHub activity so okay you've contributed to the code a lot so you have a bigger say in what happens to it or um even like credit scoring right like credit scoring right now is used by Banks to determine your eligibility for like a mortgage or for a loan but what if that could also be used for like making financial decisions like hey you've you've done a good job on the Ave protocol you've never been liquidated so when you vote in a proposal you have a bigger say because you've proven that

you're more responsible with your funds so I think there's a lot of Opera and all of this can be tracked on chain right because it's all on chain history like the nfts that people have bought the lending history that they've had which protocols they've interacted with and you can bring in off-chain data as well you can bring in like social media you can bring in GitHub up you can bring in through all of these apis so I think there's opportunities here and I'd like to see a lot of experiments in this front and I think there have been and there will be more in like alternate ways of assigning vote in power than your like your typical like this is how many tokens you hold or so many tokens you've been delegated so this is now your your voting power yeah yeah the the purchase

partition-based voting um where like it's magnified each time um you mentioned reputation which I think like you could you could put an even greater magnifier on um like whether or not that person has voted on something that ended up passing and if you're you end up voting for the thing that ends up passing more often then well I can see how that that that could kind of be a self-fulfilling prophecy too because if you if you keep giving the people voting power that you know make the decisions they may end up being the whales in the system and then and go you know uh kind of swinging the vote more often than not but I I genuinely think experimenting

with these these types of struck like voting structures are going to be are going to be a greater good um especially as we start to find out which voting structures make sense for certain organizations something that works for a dow may not work for a centralized company may not work for uh uh public um Nation or or you know something to that effect so yeah I think the evolution of governance is going to be one that is particularly interesting to watch um as blockchain kind of like seeps into um more and more government structures um that's one that I think University groups could have a foothold in and um it's it's one that you know we each I

I think anyone over 16 is able to vote so you know everyone kind of has this experience of voting how Antiquated it is um anyone who it represents like a anyone who's a shareholder in a company has an even greater involvement in this voting experience um and it's decision making in general which I think scales to very small scale organizations all the way up to to populations of of of countries um so I'm I'm really interested to see how that evolves as as one application of blockchain technology and then there's several other applications that go into IP you know we touched on we touched on quite a few um use cases that are both Financial in nature as well as

use cases Beyond uh Financial what do you see you mentioned some of the use cases that like you're most excited and interested in what do you see um in the student population you guys work with you know thousands of students hundreds of universities um are most of them involved in in this governance aspect or do you see like some other um emerging applications that students and universities are particularly interested in um I think it's mostly well mostly it's like starting projects or getting jobs uh and going to work in in this space then I would say is governance after that um

yeah I mean most most students are still interested in like looking for a job after school like well we've really tried to push for with the clubs has been that blockchain can be a career um you know that it's there is actually a lot of also interest in like running validators I know that's something else that clubs have been doing a lot now like uh running validators for different projects acting as validators or miners more so validators because the schools are also pushing back a lot against like minors like using School electricity to to run these miners so that was good that was good in 2016 but not anymore they'll catch you and they'll flag you down um but for validators it works because then you just need the computer right to

run it and then a snake so it was like a proof of stake validator so that's something else a club's a lot interested in but at the end of the day like we really want to push the students that the idea that blockchain could be a career not just like a hobby and I know that's something that blockchain clubs have had difficulty for a while is that students will come because they're excited about Bitcoin or blockchain like what it is or like I hear people are making money off of it like what's going on but then at the end of the day they leave the club because they have to get a job they have to get a real like summer internship or a real job go work for a big company so you know if we can leave students with any takeaway it's that blockchain can be a career whether

you do one of these weird things like be a protocol politician right like run your own validator and make money that way or you do the more traditional route of like getting a job you can get a job in the crypto space either as a salutary developer a community manager right working in sales working in Biz Dev like there's a lot of opportunities there um for NN both at like the large company level like a well-established blockchain company and at the startup level where it's like a new startup that's popping up or starting your own startup there's a lot of VCS that want to invest in crypto companies and there's a lot of hackathons and grants and incubators and accelerators that specifically Target crypto and web 3 projects are you doing any um uh curriculum in in these universities to

to kind of like further cement the idea that you know this is an industry now um and there's there's jobs to be had there's careers to be had in this industry uh we have our curriculum online and then we work with clubs to onboard their students onto our our newsletter and our you know our groups and our channels where they can get up to date on everything that's happening so we focus mainly on the Intercollegiate level uh the clubs themselves have done a great job of of setting up you know classes at their University some of them even for credit classes they know you can get college credits for we focus on on the integral region we focus on like let's make these online courses or do these online events or let's get free tickets for students for a conference that you get to go to

now and there when you're at that conference you can Network for jobs you can Network for investment you can find co-founders or you can just learn more about the space yeah yeah I think that it that is a strategic approach both for the long term as colleges are a little bit less integral for for people you know especially in an entrepreneurial Pursuit um as well as just a higher value offer of uh sending someone a student to a conference rather than um you know just just kind of a closed loop uh in class um so so as a you know for any students who are listening I'm sure there are students who are listening um you know how do they get involved

um you know let's say that they they do have a blockchain group at their University um there's a contact page on uh on the website right and they can probably just reach out and um that is blockchainedu.org and then for for any student who is that a university who may not have a blockchain group at that University what do you what do you suggest um are some good steps to maybe you know set up one of these or these University organizations yeah well setting up an organization is is a big commitment right because you want to ensure the longevity of it um I would start simple by just getting getting a group of friends everybody you know that is interested in learning more

and then just getting together on a particular day and just um hanging out and then talking about blockchain or watching some lectures online or we used to do these uh white paper circles where we sit in a circle we'd print out a white paper highlight it and then we would just go over the white paper and talk about what was legit What wasn't so um you know you start off casually like that before you formalize any structures but if you do formalize it then you apply you know to the school to set up the club officially that way you can probably apply for for Budget right from this from the school and that's always helpful if you want to order pizza or if you want to start doing more and more events or meet more frequently um and then you know you have your typical structure of like a president a

vice president you know if you have enough to like do a person to do marketing so you can reach out to more students on campus I would say the most important thing is to have is a successor because when you leave I think a lot of clubs don't think about that enough is that when they graduate it and if there's nobody else like there's no freshmen that are part of the club or no sophomores to take it over the following year then the club dies out and this happens a lot especially during bear markets where there's not a lot of interest so if you start a club especially in a bull market it's like very exciting because there's like hundreds of people that come but you got to make sure that there's somebody there that understands that they're probably going to be the next president or that

they're you know they want to be they're interested in being the next president because once you graduate it's going to be very difficult to keep the club alive if you're off campus now and there's nobody there that has already like taken it over yeah yeah I I I I totally agree um just you know from my experience um as a student at one of these clubs I was president of Gator blockchain at University of Florida and we did have a couple of it was great in the bull market we were filling up lecture Halls um had a whole conference 250 people showed out um but then next year bear Market um and then Corona people weren't even going to school um so it just kind of there was a lull

in the activity and uh you know thankfully we were all able to coordinate kind of like away from from uh the university and and keep it running but definitely want to have the longevity and the uh the sustainability to uh stay resilient during those bear markets um and you know for anyone who's listening who's a student uh blockchainedu.org has the contact page you can reach out to Ben and if you're you know looking for more you know just connections to other blockchain groups um reach out on the roll up Discord you can hit me up um I'm sure Eric has tons of you know connections as well and uh you know everyone's friendly everyone in crypto is still friendly like they they

love talking to people um I'd be happy to introduce you to University of Florida Gator blockchain um and then some of our partners at other colleges as well um because you know more more Minds going out this is is is uh really helpful when when you're especially when you're getting it started and then also when you're you know looking to get more involved uh in Dallas um so yeah you know just just communicate put yourself out there and then uh it it ends up working out um Eric thank you so much for coming on man this has been a blast I do have one last question we ask we ask every guest this um so if you were if you were to explain blockchain to one person Dead or Alive anywhere in the world elevator pitch on

blockchain and you know to educate them on blockchain for two minutes in an elevator uh who would you choose and why would I like if I believe that they could I could do something differently yeah like who would you choose to educate in an elevator for a couple minutes if you could choose anyone uh I mean we did educate Gary Gensler it didn't go so well when he came when he came to MIT campus for the first time right after he just finished with the cftc he um he did the this was just close it was years ago this was in two hours and like this was 2017 when he just finished with the cftc he started

coming to MIT and then he came to these dinners that uh the digital currency initiative like was I don't know if they were organizing or they were part of it but um you know I was there the DCI was there like my professors Sloane were there a lot of members of the Boston blockchain Community were there we would do these dinners every week and Gary started coming to them because we wanted to learn more about Bitcoin so we all had our chance to like pitch what Bitcoin was and talk about it and interesting it was how interesting blockchain technology was and so he he would always say like oh that's very interesting right and then he became a professor at MIT then he taught the class the class on like blockchain so we're like okay we're doing good doing good and then you joined the SEC became

the the head there and then just completely went in the opposite direction like the whole 180 like like Anakin Skywalker turned Darth Vader like level of so so he was super receptive to like to like blockchain and and cryptocurrency you can see in the in the lectures that he gave a lot of those lectures were on MIT open course where a lot of them have been taken down now but in the lectures that he was giving me the super all about it so you know I think about like what what did we do wrong did we do something wrong in terms of the way that we we taught it to him because I don't know I mean maybe maybe when you become part of the SEC you kind of have to play the bad guy because you can't you can't be a an SCC person

that's like all about and people will think you're being too careless but yeah I think about like well what could we have said differently or what could we have done differently uh maybe would be in a different position because having a sec chairman that obviously is the number one thing that's stifling us right now is the regulation right people are afraid to start companies in the D5 space because of of how of the Crackdown that would happen right even before they they get a chance to like innovate so I think that would be the biggest thing that we could do for the industry is having an SEC person that is pro crypto and is pro Clarity right not even Pro crypto they could be anti-crypto but they could be pro-transparency at least or pro-clarity like okay here are the here are the

rules if you want to register with this organization there's not even the rules there that's why coinbase is suing the SEC because the SEC is just like you're selling securities it's like we're not we wouldn't even be able to we don't even know how we would if we wanted to and like there's there's no Clarity on it whatsoever so it just yeah we need something there well you guys clearly did a great job at these dinners because he goes on to teach a blockchain course yeah he's got a whole course on it yeah so so there there seems like it seems I think as you have to play the bad guy once you once you become into the SEC right you have to be because how could you be so supportive people say you're careless right or the people that I don't know if they elect you or whatever

but maybe they don't want to so he kind of has to play that role okay real quick I'm gonna put on a tinfoil hat because there's like the conspiracy that like there was some involvement between like him and like sbf's dad because he was a lawyer so like there was some inflection point where he turns negative on crypto and the conspiracies that like like Sam bakeman fried's dad is a lawyer who had a relationship with Gensler and like Sam bakeman fried's father is trying to basically build a moat around FTX so that they're the only ones that get like regulatory approval to offer cryptocurrencies and they end up monopolizing like the whole uh the whole

production like do you is there any weight to that like do you think genzler like basically listened to Sam Bateman Fry's father and drank his Kool-Aid to to basically like uh Usher in SPF is like the only one that can that can offer crypto I mean maybe like I think that it would make sense from their point of view that like okay here's somebody that we do trust so like let's give him the you know do the to do the regulation right that's how they think it's like well who who do we trust and then that person it will be the person that's in charge of like approving her or disapproving like new Securities or new projects right because that's that's how the government runs

it's like you elect somebody to be in charge of some department and that person has the choice right which is why we need like this this liquid democracy of of uh no these it should be these policies should be put in place by committees or by people not by like elected officials that can meet with people in private and then be like okay yeah I'll hook you up with this if you hook me up with that right like you're just like everybody else like there's there's no one person you could put in power that will not be tempted by by something like the only way to absolve of that is by having like every decision involve as many voices as possible which is cumbersome in like in a traditional democracy because it takes forever to collect everyone's vote but in blockchain the instant like Ping Ping

the whole us with being on your phone like hey what do you think about this issue yes no boom done now you have the answer we all get Amber Alerts like we have that we have the technical logical infrastructure to Ping everyone's phone and Collective vote yeah like the the the the just like close-mindedness to not collect everyone's vote you know I thought this I'm pretty sure the first line of the Declaration of Independence is governance by the people for the people but it's not it's governance by Gary Gensler for the people like backwards anyway Eric this has been an absolute blast thanks for coming on man

and um hope to uh thank you Robbie cheers buddy