Does Decentralization Matter? | Kevin Owocki & Cooper Turley

Transcript

welcome bankless nation to this special episode that we are going to bring you here live on the bankless youtube and later on the bankers podcast today we are talking about the conversation of do users care about decentralization how do we onboard 8 billion people into crypto while also preserving our crypto values is that even possible is that a thing and so today i'm excited to bring kevin owaki and cooper turley uh two people who uh they're that are on differing ends of the spectrum where cooper is really on the frontier of how crypto is getting adopted in new novel use cases and then kevin owaki is a builder's builder building out these systems that

can scale up crypto values to hopefully scale to the whole entire world and i think these two individuals have very unique perspectives as to how to actually adopt get the world onto crypto systems in ways that uh that satisfy the needs of the users but also while doing things the crypto way and and i want to have this conversation about what does it take to onboard the world and how much do we have to compromise along the way and do we actually have to compromise so we are going to unpack the question of do users care about decentralization here on this bankless livestream panel coming up next we will bring that conversation right to you but first we got to let you know about zirion and i would be sharing my screen but uh you

might notice that ryan sean adams uh the ai has a bug in the system today so the ai is down so it is just me today on this bankless panel and so uh zirion of course our partners at xeron we needed to let you know that xerion actually works across seven different chains and applications uh so whether you have your assets on the ethereum l1 the optimism l2 arbitrum zk sync whatever l2 you prefer or what other l1 you prefer xerion can get you to those other chains and so while there's many many chains out there in the world there is just one xerion and xeron can help you bridge across every single chain directly so you can get exposure to optimism

while never ever leaving xerion and you actually only have to switch networks when you need to sign a transaction so you're not constantly switching back and forth between networks to see where your assets are are they on arbor trump are they on optimism xerion will give you a fantastic summary of where your assets are it is the mission control for web3 your intuitive d5 portfolio manager there is a link in the show notes bankless dot cc slash xerion for you to go check out and load up your wallet so you can see your aggregate uh ethereum and just private key portfolio across all of crypto and i think that's actually going to be a very relevant part of the conversation today is how do we have many chains how do we have many ecosystems and all of them be usable all at the same time so guys we are going to

get right into the conversation of do users care about decentralization how do we preserve crypto values when we onboard 8 billion people into the world of web 3. so right after some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible we will bring you kevin owaki and cooper turley here we go so you've got some money but how are you going to use it you want to spend me shopping now bro when you know you should be saving you'll never buy a house at this rate but what if you could spend and save at the same time for the enlightened kind with inquiring minds a new world awaits set yourself free with completely

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card that hooks right into the ledger live app right next to all the default apps and services that you're already used to doing like swapping tokens and staking so if you don't have a ledger hardware wallet go to ledger.com grab a ledger and take control over your crypto welcome bankless nation to this very special conversation about how do we expand how do we project crypto values to eight billion people here we have kevin owaki an early contributor to git coin now host of the green pill podcast which you might recognize on the bankless rss feed which focuses on regenerative cryptonate cryptoeconomics and how we scale crypto values to the rest of the world also joined by kevin awake is cooper turley an operator and investor in the creator

economy co-founded friends with benefits advisors audience and a leading collector of music nfts and cooper is also a crypto socialite and has been experiencing the intersection of crypto and modern pop culture which is why both of these individuals are particularly suited to have this conversation where kevin milwaukee is deep into the bits the ones and the zeros and cooper is deep into the pop culture and we are trying to get these two worlds to come together and make sure that we scale out crypto to the rest of the world while preserving crypto values uh guys welcome to the conversation i'm really excited to have you guys here thank you man excited to be here how do you do fellow kids kevin you are not that much older than

us okay guys i want to start the conversation here uh we got cause we got to define the actual conversation decentralization versus usability are these things even opposites and are these things the friction points upon which uh this conversation uh relies on cooper i want to start with you yeah i don't think they're opposites but i do think a lot of the times user experience is directly correlated to how decentralized something is you know to really state my opinion on this matter i think that the more decentralized product is historically we've seen the harder it is to use i don't think that's going to be the case forever but i think that's sort of the grounds for this conversation kevin what's your opinion yeah i i'd agree with what cooper said yes and um i also think that

decentralization is sometimes a really important part of the user experience if you're in a country where you can't trust the state and they seize your assets then that's a pretty big user journey hiccup also if you've got a system that's fragile and centralized and it goes down that's a pretty big usability problem that said as someone who uh has been building products in since 2017 at least from the start some of the tools to make project make web3 apps deeply usable um to the standards of web 2 we just weren't out there when i first started building and it's been getting a lot better with the launch of of tools like the graph and uh various other libraries that have been built out there open

source so i think the usability of of apps when you don't have those black swan events is catching up to the web 2 experience that we all kind of know and love i think there was a nuance right there kevin that i think we should definitely unpack and that's really just about uh do we actually need to change the definition of ux and usability inside of web 3 because like you said if you know centralization allows for assets to be c's that's bad ux but that's not really what you would think about when you think the words ux when we i think we when we think about usability and ux that's we kind of stick inside of this web to mind frame of just like is this website easy to navigate do the buttons do things instantaneously and do they do

what they want them to do uh so it's part of your answer kind of we need to actually change our definition of what usability is yeah i mean i think that usability can be all encompassing if you'll allow me to just share my screen really briefly i i think a lot about this user experience hierarchy of needs which starts with functionality in that like the interface doesn't break and it's not slow does it have the right information on it are the aesthetics hot and does it allow me to do my job to be done is kind of at the top of that pyramid of usability and so i i think that you know one way to untangle this might be to go up and down that stack and kind of reason about decentralization versus usability at different layers of that stack

cooper you've met a ton of people who have come into the crypto space in 2021 and 2022. and i i think this recent cohort of crypto people is particularly interesting because they're not in my opinion from what i've seen they're not crypto people adopting crypto for crypto sake they're people adopting crypto to get something done which really changes their priority about what an application means to them and especially with with usability so what have you learned from from helping this newer cohort of people come into this space what do they care about can you put us into the shoes of a new user and if that came in 2021 or 2022 yeah i would say it's really about ease of onboarding you know how many steps do i have to take to start using something

today you know in most cases it's really around nft collecting for the most part so whether that's minting an nft collecting an nft joining a token gated server you know these are some of the use cases that i see happening most commonly with new people to web 3. and right now that on porting process has a lot of friction in it you know i think to kevin's point being able to recognize that the custodial nature of these wallets is extremely important is a new paradigm that we haven't had to consider before you know when i sign into instagram with my email and my password i don't think about you know what are the assets that i'm holding under the hood of my instagram account and so a lot of these web3 products do come with the new novelty to them but i think the core

thing that i'm focused on from a ux perspective is how much time does it take for me to say i want to use a web3 app to actually be able to use it in a meaningful manner and how do we make that window as small as possible so when it comes to uh going from web 2 to web 3 there's got to be this inevitable ux breaking based on just the new paradigms that we exist in just like you said when you log into instagram you don't actually have to be worried about the assets that you hold so maybe this conversation is like there is actually no way to avoid this breaking of the ux just because we're going from paradigm a to paradigm b when you when you are helping people on board into the concept of like user sovereign and sovereignty with their

assets like how easy is it to explain it to them the the powers of web 3 is kind of where this ux thing actually breaks down i'll take a first crack at that i think connecting with a wallet instead of signing with the email has really clicked for a lot of people once they've actually been in the door you know when they go to two different apps and they're able to connect with that same wallet address i think it makes sense to them i think the difference there is that more broadly i don't think a lot of people are well suited to handle key management you know i think for people like us who have been in the space for a long time we understand the the notion of non-custodial versus custodial we understand that giving out your private key as a non-starter so many of my friends have gotten

scammed from just like negligence you know scammers are getting pretty good out there and key management is definitely a tricky situation and so to your point i think that um it's really important that we emphasize why connecting with the wallet is better than signing in with an email but with that i think comes with a lot of underlying risks and i think that's kind of the core area of ux i would say that's really interesting to discuss here in this this panel yeah i i would just add that you know when i think about this trade-off between decentralization and ux i think a lot about um you know in in web one everyone had to learn what a back button and a url bar and a reload button i think there was a stop button that was on browsers back in the day um we all had to learn

these new paradigms for how to traverse information what a hyperlink was and people kind of got over the hump right and so when i think about web 3 you kind of have to learn about private key management you have to learn about backing up your private key which is an important part of private key management you have to learn about sending transactions gas um layer 2 architecture if you're going to be in the ethereum space and so one of my big questions is are we going to uh are are we going to try to shim the web 3 user experience into web 1 and web 2 which we already know people understand or are we gonna teach people these new primitives around key management and gas so like are we headed towards a world in which a lot of these d apps are a blockchain mallet with web

2 in the front and web 3 in the back or are we going all in on beautiful web three locks for everyone and i think that you're gonna see a stratification depending on the use case uh between those two things yeah i think it's uh i think it's a mix of both you know my vision for what this works out as is that i think that most platforms will start custodial and they will front and cover the gas fees so people do not have to do that themselves but i do think it's always how it's going to function and so if you are an advanced user i believe that you can mature opt-in to sort of a more non-custodial approach there but i think for the eight billion people that david's referring to my guess would be the mass majority of those people will never touch a private key in their lives

yeah you know one interesting experiment out there is the burner wallet which i think was one of the earliest l2 wallets that just kind of felt like an app that you could use but it was so fast and so easy to send transactions on it without having to worry about the gas prices i i think that that's a great point that we can kind of like pull people along this this custody route into having their own private keys and learning about those primitives cooper when you've uh helped people on board and watch their experiences as having to use crypto infrastructure again to achieve a goal not necessarily just to do crypto stuff for the sake of doing crypto stuff do people feel feel the power that they that of holding private keys as in like is that something that they feel empowered by or

do that does that feel something that they are encumbered by as in does the responsibility of having your own private keys is that a burden for for them or do they actually think that that's cool and neat and then it gets them excited this is only my personal experience but i have never once onboarded someone to metamask here in l.a and then seen them be like [ __ ] yeah i have a personal key like every single time it's like bro what am i doing like what are these words like just get me through to the thing and then once they get into the thing they're like okay wait i need eth2 then it's like yeah okay go on coinbase and then if they want to send from coinbase two metamask you actually have to kyc so they're uploading their documents it takes a couple minutes to

process and then they're withdrawing and that whole process has been very difficult for me to be like yo you need to be in this world and then i'll sit with them and then it takes us 30 minutes to an hour of me being with that person you know physically for them to get started um it's been tough you know to say the least one of the things that i tease bitcoiners the most when they say that bitcoin is going to take over the world is that i kind of tell them that well you guys kind of have already found all the libertarians that care about bitcoin like there's not many left of you to really scale out bitcoin to the rest of the world and what i'm hearing from you cooper is that that might also be true with people that get excited about having private keys and having control

over their own money and assets kevin do you think the powers of being your own custodian having control of your own money and assets maybe we've actually onboarded most of those people and the rest of the world actually might not be interested in those powers what do you think about that um i think a lot about drivers and barriers so what's the job to be done that they're trying to accomplish when they hit the private key roadblock or the kyc roadblock and and those are the barriers and so what are the drivers are the drivers enough to overcome the barriers and the problem in 2017 was that you only had this like sort of libertarian football government kind of attitude that made you want to get over those barriers but now we've got uh nfts we've got d5 we've got

quadratic funding so it's about continually lifting lifting up the bar or the drivers to get people wanting to incur the pain of learning about these new primitives to get them through the door but i don't know the developer uh take what i say with a grain of salt because my audience at get coin is mostly developers and people who already understand this stuff so i think that i'm not really bearing the brunt of it in in a way that someone like cooper is yeah and david something i just thought about there is um for all three of us on this podcast we have a significant portion of our net worth in crypto i think for the average person that's joining crypto every day now they have less than a thousand dollars you know in many cases less than a hundred dollars and so when it comes to something like

key management i think the reason we're so passionate about it is because it's very meaningful us you know if we lose that portion of our lives we're getting hit with a serious serious dent for a lot of these people that are joining web3 today they're treating it almost like a burner experience in many ways shapes or form you know the most common experience i've seen is someone putting a thousand dollars of ether their metamask to go by the dumbest jpegs i've ever seen in my life on openc and that's all that they know and so when you treat it with that mindset i think that's why there's a different relationship with private keys because they don't see it as you know the means to their financial freedom they see it as speculative gambling for the short term what about the onboarding experience from for other ecosystems i've heard

fantastic things about the phantom wallet with solana cooper do you have any perspective as to how much of this is an ethereum problem it's not that much easier on sauna i think it's incrementally better but it doesn't drastically change the overhaul i mean you have a little bit better ui on phantom you're using a different token and it's a little bit easier to send and faster but at the end of the day i think the whole notion of setting up a private key and sending tokens to that wallet to be able to use it in the first place i think is the core blocker that we get stuck on irregardless of what ecosystem we're talking about i think the the meta conversation here is really about will crypto change the world or will the world change crypto obviously like the internet changed the world uh because we first didn't have

the internet and then we had and then we had the internet and that changed everything but we already have the internet now in the world of crypto and like now crypto still kind of optional at this point and so to perhaps to get crypto to eight billion people we actually have to change what crypto looks like in order for for for that to to change the world rather than just like well crypto's so clearly useful that the world is just going to have to change to adopt crypto uh what are your guys's perspective on this this this friction i think we should keep increasing the drivers and keep decreasing the barriers to get into crypto one of my beliefs is that for 99 of the world their financial lives is not their investments they

probably don't have that much savings and we're very privileged if we have savings in this space at all a net worth um and and so i'm a big believer that if you want to make have 99 of the world adopt web 3 then what you're going to need to do is hit them with a use case that is something that intersects with their financial lives what does their financial lives intersect with jobs we got to build this internet of jobs where people can earn crypto earn their first crypto instead of buy their first crypto because 99 of the world their financial lives is not their investments it's earning and a lot of times it's pretty tight it's paycheck to paycheck and so i think that it's really important to build web3 earning experiences if we want to onboard a lot of humanity and i just think it's so

cool that um santi siri of ubi there are people in argentina that are living off of ubi in santi siri i think it's so great whenever i meet a developer at uh eth event and they tell me oh i got my first coins at i get coin and like you guys got me through three months of the bear market last time so i think earning is gonna be a huge blow away use case then its time has not come yet at all i absolutely love that yeah and i can really echo that sentiment here in la2 because one of those drivers that does get people to go through the hoops of downloading metamask and putting eth into their wallet is the ability to sell their creative work you know i think nfts have been such a core driver to this chapter of web 3 because a lot of

people are earning income through selling creative work on chain and i think that ability for someone to have a new marketplace and a new medium to be able to transact with their peers has been in my opinion the single biggest driver of success in web3 over the course of the last year and cooper you're a big builder in the world of the the creator economy which i think is what more or less you alluded to right there can you just talk about uh just the drive of adoption that comes from sustainable revenue generating uh parts of of web three like is this do you think this is going to be responsible for like five to ten percent of adoption or like 50 to 60 of adoption like where how important does this aspect of actually being able to earn money natively in web 3 drive

adoption from your perspective i think it's the fundamental building block you know when i look across the board of my friends who have retained web3 it's been those who have been able to consistently sell their work on chain you know it's one thing to buy ether and have that in your wallet and see it's go up it's another thing to go and buy an asset on openc and then flip it for a little bit of profit but the people who are most involved with web3 today are those who started out by selling an nft or two using that money to then buy another jpeg and then continue that cycle i think once people realize that web3 is the most opportune place for you as a creative to be exploring you know relative to any other marketplace that exists today once you take a couple footholds into that place you know it's

not only the ability to mint and tokenize your work it's sort of the community spirit around it and so when i sell a work on foundation or when i sell a work on openc there is people on twitter that are like coming and giving me flowers every time i think that's where we start to get into sort of the stickiness of this is actually more on sort of you know like how how personal the relationship do you have with this ecosystem and how much of a core role does it play in your life but cooper in your answer you talked about things like like open c which uh you know i wouldn't even classify opencs fully web 3. uh they i've heard from members of the openc team as they kind of consider themselves web 2.5 right like you own your own assets uh your assets are are

coming from a next place external to open c but openc can still censor your nfts they can still like you know take like close off your your account and so these are some of the compromises that we've had to make on our crypto values in order to have like an entire bull market in nfts like imagine whether or not like without openc would we have even had an nft ecosystem or an nft bull market so into my mind that's an indication of just like oh we do need to compromise in order to have this ecosystem uh we had like the looks rare platform the more decentralized version of openc which isn't even fully decentralized uh still actually hasn't gotten the adoption that openc has so like where do you see the role of

compromising in in the world of trying to get these people onboarded into into platforms that enable them to be self-sovereign builders yeah i think it goes back to how easy it is for the platform to use you know the reason that openc is winning right now is because it has a superior brand and it has a good product an analogy i like to make here is when sushi swapped forked uniswap the reason that that project went differently is that uniswap was driven by its code and its underlying protocol parameters it was not necessarily driven by the product experience itself now openc isn't really innovating too crazily on a technical level from a protocol standard point it's winning because it has a strong product and you can go and you can search for these things and the ui stays up most of the time and you have trust

that what you're buying is reliable and i think it's a very different standard when we start to compare you know what is the difference from a unit swap versus sushi swap fork from an open c versus looks rare the unit swap for a sushi swap is on a protocol level with the smart contracts opencvers looks rare for the most part on a product level kevin how do you see the this trajectory uh like in the in the future how do we build out systems that don't compromise on our values when it's so obviously easy to onboard more and more people if you just take shortcuts well you're probably asking the wrong guy because i built bitcoin web 2.5 back in the day let me put my hand to the sky and say sorry that i did it that way but the tools truly weren't there in 2017. um

uh so my experience is that um bitcoin's built web 2.5 when you go to getcoin.com it's a server that we manage that's centralized um spent a lot of time during the bear market just trying to survive and we talked about rewriting it to be decentralized and it just was like always number seven on the list and um now that we've raised the round from paradigm and kind of like fully committed to becoming a dao we're in the middle of we just announced grants 2.0 which is going to be a protocol based approach to get coin grants and it's going to take all the tech debt and debt that we have from the old product and flush it out the window and the hope is that grants 2.0 is a credibly neutral

foundation for bitcoin grants in the future so i think that we're kind of like right in the middle of that transition and you know what we did in 2017 got us off the ground it made us into somewhat of a household name in the ethereum space but it's not the future of credibly neutral public goods funding and that's a very bitters pill to swallow um to have to totally reset on your product and go in another direction but luckily we've got the right community momentum and capital to make it happen now and so we're just really investing in in reinventing uh turning the company into a dow or i guess like bitcoin grants into a dow and so we're right in the middle of that transition so uh i guess i'm the wrong person to

answer your question is the short answer of uh to that uh bitcoin right now is very web 2.5 but we are trending towards becoming web3 which i think is kind of like an interesting counter example to open c which is just kind of on these this like ipo route um bitcoin is on the route to becoming a dow and there's like a counter factual version of the world in which the teams could have chosen to go in a different direction but um i think that we made the right choice by deciding that bitcoin grants was gonna become a dow yeah it's definitely the harder path but i think definitely the more admirable one and when i think of what makes a product web 3 quote unquote i think about whether you're connecting a wallet or signing in with an email and so david i would agree that something like openc

is you know web 2.5 many senses but to the average user the fact you're coming in and signing in by your connecting your wallet i think that's the level of depth to which they consider that conversation about whether or not this is a product for me it's the forkability it's can i go to this code base and fork it and set up my own instance of it if my right to exit if i don't if i don't like the system as it exists and you don't have that with open c you kind of have it with git coin but you have to deal with our clunky code base um i think austin griffith is the king of fork ability i'm always working with him and he's always like you know fork this template that i made or fork this app that i made and that's kind of what we aspire to right

now at get coin with grants 2.0 i think you see the difference in framing there too because we start to consider 8 billion people in web 3 the amount of people i even understand what a fork is or how to even do that in the first place in my opinion is going to be like super marginal that's not to say that it's not important but i think that's where like the lanes start to differ right it's like what is the depth which people can actually choose to do something with these systems if they want to back to my other point i don't think most people will ever be able to do so or even know like what that looks like yeah i mean i think that it's true that those people don't understand forkability but they all get the sense that they're trapped in facebook while

facebook's walled garden so i think there's an intermediary audience in between the eight billion people and the protocols and that's the developers that are building on top of them and the early adopters um like are they are they able to fork the protocol and create a better customer experience for the rest of the world based off of that forked protocol is like the intermediary kind of wedge between those two audiences i think kevin can you talk about the the the right to exit or the ability to exit and how that fits into the definition of like web3 values can you just for listeners that are new to this concept can you kind of unpack that for them yeah totally um so basically fork ability in the right to exit is basically like i could leave imagine a

world in which you could leave facebook and you could not only download your data but you could take your social graph with you to another facebook clone that had different values that wasn't run by zuckerberg that was run by like anti-zuckerberg or something like that and so there's this transportability of your information from network to network um that is involved in your right to exit that doesn't exist in web 2. and one of the dreams the big dreams of web 3 is that i could take my social graph and my relationships with me from site to site without having to get trapped in anyone's walled garden so that right to exit is is is that but it's also anyone being able to fork a code base of a protocol and launch their

own version of it which you know can be a friendly fork which means that you can the the team that initially launched the protocol converge those changes back upstream if they're a really good idea or it could be an unfriendly fork like a sushi swap where it's like we're just gonna compete with you um and i think that really the value that we're kind of like chipping away at here is the consent of the governed right in political philosophy there's this idea that the consent of the governed is the only legitimate basis of governance as opposed to like the divine right of kings in like the 16th century and um the only consent of the governed we have with these facebook with these giant tech monopolies is that tick i read the terms of service and no one [ __ ] read that terms of it's 35

pages long you can't negotiate the terms of services totally asymmetric power between the consumer and the people who've put the platform out there and so the idea of not only giving users governance of the platform formally with governance tokens but also allowing forkability creates that consent of the governed feedback loop which hopefully will lead to better products and better consumer experiences because users can exit if you're like i don't know if i can curse on this if you're fudging it up they can they can exit and i think that it all goes back to consent to the govern for me and forkability and right tax hit are all just parts of evening out that power asymmetry and restoring the consent of the governed and therefore the legitimacy of these products

and just to just to reiterate and unpack that a little bit further the idea is that if your code base is open source if it's if the code is free for all developers to iterate on as they see the idea the hopeful idea the optimistic idea is that the developers of this open source ecosystem will trend towards crypto values over time and what crypto values are in my at least in my perspective what web 3 values are is kind of what you said the consent of the govern as in our web 3 protocols reflect the values of the users that compose them very much unlike facebook right like the values of the of the users are not freely expressed into the design of the systems but in web 3 systems the idea that we can fork these things into newer

and newer systems ensures over time that there's some sort of alignment behind the values of the people and the the systems that enable these people now cooper my question to you is that who who of these new users cares about this concept like how how how crypto values woke are the people that come into the crypto in 2021 and 2022 and do you see them like trending towards crypto values or do they not care this was uh exactly i was going to take it so i'm glad you asked that question i think that being able to have governance is extremely powerful but to your point i think the vast majority of people will never use it in the first place you know the extent to which governance

conversations happen in the terms of creator economy is what color should the t-shirt be um where should we host the meetup you know like things that are like you don't need tokens really for that but i think that people are just like they hit a ceiling in terms of like what governance can actually do for them and so i think there is a degree of education that's like yo governance is valuable like it's not only the color of the t-shirt or like the logo that we use but it's like a fundamental change to the underlying protocol or product i don't think many people are aware of the fact that they can have that level of influence on a project i think it's only because we've seen the power of on-chain governance and sort of the social and financial dynamics that come with that that we

understand you know the depth to which this is so important guys i have a bunch of more questions that i want to get to such as what aspects of web3ux actually out of the box trump's web 2 ux as well as is this really just like a scalability issue like imagine if we had instant fee instant and free transactions how much of our ux problems are solved and then also i want to ask you guys about your favorite ux experience in the world of web 3. do you have a particular app that comes to mind about like that really just like embodies good user experience in this new world these are the questions that are coming up next right after we get back from some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible if you're going bankless you need metamask this is your tool to

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ecosystem no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswap grants.org and help steer uniswap in the direction that you think it should go thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless alright guys we are back to our conversation about how we preserve crypto values which i personally hold dear and how do we make 8 billion people also hold those things dear and so i wonder kevin you've been a builder in the space and you mentioned kind of having to compromise with with web3 values in getting your your application out the door i'm wondering how you kind of navigated those choices what what things would you would you absolutely never ever compromise on and what things are easier and more okay to

compromise on that you might see other you know upstarts new companies new platforms compromising on in order to get their their viable business out the door yeah i mean i'm really proud that in 2017 that everyone was doing icos and we just like didn't have any of that noise we just built a community that people loved and that sounds like an obvious choice in hindsight but at the time it was a real counter trend bet to um to not do an ico um i do think that back in 2017 when we started just the tools weren't there yet the graph wasn't there yet scaffolding wasn't there yet there just wasn't the tools and and so maybe what happened with get coins launch isn't super relevant to what builders out there are are doing today

um i think that there's there's definitely a different set of trade-offs today where you can have a pretty close to web 2 ux with a web 3 wallet um and i think that that's really cool things that i would not compromise on is i don't ever want to have custody on users funds i don't want the liability i don't want to be accused of of having access to those funds and so we just we just always designed it so that we never had custody of of users funds um and i think that uh you know a clear trade-off that we had to make was back in get coin grants round 12 we because the get coin platform was centralized and there is a sanction against certain sanctioned nations we did have to shut down a grant that was

connected to one of those sanctioned nations and i know that that caused a big controversy among the web 3 community that's connected to to that nation into that community and that was a trade-off that we were coerced to make because of the the regulatory regime in the united states but it's a clear trade-off that we had to make because we're centralized and i'm i feel for everyone that it affected i i truly do um that that you know they can't participate in quadratic funding and public goods funding because of because of that so those are the trade-offs that come to mind to me but i will note that uh in 2022 there's really great tools to get your tool off the ground decentralized and you shouldn't have to make the same trade-offs that i made in

2017. yeah i actually wanted to pull on that because that was a question that came from from one of my friends when uh organizing this agenda is the importance of dev tooling to help solve ux issues and so i think from what i've gathered there's actually like two layers of building first you got to build the apps to make the apps usable but that job is done uh a lot easier if there's a lot of dev tooling which also needs to be built kevin can you talk about and unpack just the importance of dev tooling when it comes to making usable apps yeah i mean you know imagine you were trying to to launch this podcast with only sticks and stones it's it's hard to focus on your audience and providing value to them when you don't even yourself have the right tools

in order to ship to them and you know some of my favorite dev tools are scaffolding which allows you to get a end-to-end d app from smart contract to front-end interface up within a minute i think the graph is really great for querying relational data i'm really excited about what ceramic is going to do for web3 profile data and so we're kind of starting to see these tools develop oh and one of the things that really like i'm i'm so sure that crypto is going to be tradfi and it's because every new money lego that is built in this ecosystem enables us to do something new and then the permutations of all the different money legos of what you could build grows exponentially there are hackers that can walk into east denver a weekend hackathon this weekend and build

something in a weekend that it would take a bank 100 million dollars and a thousand people to do 10 years ago because there's so many money legos that are just out there open source and there's such less craft in the open source financial system so the the amount of what's possible to build grows exponentially with every new money lego that's put out there and that's why i'm so sure that web3 is going to win eventually the progress is exponential so this uh the question of this episode is do users care about decentralization and like extrapolating it's like we have crypto values that we believe that we embody and how do we export these values to eight billion people and a lot of this is coming off the backs of like the alt layer one summer uh solana avalanche a lot of these decentralization

compromised ecosystems gained a ton of adoption but in my mind they compromise on some of the values that make crypto tick decentralization being being the big one but we also have layer twos coming out that in my mind help preserve decentralization at scale and kevin what you were talking about with just these money legos offering optionality to devs uh a question back to you again kevin is is this just like a short-term problem is this just the problem that we would expect the first 15 years of crypto to have and over the long term it's just we just build our way out of it um sorry i don't think i understood the question is it is the problem of not being able to

project crypto values to eight billion people just something that we would only consider in the first 15 years of crypto because we just haven't built out their own solutions for it yeah there's a couple questions tangled up in that and i know you don't want me to ask a question back to you but i mean i guess like the question is why do we want to propagate crypto values back to the world is that we think the world would be better if it had more crypto values self-sovereignty anti-fragility in it yeah i think i think the answer is yes um yeah yeah in broad strokes yes um but i do think that like to actually answer your question the the utility is the trojan horse for the values and i think that you know every

time you use quadratic funding um on git coin you start to see that oh public goods are actually fundable like there's actually momentum here it's not just this like dead space that no one's that no one's working on every time an artist makes more in a week off of an nft than they did off of a year of spotify scales you start to see oh my gosh a better world as possible for funding the arts and i think that the utility is really the trojan horse for the values and you're right in the first 10 years of crypto the only utility is like the libertarian government like type stuff which like all due respect to libertarians i believe sovereignty is is very um is very important um and as we have more and more utility out of coming

out of the ecosystem i do think that there's there's going to be more opportunities to trojan horse more sovereignty and more of those values into the world from there cooper i want to ask this next question to you is uh what about web3 actually has good ux uh i i think the obvious answer that comes to mind is well you get to own your own assets which has trade-offs this can also be a bad ux but is there any well well you've observed your own operations in the world of web 3 and also the people that you've helped onboard what is universally like given the thumbs up by people in in crypto is there anything come to mind i would say universal login you know one login to every app that you ever use

makes a lot of sense to people i think a digital backpack is cool the fact that i can like own tangible financial assets that all live in one place you know even if they're across a variety of different industries is really exciting to people and then more broadly i think we'll get to this point but token gated access you know as a primitive basically the assets that i own allowing me to enter different physical and digital spaces i think those are some of the core primitives that people have been really excited about kevin same question to you what has what tailwinds does web3 have when it comes to ux open source i mean i think that just the exponential money legos that are available to implement all of those things is so important and it's why you've seen more innovation in web 3 in the last two years than you've seen in

banks for the last 30. like what is the bank done like invented the atm in the last 30 years um and maybe found a way to to milk people for for more profits so um yeah also very excited about universal logins i'm excited about non-skew non-skeuomorphic use cases of crypto things like coordinate uh things like quadratic funding and and just things that that weren't possible in the old paradigm because i think that that's where the breakthrough the breakthrough use cases are going to come from i actually uh add one more on here too people love the idea of secondary markets and on-chain royalties i feel like that's what i talk to creators they get really excited about the fact that they don't have to like manually collect from anyone and that it just happens automatically it's like

kind of a nuanced one but people actually really resonate with that totally is there any uh web3 application web3 website or company or project or whatever that when you look at that you go to whatever wherever it is whatever website and you log into it and you're like wow this this just feels so awesome this ux is fantastic i feel really empowered as a user anything in the world of web3 that really stands out as they did it right um cooper i'll start with you i think the two i'd call out here are foundation and sound xyz you know foundation's been the one when i show new people here in la about like a crypto product like oh this just looks and feels like something that i would use normally it just happens to be built on web3 and then from the music nft side

of things you know the audio player on sound with that audience tab there's just some social choices that were made there that were really good and i guess there's a third one to round it out um mirror i think is fantastic from like a publishing standpoint it's a web3 product but they do a lot to really extrapolate how web 3 it is to where if you want to make an nft on mirror you just click a button you say i want 10 copies upload this jpeg here and then press the button to mint it and it's more of a widget-like experience than it is like you having to do anything on a contract level kevin same question yeah yeah great question um i i want to yes and cooper's answers those are all really great i do think that one one tool that i'm continuously

impressed with is snapshot which is where a lot of dow governance votes happen just the repeatable off-chain governance stuff that they've built i just think is like the amount of the ecosystem that depends on snapshot for its dowels i think is immense and we should give them a lot of credit for the work that that they've done in making that a reality um i also think gnosis safe i noticed safe has just become a pure part of my day-to-day in week over week managing funds in a gnosis safe being able to connect it with wallet connect and all of these different d apps i think that it's maybe not the most aesthetically beautiful interface in the world these two apps that i'm talking about but they're so purely

functional in getting the job to be done of managing assets or voting and decentralization uh that i that i'm just compelled by by how seamlessly they they work and how much of like a core money lego they've become for the space so i think snapshot endos is safe for me definitely cosign snapshot i think the interesting thing to call out about gnosis safe is you know on the protocol level gnosis safe is fantastic it's like a fundamental building block i've noticed that there's actually a new chapter of products being built on top of noses safe just to make it easier to use there's um a couple of couple companies called coop castle um you know metal links one that comes to mind here there are a couple of companies that are basically like all routed on the back of noses safe at the core and then just

making it operationally easier on top utopia falls into this category part still falls into this category i think it's interesting to recognize that something that's such a core building block like gnosis safe i mean i totally agree with you kevin i'm in those safe every single day but there's things that we need to do to make it easier like right now if i want to collect an nft with a friend through a gnosis safe wallet i can't connect to most of these sites like the wallet connect integration is is very tricky you can't sign messages and no so safe right now which means i can't even get started on a lot of these nft protocols and so i think there's definitely improvements that we can make on this sort of ux question to make something as powerful as a multi-sig more tangible for the average user

totally what would you say is the lowest hanging fruit ux problem that you wish the industry could solve like what is the thing that everyone is running up against that just frustrates them does anything come to mind i mean my audience at get coin is like web 3 developers who are by definition already further down this rabbit hole so i don't know i feel like this is this is a better question for you coop yeah i would say uh fiat on ramping would probably be mine you know i think that um it's easy to buy crypto it's not easy to buy it in on custodial fashion and i think all the solutions that are out there do not let you easily get eth into your wallet in one click and i think that's the single biggest hurdle i think

people are fine with private key stuff it's annoying but it's not like tricky it's just like when it comes to actually funding the wallet itself that i think people get blocked a lot of the time yeah i could imagine that problem actually getting worse as we go into a layer two ecosystem because we need eth to go to a wallet on a particular chain and these all these exchanges need to enable all these chains and there's the idea about the layer 2 revolution is that there's going to be many many many chains so how do we get these fiat on ramps to be able to deposit gas money across any sort of arbitrary number of chains i think it's going to be a tough tough hurdle to overcome but when it does then it means every single chain is actually uh available to enable users

left and right um so i think that's the thing for off ramps too you know right now if i sell an nft on foundation the ability for me to actually put that into my bank account is a pretty difficult experience and i think making that flow easier where i can top up a wallet and then easily cash out if i want to i think that's actually more of an important question than um you know private key management kevin i think this is going to be one of our our last questions and i'm going to throw this one to you is um again going back to the concept of putting crypto values into 8 billion people's brains how do we preserve decentralization how do we preserve user sovereignty uh but how do we actually do that as in do we want users to be consciously thinking

like oh is this app decentralized am i in control of my own assets or do we want to actually take that cognitive load off of the user and just have that be the water that they swim in is that even is that even possible and or is it actually our responsibility to just preach about these new values of the web3 age and trying to convince as many people to get on board with that yeah i think preaching might have a net negative effect so i i would i would i think we really need to use the utility of these dapps to trojan horse in these values and just show them that hope for sovereignty and for public goods and for decentralization anti-fragility is all possible and i think that we've got to

deliver the apps that solve problems for people in the year 2022 that exists today and that and that those values are utility are our trojan horse in from the utility and that takes me to how do we make it easy as possible for developers to create the next wave of innovation how do we give them business models how do we give them the money legos how do we identify the use cases and how do we build a talent pipeline no one has enough developers or designers right now a talent pipeline of people who want to work on this space and so that's kind of what i'm focused on right now it's empower the people who are going to create the utility and then the utility will trojan horse in the value i think so is it really all about developers as in if we can just give the developers

the tools to uh ensure that what they build is aligned with web3 values that well then they can build platforms that scale those values out to the users if you're asking the founder of git coin if it's all about developers i'm going to say hell yeah i think so i would take that a step further and say um i think it's about making the tools easy enough to use for someone who has never coded a day in their life to actually spin up a web3 product or service this is something as simple as saying if you hold an nft you can enter this venue i think right now if i want to do that i need to have a dev team with it i think the testament whether or not web3 would be adopted is how easy we can recreate almost a shopify like experience or a wordpress or a substack

experience where i don't need to be technical in any capacity to benefit from the foundation that web3 has built hey guys final question and thank you guys so much for spending some of your time here on the bankless livestream i really appreciate your guys's perspectives here so so final question is um what w do you really hope crypto the industry of crypto has in 2022 cooper i'll start with you i mean i'm obviously extremely biased here but i think music is the vertical i'm most focused on and um this is one that i think is going to have a breakout moment and i think the reason for that is not because i hold a [ __ ] ton of music nfts but i think that there is a very real wave about artists saying i don't want to be in a label anymore and i think web3 is a clear alternative to

that so i'm very excited to explore what that path looks like kevin what w do you hope the crypto industry achieves in 2022 um i'm really big on regenerative crypto crypto that's good for the world and i think that that is both a means in itself a means uh and an end and i do think that uh there's a lot of skepticism about crypto out there which i think is is righteous and i do think that if we want to create a better world with crypto then and we want to show the world that we're creating a better world with crypto we actually have to create that world and so i'm really focused on this thing called impact owls which are dials that have positive externalities for the space um and for the world at large and

that impact can be financial like bitcoin grants funding public goods it can be on identity and um and income like ubi and proof of humanity or it can be on the vector of paying down climate change like climate dial so i'm really focused on impact owls i don't know that 2022 will be the year for them but i do think that at a time in which governments are trying to figure out how they're going to regulate crypto if we can put our best foot forward by showing how crypto can be better for the world build web 3 era institutions that fund public goods and regenerate the world then i think that that's a really good step forward for the space nice can i add uh one more in there david

go for it i think it's really relevant to this medium but tokenized media you know being able to collect versions of podcasts blog posts you know whatever it might be i think that there's going to be a really big wave around tokenized media i'm excited for that to have a little bit of a limelight i can confirm so guys thank you so much for coming on this live stream i really appreciate this conversation this is something that i think the entire industry needs to need to have conversation the entire industry needs to have and needs to be aware of and hopefully can start to solve some of these uh patches in our apps to make sure that they stay aligned with the values that we created when satoshi mined the first bitcoin block so cooper kevin thank you for coming on this live stream appreciate it

thank you very much it's fantastic cheers guys of course none of this was financial advice i don't even think we talked about specific crypto assets or anything of that nature but even if we did it wouldn't have been financial advice so thank you for for bearing with us uh i don't know the the closer as well as ryan does but we are headed west we're on the frontier it's not for everyone but thank you for joining us on the bankless journey cheers hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get

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