Fireside chat between Chris Fabian and Aya Miyaguchi

Transcript

[Music] They can hear us. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone else want to join us up front? Come. I'm breaking the fourth wall. It's a It's a famous thing in theater. So, well, I'm kind of coming amongst you. So, come and join us. Come be close. Right. The clicker. There we go. Thank you. That will be down to you. And it is 12:01. So, it is time to start because we have a lot to get through, ladies and gentlemen. Right. Is everyone feeling good? Feeling comfy. Yes, that excellent one.

Enthusiastic slow clap. Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you. The problem with humanity is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. This is something that Io Wilson, who's sadly no longer with us, but he also studied ants, which is funny because he also studied humans, and there's a lot of parallels in between those. He said this quote, and I think that it applies more now than ever. We basically have technology to solve almost all of our problems, but we're human after all, as Da Punk sings, and we all mentally still live in the cave. So sometimes all the best intentions come running head first onto a concrete wall of bureaucracy, big institutions, slow processes, and it is

down to people like a and Chris that are sitting next to me now that that wall is broken. often at a big kind of cost of blood, sweat, and tears, but it is broken and these positive changes are shining through. I'd love to welcome you at the fireside chat between Chris Fabian and Ya. Ya being the president of the Ethereum Foundation and Chris being the founder of Giga. Um they've worked together on a lot of projects, most notably a UNICEF Ethereum Foundation one, which we'll be talking about today. And they've done a lot of stuff, but they just don't talk about it much publicly. And so today, we really want to give you a flavor of what they've done. and a chance to ask questions and interrogate this very very complex topic. So ya and Chris welcome. Give them a big round of applause

please. I would like to start with you a uh there was recently a a blog published. Um I'm sure a lot of you would have read it. You've transitioned from the executive director at EF into the president. Um which sounds very statist but trust me it's it's it's all it's all good. Could you speak us through this transition and what this transition really entailed and how you felt basically going through it? Um yeah okay so the transition transition um this is actually I haven't really um give given a talk after that we've been very busy with the transition so this is the first time we I talked about this I talk about this um so it started with um so the ethereum ecosystem

changes all the time it's like almost like a living thing that's why I call it infinite garden um but Um so there with many different moving pieces um and then the community requests many different things to the different foundation. uh so during my time um uh we studied this philosophy of substraction and which was um I think it's most misunderstood concept uh but the idea was most of blockchains uh in this space are either owned by or control the develop controlled by a one company and

that's that's what differenti differentiate Ethereum from everything else well outside of Bitcoin and and then so that the beauty of this space is really like EF doesn't really own own the technology doesn't own the project of building the platform it's all working together collaborative efforts um and then when I joined EF uh it there was still like a strong tendency to give all the power to the EF or want EF to do everything.

So it was supposed to be the mindset subtraction was the mindset of like no we shouldn't do everything but we can also do everything. We're not even the richest organization in the space. Um so it started with that and with um like after seven years and I think a lot of great things happen. I want to show maybe an obvious example if I easier one to to wait how where do I put put this somehow it's actually moved there but it doesn't move here you'll never know godlike technology I already mentioned this ah there we go yes oh yes yes so this was uh you can

see the details in the the 20 last year's EF report but I don't know um a lot of people who haven't seen it. So basically this is an example of how the treasury of our community is and this is what you know how much money everyone has. But the next one is this is um there is like the specific measure ways of to to measure this like described in our report but basically there's so many other organizations now that are funding uh what we call public goods and plus extra thing. This doesn't

include um forprofit investments or equities and stuff but you don't see this in anywhere else. So that's really the the the flute of subtraction is um um like only by us there's little thing we can do but by working together. So funding is just one example. Um and then it's after uh some years um but we started to see a lot of different layers of activities and also this is like I used this space layering of Steuart Bland at the transition

to kind of go back to uh how everything started. But I saw that as the Ethereum ecosystem has now a lot of different activities with many different um sorry like different paces speed. There are things that are happen quickly uh also for the short term. There are things that happen like slowly but last for long term. Um we have been focused on the long-term part. We still have long-term thinking as a one of our principle and if we don't think about the long term

like everything is meaningless but we all we need all of these in in this in the ecosystem in the space and that's where I talked to Vitalic and we need even at the Ethereum Foundation like we we we need to um have different activities that cover different case layers. uh that paces in the layer but I myself transition to focus more on the the core slower pace side uh which was also um has been always my interest um so focus on long-term things but we have all different activities but now we have um

amazing new coedes uh and executing on like you know short midterm thing but also thinking about the long term as the vision. So the board is in charge of setting the vision, thinking about the long term and then you collect executing. So we changed the structure and then now uh to to strategically be a bit stronger organization to respond to um ever changing environment. So that's how our transition was. Thank you very much. And if I can encourage everyone, please do read those blog posts. We'll share them afterwards as well, but they're really

enlightening and I love when we were preparing for this yesterday. You know, you uh in the notes it is that you're building an infinite garden like not a machine and it is almost like we saw this with web two although this was ages ago. You know there was this idea of you know giving the data and the tech to the people and it just became an oligopoly and suddenly there is this almost like weird feeling that you know Ethereum and web 3 is meant to be decentralized distributed but people are kind of waiting for almost like centralized leadership and by telling them to do your own thing it's not like you don't care or it's not like you're letting them go. It's like no do your own thing that's the whole point of this. So I've got one one more question for you. What do you feel because there's been a lot

of changes that happened. what do you feel that kind of like stayed the same and what are the things that have really kind of changed for you? How would you articulate that? Um so in our transition like like I said our actually long-term vision doesn't hasn't changed. We still say infinite garden is the vision. It's almost like infinite infinite garden includes things more than Ethereum or even blockchain but you can just separate that that piece I mean you know this we talked about this right that um um so we in order for this technology to really serve the world and then really help

solve the problems in the systems like has to come together. Um so that we see this as infinite well I use infinite guardian infinite comes from the infinite games and we we we do this play all together with everyone um not just for one one player to win it all. Um and then the organic growth needs to happen like we can't try to control everything just one player trying to control we don't make innovation uh true innovation happen which we uh prove that a lot in but the Ethereum proved that a lot in in uh in in the last 10 years it's about to become 10 years the birthday is this

this year and um so that is not changing but I like I said so the the challenge I think the biggest challenge in the space we felt at the transition is there are almost two extreme views in this space. One is that um oh we don't really care about um decentralization that what matter most is the price of ether. We started to hear that more often. And then the other extreme is like we care about the core values of decentralization um privacy uh censorship resistance and like we would this this is the most important things and then we

don't move forward um at all. this is like we don't we're not going to change, right? And then we it's it became very difficult to even communicate in the space because but then um so our view is we're not saying the money is not important. It it matters uh for the the the token to have some values to secure the network. Um but also at the same time these values are not just ide for idealistic reasons. I think people in PLA know this actually I love this city so much. I'm walking around there's uh museum of communism

like right at the almost in the supermarket area. That's a people think about this also at the hotel. I don't know if you recognize this. This is the only place I the Wi-Fi password are actually real passwords. If you say hon it's not like huton um is password. So this it's weaved into the culture and because they that's their life that's that's been their life because of the history. Yes.

Um and so so that how do we connect these values to to these uh opportunities with businesses and um you know like sustainable finance financing and funding and everything. So that's that's something we think more uh recently and something we want to actually you know like do better. Fantastic. Thank you. And you've right created a beautiful segue. Thank you. A ya into the next question. You mentioned the Czech Republic and the checks like anthropologically we're a nation of hackers. We love to tinker. We're very kind of against the system. But then like on the institutional level we're we're hopeless. Um so so that is very

much like the two tides crashing against each other. But we don't only see that in the Czech Republic. We kind of see that globally when you have a big institution looking after kind of big global problems and then you know the the hackers that want to do something about it as well. And that kind of opens up the amazing collaboration between you two. You've been working together for quite a while, but actually the partnership, one wouldn't expect it, between UNICEF and Ethereum Foundation. So maybe I'd love to um throw the baton over to to Chris a little bit. You've been working with a for long time. I think it's two kind of kindred souls that met and made things work despite the circumstances. But kind of what did that look like? A large public institution and a web 3 institution trying to collaborate? I think. Do you

have the picture of what it looked like when we first started or that's the next slide? That's great. Wait. Um Oh, no. That's later. Oh, do you Wait, we can I mean that's what it looked like. Yeah. Well, you'll you'll Okay, that's how it started. This is This is how it's ending. No, this Yeah, that's not how it's It's like in the middle of it. So, I somebody's taking a photo. I don't know if this is useful. Hope it's a good story. But yeah, maybe we should should we go back? Let's go back a year. First, how we met.

Yeah. So, we we'll go back a year and we'll come back to this in a second. Yeah. Uh, so I I was running a thing called UNICEF innovation at the time. UICF, if you're not familiar with it, which I wasn't when I joined UNICEF, it's an enormous agency that is focused on providing access to health care and uh education for children around the world. It's the world's largest children's organization. I came from startups and building tech in emerging markets and I had I had very very little knowledge of this enormous UN thing and what UNICEF did. Um, in the few years that I was there, I built up their open-source platform uh for for using SMS messages to send information. and I built up the their data science capacity and we were starting to work on

blockchain stuff in 2014 15 16 and I I felt very lucky to be in this this thing that had offices in 190 countries around the world which each one of those offices was able to work with the government and when I was starting my own companies the hardest thing for me was working with governments because like it would take forever to get a meeting I didn't understand how they worked the people had titles that were strange they all wear clothes like this and not normal people clothes and etc etc. Now I'm a sellout and I I get it but you know that's what happens over time. Um so I found this organization that had already its tendrils into all of these governments around the world and that I thought was sort of unoptimized. I didn't think they were

doing stuff with technology in 2012 2013 that was meeting the pace of change in the world. And so I was able to I was very lucky. I was able to bring in some of that um energy and some of the people that I knew from from the startup world and it was great. So fast forward a few years. I was in Japan maybe 2017. Um I think it's 2018 it has to be because I joined EF 2018 and and I was there to meet with u the largest Japanese trade organization Kaiden which is like also another big institution full of people who wear suits and you know dress like that. And again I was more used to it by that point. Still not fully but kind of I had a sense of it of what that kind of institution looked

like. But I was there because I was trying to get Japanese technology um companies, big companies interested in working on drones and UAVs. Some of the things we were we were investing in and putting money into working on open source software and working on blockchain. So we had a few implementations of things that we were building for identity. This was 2018. So it was sort of right at right middle of ICO like that moment that kind of mo thing and we were trying to figure out identity and and payments and stuff very early days. Do you want to tell the next part of the story? Well, maybe. Yeah. That but the the meeting basically someone we got lucky. Someone um said well someone said to me I should meet this Chris Traapian

person from UNICEF. And that same friend said to me like we should go out for dinner because there's good food at this place. Yeah. And then I was visiting um I don't live in Japan anymore but then I was visiting there for an event or something. And then to be honest, um I've been working in in crypto for already at that time before joining AF, I was already in the space for a while. Um I was pretty skeptical about this meeting like um like what how would I like now I'm part of Etern Foundation like meeting with UNICEF like would that be a good thing or like this you know I know unit organizations are pretty slow and

then we're um but you know we just happened to be in the same city and then why not uh and then at the food was good food was within first 10 minutes Chris Fabian started to tell me about his his goals and vision with crypto and that's blew my mind. I remember I immediately texted Vitalik like this is this is something weird. I met this weird person who is saying like he's going to blame crypto to the normalization and I was thinking why is why is she like texting under the table like what I'm saying is so boring. if uh what he did was he was really clear that we we're going to hold uh crypto in the wallet UN wallets and

then plus give transparency to the fund and it was if we are able to give transparency to to the fund movements of the United Nation organization that sounds pretty crazy um but he sounds like he's he means it and So I mean we can't really take too much risk but then it sounds like like this it's just like you know his team is going to work on it and then we can just help and that's where yeah this this one and I guess what I'd say is like so before that so there I set up the UNICEF venture fund like two three years before that where it kind of worked like a

regular fund you had a bunch of LPs they gave money you could do a capital call you could get that money into a small startup it only looked at open source startups and it worked like that But but in order for us to get money from one of the people who had money like the liquidity providers for that fund to UNICEF took like four or five months to get it from UNICEF to this company took another like 7 months. So by the time you made this thing move it was a year and nobody could really see what was happening because it was all inside of a crazy bureaucracy. It was like all the stuff that you think about governments or the UN is like there it's very hard to understand what goes on. And so the idea here was, you know, could we set something up that was all onchain where

not only the money coming in is it's going to be in ETH or Bitcoin with that part is onchain. The contracts that we write with the companies are smart contracts that delimit a set of terms like a term sheet that's all onchain. And then the company that takes it, which is a company developing open source software in emerging markets, also has to keep that as ETH or Bitcoin and use it for the next hop as crypto. So they can't just cash it out. And that was really important that in no part of this system could UNICEF take it and turn it into fiat. And wow was that a fight because ETH was at a record. I was like a it was like $1,000 per ETH. And UNICEF was like we're going to like this is the moment

that money come like pull the trigger cash it out. And we're like well if you if you cash it out you lose the thing that's important which is not the money or the value. It's the ability to have it tell you truth about what it does. The companies were also like, "Wow, at this point it was like 1,100 per year." They're like, "We're gonna we're going to make bank now." It's like, "No, you have to you have to find somebody downstream from you who will also accept it because that lets us see what you're doing. It lets us have transparency. I want that as a fund manager. I want to know what you're doing with my money." And so that was the dream. But wow, is it hard to sell that to a bunch of people who manage assets for a $15 billion a year organization.

I I actually sorry I have a a question uh to to add to that because when we were preparing for this interview you mentioned obviously I'm so excited about this that your sister's an archaeologist and that one of the things that you you know when you talked to her about blockchain she says you know people are people and money will always be money and you what you just mentioned is very much the case that the normies outside and this was very much a topic of a lot of talks yesterday as well they see the the gold the glint in blockchain but what you mentioned the transparency of the activities that often you know UN comes for scrutiny under that's the important thing that web 3 is able to provide as an infrastructure. So uh in terms of like this this relationship what have you learned about like when

these two worlds collide what is important to kind of you know put forward to make that argument to make sure that that collaboration is a successful one. It's a great question. So actually that slide with us in the wigs is really important because we were on a phone with lawyers. This was this was DevCon Osaka. So this is like so yeah um so we the the the launch of the krypto fund was uh on the f opening day of debon Osaka in 2019. So the about a year after we met uh this was the crypto fund was launched the day before he was still uh he hasn't finished all getting all the signatures. Don't look at me. I mean, there were like 30 lawyers that I

didn't know about and uh and then I was like, "No, I I'm I'm about to talk about this at the opening." And so, we were it was a Halloween day. We were in this kids room that was only space available. And we dressed like that normally. Yeah, we we didn't play Beardus. It was just a bunch of things were around us for to entertain kids. But anyway, um, so we were still like he was still talking to their lawyers and then we don't know like this is happening tomorrow ideally and then it would be like a great news to the to to the community at the DevCon. Um, but to your question um I think I wouldn't or we wouldn't made the

decision to work with UNICEF just because of the name of UNICEF. Of course, it strategically helps to to work uh with UNICEF for for the PL purpose, but at the same time, it was uh it had to be the right team because we're not going to be the one to drive initiative inside the organization, right? And then so our side has expertise on the technology side. And then also he another reason I was convinced was that um that they he understood enough about it cannot be just any crypto right and then that was very important

for us to to so I was also like Chris who are you receiving uh donations from and it was remember it was 2018 so if you think about who was out there in the space yeah that was a particular moment to this question so I think it's so important I when I pitched this to unis UNICEF and on this phone was like the person who was the financial controller for UNICEF. So that's their number. It's their name there. You can't really see it. I'm not going to implicate them. He was amazing. So he helped push this through actually. Um I was I was so focused on everybody understanding that this was not about receiving a bunch of money because you can receive a bunch of money in euros or dollars or whatever.

It doesn't matter. And UNICEF will just deal with it on the assets, you know, on the balance sheet as that type of asset. This was about receiving technology and I that was the important thing. It was differentiating this ETH from any other asset. And the way that we managed to move it, this is I don't think I've ever said this before, but we said it's the thing that it's most like that UNICEF is familiar with is a motorcycle. Like ETH is closer to a motorcycle than to a dollar. And they're like, what do you mean? It's like well UNICEF receives motorcycles to deliver vaccines all the time. People give us motorcycles or we buy them. We give them to a worker. They deliver the vaccines. It's off of our balance sheet. It's, you know, it's a thing that has a function and that's what we're getting. It's just another

thing like a motorcycle. So, it's an intangible version of motorcycle. And it was like that type of learning and that type of work, figuring out that a smart contract isn't a contract, getting the lawyers to relax on that. All of these misunderstandings about what the thing is made it take a lot longer than it should have. And I think they still stop governments from adopting certain types of blockchain tech that they, you know, otherwise would if if it was just like it's just a motorcycle, it might be easier. Um, we can go kind of quickly through the rest of it. Yeah. So, it was just the start. Um, and then the fun is one part, but to your question, like what we learned is there are a lot of Okay, so this is what uh crypto fund did. Maybe you can talk about this and

not me. Yeah. Well, I mean, these are all of I so I'm not involved with it anymore. It's run by an amazing team uh by my my co-founder manages it. This was all of the investments that the innovation fund and the crypto fund made. So you can see some of them are colored. You can set up in developing countries working on blockchain plus other technologies. All open source. A lot of these got combined. So you would combine a company from Brazil and from Malawi and make something bigger. And this is still you can go see it. It's all just Google UNICEF crypto fund. It's all live. And then this is it's hard to see but speaking of the transparency like you I mean there's another another I I think another site that shows actually link to the transaction and stuff but this is it's actually shows a

transaction um and then these are example of um blockchain project that they um invested in and like it's all onchain so the payments would be linked to like GitHub updates I mean it so the term term sheet that was written on in a smart contract allows you to move out money automatically when there's a certain diversity of contributors or when certain open source metrics have been met or things like that and you can see it all but the UN still didn't quite UNICEF didn't quite understand what it was so we drew some pictures and this was my favorite one that they basically because UNICEF was a unique or the team a team in UNICEF was

unique team that was driving this. So they became like a mentor for other all the UN other organizations. Um and then that's where they started to actually we merge into the Ethereum space. They came to uh ETH hackathons uh and then basically there are things that they can teach to our people too, right? And there are lot of course technical things that we can definitely our side of people like or developers can teach help their their things. So that unique collaborations there um like for our side for our end um like often people ask about does EF do this blobing for you know regulations and regulatory situations in the different places. Uh

so far the way we do this is like we we don't we focus on the building side. So we don't really have uh capacity to do the heavy lobbing everywhere. M but by by telling these stories it's actually very convincing for the government to feel the legitimacy of the technology even if it's actually already uh very useful but then a lot of people don't even listen to that and and I think it helps when so like this was pre-infinite garden but we still made a I love I love gardens so in our office in Geneva there's like a tree a bunch of trees uh I like mushrooms so there's some mushrooms sorry sorry but I think we're more like the fungus layer like this mycelial layer

underneath you know in in how we work with the public sector with the UN. We were like this these roots this structure that passes information you know underneath all of these trees and these I kind of thought of all the UN and the governments as the trees and our team was like this little fungus that was allowing them to communicate and live and I still think there's a role for that. It's very hard to move technology into governments. We'll talk about that a little bit later, but you can't do it by force. You can't force the trees to change the way they're doing it. You have to do it subtly. And it has to be organic in the same way that the trees work, but it's not exactly the trees. It's another it's another part of the ecosystem butterflies. Bit like a old old information. I don't know there many

advice you can give now to improve this. This is 2018 to use the permission blockchain. you might need I don't know but it's yeah but anyway this is just an example like how things started to you know merge uh and then maybe we can quickly and we ended up here. So this is Giga if you like grab that QR code you can go and see our map this is a map of connectivity in Brazil. So going back to um you know what I think is really important is that in order for us to spread the values of a decentralized ecosystem that ecosystem needs to exist in every place and right now a third of the world isn't connected. So two billion people don't have internet not

web 3 not web 2 not web 1 not web zero they have spiderw webs but there's no other thing there. All those dots are schools in Brazil. The red dots are schools that are not connected to the internet. The green dots are schools that are. And you can see where web 3 is and where web 3 isn't. And it's all around the world. If you if you go to the QR code, you can go to the site that it's a mapping site we've built. You can see live data from 40 countries about their school connectivity. And you can click on the school and you can see how many gigabits or megabits it has as throughput and you can see it in real time. So Giga, our project is working to connect every school in the world to the internet and by doing that connect every

community and to make those schools nodes on a network because if you have those red dots turning green, which we're working on in the Amazon, you can suddenly hear from those schools. You can move money to them. If you're a kid who's trying to learn somewhere in the Amazon, you can get access to the tools we take for granted. And it's a billion dollar project. It's a multi-billion dollar project. So the cost of connecting every school in the world is like 500 billion to a trillion US dollars. In Brazil alone, it's about 600 million that we're trying to we're putting together. We've managed to leverage that in the in the Brazilian government just to connect the schools there. So we really I mean a lot of this work that we were doing with the venture fund and the crypto fund inspired giga because the companies we were putting

money into were not scaling because they were hitting that red area over and over. It's like company in Malawi hits the red area which is most of Malawi. Why isn't it scaling? It's frustrating me. So Giga was started about this same time a little after the crypto fund. And we've been working together on a lot of the places where connectivity as a core infrastructure and blockchain as a decentralized infrastructure come together and I think it's one of the larger deepen projects in the world now. So the the the big goal which the it's still in pluggless is that like really the coordination of internet connectivity is then for our side it's a bigger picture is yeah without internet

we can't even talk about web three or there's no um nothing. So that's that's someone needs to work on that but also it it is the a coordination issue. It's like a lot of places actually have internet providers but the the schools and the government and providers that coordination I mean sometimes it like the intention is bad but also even without bad intentions the coordination is not going well and that's where okay like this is a a good real use case of ETHM we just did the bid in Brazil there are 11,000 internet service providers for the country of Brazil. Each school

is supposed to choose three of those 11,000. Like imagine the coordination for a head teacher in a school in Manau or outside to coordinate that. I mean you first of all there's such a huge topic. I'm sure you're all like so keen to ask questions already. So I'll actually ask one more question about GVtech and then I'll open it to the floor because I want to give you a chance to to talk. But first of all, I never thought I'd see UN and blockchain next to each other. Uh I I once went to the UN uh headquarters in Addis Ababa and it was it was such a complex world. I it is wonderful that you managed to push it through. But that is kind of like where my question is leading because there's the two of you who are fantastic. You're charismatic.

You know what you're doing. Your friends, you're kind of pushing it forward. You know, blood, sweat, and tears getting this across the line. But then there's like the reality of carrying the legacy through and making sure that we repeat those success stories. And uh it was a really interesting a lot of discussions yesterday as well that and a you mentioned this as well a little bit woven into the philosophy of web 3 as almost like this anarchistic kind of like resilience spirit like you know we are there to be not like necessarily against institutions but really hold them accountable and to exist in parallel to them. But then you've got also the huge need and the crying out loud of the masses who say we're not happy with the way that the web 2 world is going. We are not happy with you know a few people like Zuckerberg and Musk

owning all of our data and basically completely monopolizing our digital lives and our digital footprint and that bridge between the web 3 and the web two web one web zero world is very difficult to build. So what do you think the way that globalization is going people are losing kind of often trust in governments there's also a lot of conspiracy theories around the big uh institutions like the the who you know especially postcoid where do you bridge that between like you know not dictating what people should do and kind of not infringing on those basic rights but at the same time making sure that we harvest this technology that we have to solve these problems at scale like what do you think are the most important things for that discussion even to take place so that people can take the mantle

on from you. It's a big question. Do you want to start? Um sorry it's a big question. There are many things that I want to say about this is but the but where you started as you know we had this anarchist mind and then so it's really not either like it's not like black and white um like there was one fellow actually we had this next freedom fellowship um we have this next fellowship and then one of the fellows was actually from this um connection and came from their their crypto fund startup and then he's been working on Gabtech in in Latin

America his team has been and then he said um I didn't really care about governments but when I look around like growing up in Mexico there's so many problems in like in my life and then each problem when I try to solve like government is the problem and so why don't I fix that if because that's just the biggest source of problem. Um so being solo problem is one thing but also another thing is we start as EF we started to hear from uh different places or different governments they're now pretty knowledgeable about this technology compared to before

um and they do they are interested in like innovative technology but also digital innovation we want to do it right we want to learn about all like available solutions So, but we want to do it right and uh how do we like it seems like Ethereum is it's an obvious option. How do we do that? We get these questions um more now. So, we started to think if this the government side is willing to really change the systems and then it's it's better they do it right like we don't want them to pick a wrong solution that would make things could make things worse. So, there are big opportunities. There is a big

opportunity there where but then at the same time we're an organization that we don't really do everything. We can't we not we don't have like big dev application dev teams to go out there to to help building things but we have this amazing community uh development teams um all over the world. how do we help coordinate this is so that's our side of a goal and then so that's why we we've been seeing a lot bigger opportunity there um but I think that that the passion of this this frustration from the anarchist side is important because that was yes they have

there are problems out there uh so again that's like how do we how do we connect that and then blink that that the the energy to the positive solution. Thank you. Thank you very much. And let me actually just like sharpen the question for for you Chris a little bit. Um there was when you mentioned the Amazon and when Starink went to one of the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, one of the first things that came out across the media, it's like, ooh, we're spoiling the tribes. We want them to stay as they are in their kind of grass skirts and look at them using the internet to look at pornography and social media. They shouldn't be doing that. Let's keep them in their like little little zoo. And it was shocking to me. It was almost like this 19th century like like technological like

safari of like let's keep them kind of locked out of the connectivity web and like let's just like leave them as they are. So it is interesting that even such basic things as connectivity are subject to very political discussions. How do you kind of balance this? Obviously in UNICEF when you see problems that need to be solved uh but not you cannot always necessarily like let the wait for the people to do it because they might not have the means they might not have the digital literacy. How do you kind of balance this kind of directive and solving the problem but also having the citizens as the kind of number one decision-making priority? Yeah, I'll expand it a teeny bit. Like the world is about to be in a time of change that is so much faster than anything people have ever imagined. We get it a little bit

because we are using that technology and many of us are building it. But it's going to be even faster than many of us understand. And it's going to happen. It's already happening. Governments are notoriously slow at doing everything. Big corporations are also pretty slow at it. And you see some of them losing their footing even now, right? Like, oh, we should have done that, been more in that. No, governments are even slower. So, as we're about to hit this very unique, very terrifying moment in human history, the governments of the world, who have, by the way, the largest user base in the world, cuz every citizen belongs to a government pretty much except for stateless people, like they capture a lot of the world's total addressable market. They are unprepared

to deal with change at the speed that it's coming. If you're living in the red areas, you're even less able to prepare for that. I believe that we have a duty as people who understand technology and who have the resources available to us to create some rails that make sure that there is equity in this coming world and not equity because it's nice to do and because like oh boohoo isn't it better for somebody far away to be like that's important. It's important to care about human values, but also equity because if the world is unbalanced like this, if there's a third of the world who's left out, everybody who's read a science fiction book or seen a science fiction movie knows how that ends. And it's not

good. And it's happening already. If you're a kid who's growing up in those red areas, you don't have access to university. You don't have access to health care. You're pissed off. You're angry. And you have no hope. That should bother us. should bother us as humans. It should also bother us economically. It should bother us technologically because it means the network is unstable. And I'd say that the internet now is a terrible place. Sorry, Tim is going to be here in a minute. But the internet's like a terrible place. If it was a physical building, I would never let my kid into the internet. It's disgusting. If you're a young girl who comes online for the first time, you're 13 years old in the Amazon. That is not a place that you want to come into without those protections, without

safeguards, without knowing that there's some open- source systems that protect you. Things like DNS routing that makes it safe, things like child protection helplines that allow things to be reported. So, I think we have a lot of work to do. I'm based in Geneva. I'm based in Switzerland. Switzerland manages a bunch of big open foundations. One of them is Cloud9. If you know, if you do anything with DNS routing, Cloud9 is a large safe DNS routing system that's Swiss funded and Swissbased that provides a a safe set of uh, you know, DNS addressing for users that allows them to be protected online. I think that there are other gov tech tools like that, toolings, fundamental things that are cryptographically based that we need

to be contributing to as a community to make this internet safe for what's coming. And that means that making sure that poor people aren't going to be eaten by agentic AI. And it's a very weird scary moment when for $45 you can lose your identity. It will belong to somebody else. Sorry. Uh and that's like the cost of it. It's like 15 in Switzerland. That's one salad. We have to be able to protect people's autonomy, people's agency, people's space in what's coming. Otherwise, this red stuff, you're going to see another red map. That's compute verse not compute in a few years and it's going to be even worse. So I think that like for business it's fundamental for building the Ethereum network for building anything we care about we need

to have connectivity and and we need to work with governments to do that whether we like it or not. Thank you very much. And definitely some of these topics you mentioned Tim um with the discussion between Tim and Vitalik are definitely going to be covered in the next session as well. Um government web 3 all of this is very complex. There's a lot of angles to look at it from, but I want you to be uh have the opportunity to ask questions as well because it's a very rich and diverse audience. So, does anyone have a question for ya and or Chris? Yes, a gentleman in the front row. Uh yeah, you you can Yeah, please. Thank you very much. You were first. Thank you. So, um yeah, I heard you're talking about um organic growth and human values. So how

important do you think is going to be for uh if you use those things to succeed in all of these things? How important is organic growth and how important is that we care about human values? I don't want to live in a world where we don't have a values-based approach to things. I think that some of the things we took for granted like some people thought the UN was the values-based approach and if you see it's being defunded and it's being torn apart right now that whole idea. But I think that the values that exist in open source technology, the values that exist in platforms that are built to protect individual privacy, individual ability to do things are really important. And if we're not fighting for this, the big companies are not going to be fighting for those. So, I don't know. I don't

want to live in the in the counterfactual of that anyway. But also, um, it's not going to be any solution like unfortunately like Chris said, internet is disgusting. How that's how you say I know it's terrible but but uh but um no without censorship existence privacy it's not going to be sustainable like it's not going to be like a real solution without those values. So values are not really fluffy idealistic thing it's actually it's it's solution it's it's important for the solution. So we believe that in the meantime like it's it's yes it's very important to uh it's hard to make plas like sticking to values. So that balance is is is very

challenging but I that's why I think we need all smart plays to think harder about the solutions. It's not like if we don't care the values solutions are pretty easy right like so that's that's where we're working together um with all of you. Thank you. Thank you very much please. Next question. Um I think is super cool. I was wondering uh do the cost of connectivity go down if you use satellite internet like Starlink or something like that. The cost of internet go down when you have clarity of where the gigabyte is going. So Starling costs like $3 $400 roughly, you know, $200 a month. If you use fiber and if you use open fiber and open networks, the cost is much much

lower. Actually, it's right now there's a inequality in pricing because of how the internet is built. And one of the things we're doing is tokenizing the gigabyte so you can actually see how much it costs at each point of this network and trade it in a fair way. So I think the answer is the costs can come down radically. Cost of a gigabyte in Malawi is eight times as much as it is in Tanzania which is right next door because the transit costs are a lot that people have put you know barriers in. But if you can create a tradable clarity on that you can bring the prices down a lot. Satellites help get people's eyes open to it, but if it's only like it's less than 1% of traffic on the internet that goes over satellites.

Thank you. Yes, the gentleman in the check shirt. Uh, thanks for the inspiring talk. This is more a question for Chris. How do you manage security at UNICEF? Because as you said, it's a traditional organization that you had to, you know, innovate and I assume there are many attacks from malicious actors. So how do you manage security at UNICEF? Thanks. So I'm super far away from core UNICEF right now. Like the I I haven't managed the innovation fund or been part of that group in a long time. Um they we built all that software ourselves. So like in 2018 we built the custodianship. We built everything ourselves. It was done with a lot of our partners. It was it's really good. Like it's top class. And they they work with

a bunch of partners who I can't talk about now who you would all know to make sure that's in place. For us at Giga, we talk a lot about network security and that's why things like Quad9 are really important to me. Um, keeping making governments able to have the ability to have decentralized networks that are public goods and have those be secure is super super important. I'm sure we'll hear a lot about that in the next talk too. Um, but you can't do that without blockchain. Like there is no way to do that without the technology that we love. So I think we're in the right place. Thank you Chris. Any other questions from the audience? Don't be shy.

Oh yes, this is a lot of running for you with the microphone. Thank you very much. Uh thank you. How do you distinguish uh between solutions which claim to be u driven by values by privacy and the ones which actually are? Do we have to rely just on stars on GitHub on like how do we do that? So many of mentioned even today like they claim to you know provide something which is privacy preserving. Is it I mean, I think open source is the single biggest tool we have for that.

Like, so that's to me the non-negotiable. If it's not, if you can't examine the code and then it's out. So, that takes a whole bunch out right there. And then what do you do? You test it. You look at the team. You look if they're kind and humble and have a good sense of humor. Like, that's it. If the team doesn't have those things, it's probably not very values-based anyway. And you build from there. And you let it work in small ways. And you you see Yeah. And you mentioned a very important thing unfortunately I'm so sorry that was the last question but you mentioned a hugely important thing that in an increasingly digitalized world the things that we consider soft skills you know the ah we don't need to know about these things like emotional intelligence and friendship the things that fundamentally make us human they're

going to be key for the successful integration of these uh technologies going forward as well and kind of I want to leave that as a segue into my unfortunately last question I'd love to chat with you all day and I'll catch you afterwards because there's more that where that came from but um uh there's There's a lot of people surely inspired by you either here physically or online. Hello. Um what would you give them as a piece of advice? Because you made something really huge happen but it was kind of against the odds if you will. What is the type of advice that you would give for people that might have these big thoughts about changing the world but they might be put put out by the huge process that comes with it.

What would you say? What would what would be the motivational spiel that you would give them? You want me to go first? You want to go first? So um it's not just about the collaboration with Chris UNICEF but uh the more I' been in this space that is um more I realized that it's techn it's not technology is is part of it but it really about humans around it and also we are still at an early stage for everything including this type of collaboration including a government gap aritect and the technologies that we are in. Um and it has to come with a good education.

So when we think about this type of collaboration, we do think about like you know someone asked a question about security and uh the collaboration involves a lot of educational effort like his team has talked to a lot of um our people or or developers or security experts to really ask the right questions and then so that that type of work is like not visible in the tech but it is very important to think about that that um elements of this type of collaboration. Thank you very much.

Yeah. So, we're working on setting up a foundation in Geneva for Govtech specifically to be the API into these types of problems to let people connect. If you follow up in a few months, you should see some progress there. Um I hope that it'll focus on a few things. One is agentic network infrastructure. Another is kind of crypto security and definition on um identity. A few other pieces like that. I think that the next few years are super super scary for humanity. And I think that countries and and groups that have trust as one of their values. I mean, that's one of the reasons that I chose Switzerland to live in will be successful in a world where trust is so precious and so hard to come by. So, I think that as we can build towards those principles of trust, of

openness, um, of clarity, and sort of solidarity on these things, it's the way that we get through what is by all intents a very, very nasty next 10 years. That's not to end it on a dismal point, but I think that a lot can be done with the human connections um that the technology maybe hides sometimes. It's exactly what I is saying. Uh and I'm just so happy to have this friendship and this collaboration going into it. Thank you so much, Chris. And it's actually not a dismal note at all because let me leave you with a quote from a clay tablet that is almost 4,000 years old. I am not getting water for my sesame field. The sesame will die. Don't tell me later. You did not write to me.

The sesame is visibly dying. Ibby Ilabat saw it. The sesame will die and I have warned you. It's a clay tablet that was sent to one of the state bureaucrats in Mesopotamia in the city of uh what I'm trying to say is that humans have always wanted to hold each other accountable. Whether it's sesame dying or whether it's people not having connectivity and students not being able to take what they really want and need from the wonder that is the internet and this new digital age. So humans have not changed but the technology has and governments will be here, new technology will be here, anarchists will be here, we'll all be here and we just need to find a way to really collaborate together and the way that to do that is emotion, friendship and being fundamentally human and that has been beautifully beautifully crystallized today in this

fireat with ya and Chris. Thank you so much for being with us today and I give them a huge round of applause. Thank you. And thank you S for it. Thank you.