The Cryptonative generation
ETHCC 6 · July 2023 · 15:20
Josef Je examines the economy created by crypto-native communities. The speaker discusses how new financial infrastructure has also produced new types of companies, roles and jobs.
Speakers
Topics
From ETHCC 6, hosted by Ethereum France.
Transcript
[Music] foreign [Music] welcome to my appeal so today I want to convince you that all of the stuff that you've seen and heard throughout the conference one matter just in the future but it matters today already my name is Joseph
um I've been in crypto for a bit I'm a Silk Road Fanboy I've worked with ethereum foundation for four years I started Board of hikerspace and since 2024 I'm running the pawn dial and also organizing several conferences like eat Prague and ethereum Zurich so today I want to first start with some introductions of like topics and terms I want to talk about crypto natives I want to talk about crypto native economy I also want to talk slightly about the story of of the pondell and how does it relate to this topic uh and then finally I want to tell you about the crypto native generation who is the crypto native generation
uh and then since a lot of people ask roto-conference I also want to touch on a topic of why do banks hate us so who are crypto natives uh you could have seen similar slides before um so there is a quick definition of what we came to uh the QR uh the QR code will take you to your our blog where you can read um the crypto native interviews that we uh that we've done with several people in the ecosystem that we consider crypto natives asking them about this particle topic so to me cryptonative is someone who has a significant hold in crypto nfts just crypto assets it's a defy User it's not just a holder it's someone who actively participates uh it's also someone who doesn't rely on
intermediaries and wants to find ways to to be self-sovereign and self-sufficient um and mostly or also importantly um it's a person who doesn't understand the concept of bank holidays so it's a it's a techie it's someone who wants to um who wants to reap the advantages that technology brings us today what is the crypto native economy so on this very stage a year ago uh we introduced the the term or our take on the term of what does the crypto native economy consist of I don't want to go into much detail again you can read our reports you can read the report for 2022 uh and also for the last two quarters of
uh what did we um what did we get from the on-chain numbers uh but quickly um the crypto native economy to us is everything that happens on chain um verifiably it's basically all of the fees that users are willing to pay for the technology that you're all are building so we looked into uh how much people pay for transactions on L1 so and on twos and bridges and dabs and we want to we want to understand how people behave uh within the within the crypto ecosystem and um how the money floats around in something that we call the crypto native economy um but that's that's about the topics
like all of this reading you can do you can do later but now I want to touch on on the actual subject of like why why I'm here standing on this stage talking about crypto natives so my story in crypto date as a user back to like 2012 but my actual career started in 2016 I was uh 23 years old when I decided to turn my entire not just career but my entire life uh into crypto I was running a startup back then I tried to convince the founders to start pushing certifications academic certifications on chain because I've seen it as like a super useful um take on how blockchains could be
could be actually leveraged um and since the day my my life has changed so in 2017 I started I was working as a freelancer I started receiving some payments and cryptocurrencies for the work that I was doing it was mostly smart contract development some outlets and so on in 2018 after I joined ethereum Foundation I turned my internal income into cryptocurrencies uh and I was essentially uh just earning earning crypto to my wallet at a regular contract uh nothing out of the ordinary but also it was a time when I was thinking about you know my own future my like personal future and since my entire life was in crypto
the natural thing uh to do like when you're getting in your 30s is like maybe you know I should I should buy I should own the place where I live um so I went to to the bank to my bank that I was using back then and applied for a mortgage and during the process when I was supposed to improve my income I showed them the list of transactions I showed them I show them the uh the contract and the guys started laughing and he told me that's like you don't have anything it's not real money um I tried to make the case but it led nowhere so essentially started started sending um some part of that crypto I was earning into Fiat trying to prove that I
have regular income two years later I passed the test I went to to the same bank I was like hey I actually I have income like you can you know um you can just like assess a credit score and we're like yeah that's fine so um we like we are fine with your income now uh now here's a Heroes of kyc formation so it's just a you know regular thing that you have to fill out and it was one one tiny check box in the bottom which said uh are you exposed uh are you trading are you exposed in any way to cryptocurrencies um to which I could only say well yeah no well I'll work with the ethereum foundation um I had to take it there's no way for
me to hide this and that's essentially end of the story I couldn't get a mortgage because I work in an industry um that um I guess not eligible um and that's why we started Pawn that's that was my uh that was my realization of like well maybe the Legacy system isn't just ready for for the stuff that's being built and we don't need them anyways like we have divided that can already serve the purpose uh and it's also when I realized like we are different we're different to the Legacy system to the extent where we just have to move on and change extra change things around like quite drastically so who is the crypto native generation so I'll do a bit of a quick history dive
so I'm sure that everybody in the room is familiar with you know the concept of encryption and like you've heard of like Caesar Cipher and how um the military and armies were using um encryption to send like uh depash messages and um to to basically share information um between you know the the different uh the different parts of the army so essentially throughout centuries encryption or cryptography in general was a competitive Advantage it was used by the state by the Army to essentially protect themselves uh and to get get a competitive Advantage uh against someone
else the other Army the other State uh or the people themselves uh the soon and like the 17 18 19th century was also leveraged by uh the new institutions or the new kinds of Institutions being backed so they literally had the same problem they had to somehow protect their money shipments their the information they had about like where the money is like how much uh money is lying around in the safes and so on uh so they would prevent these cases like being being mocked and so on and they went further I mean as the technology improved um the banks were using um the same instruments as the Army eventually like the banks were using
Enigma um for encrypting their own communication um because that was part of their their business model like they they had to make sure they're safe against like whomever there are competitors let it be under the banks Let It Be individuals who could try to get hands on the money in the saves um and obviously the technology improved like first like they were using Hardware um encryptors and they had like their own networks um and nowadays like what you can see um with credit cards with you know your internet banking is essentially the stuff that uh was created in the last like 40 years um I was like thanks to you especially
like these three gentlemen and like even even others so this is Timothy May uh Eric Hudson um John Gilmore starting the decipher Punk movement and in the 1980s or early uh early 90s and what these guys did was basically like taking this competitive advantage that the state had and started showing it to everybody uh and boom like they they started explaining to people how they can leverage the same tools um mostly accessible to uh to the state and the military and the banks and the large corporations for their own personal freedom
and from that movement a lot of like privacy tools emerged uh and finally the reason why we are in this at this very conference the cryptocurrencies as one of the use cases for for cryptography it wasn't just a crypto as a as a tool but it's it's a general General shift in how people started behaving and it's also not just because of uh cryptography but the spread of internet and other digital tools that we have but thanks to the cyberpunk movement or just the values that the movement promoted now we live in a society where you can literally be be anyone uh you can you
can have um your personal life like separated from um from your public work and whatever you're doing you can literally wear any mask like any day it's it's your choice and that's the important part so this is us this is us today um we are the people who are using this type of Technology we are people using cryptography every day and obviously like most of you also being on the you know on the very end of the spectrum of like who are crypto natives being the real Legions um but we today already live in in a world where uh you can you can have access
like you you have the same tools uh that was only available to you um few individuals and like corporations like 50 years ago so today again like you can be you can be anyone my my point is like we are the crypto natives it's not something you know the the tools that we build the products that we build it's not for the future it's actually for today like we are in in the world where crypto is is completely normal um it won't like we we shouldn't wait for adoption we shouldn't wait for like something big to happen the big stuff already happened the the part of
um like the fact that you are now here it already happened um and like you being you being um in in the ecosystem like working on these projects that's your your choice like you you chose to be a crypto native in my opinion it's not the Gen Z's it's not like whatever whoever comes after it's all of us right now and it's also the only like Nativity that you are not born into but that you can choose and generally like I would say we are nice people right like we're optimists like we are building something because we don't think the world is going to end in a few years
and uh we are nice to each other uh we smile and love um but the banks ate us um several several of you like ask us like why why do banks say this and can only give you give you my take I mean like I'm I'm one of the people being rejected from the Legacy system uh me personally our companies even though even though like we don't do anything shitty we're pretty public about it like every single step that we take um and I would say the reason is that well the the banks are now losing their competitive advantage since cryptography and like true even true cryptocurrencies is now available
to literally everybody um these businesses are you know they're desperate they're afraid they're they're going to lose the position that they had for centuries and even though we are still in a in a very very beginning right like we are we are the Apes that just like found out the tool we found this like weapon I would say like cryptography is a weapon it's also the most moral weapon out there which is predominantly used to protect you own so we are in the stage where we have this tool and we are still learning what to do with it I mean we we don't
understand we don't understand like where this will lead there are many applications that we kind of kind of grasped uh there is the entire like field of zero knowledge proves that we are still getting into um but the time is now um and that's essentially all I wanted to tell to you um which is don't don't wait for the future because like you're essential living in now so my name was Joseph I'm from Pawn you can check out what we do for crypto Natives and thank you all for coming [Applause] [Music]
[Music]