Self Sovereignty Is NEAR with Konrad Merino

Transcript

okay hi everyone uh thank you for staying uh I'll be very quick so you can go soon and grab a beer or coffee so once again I'm Conrad from the near Foundation I run BD and blockchain success uh for near ecosystem so uh I was asked to deliver a talk about self sovereignty and I think Lily from the Solana Foundation had uh already touched upon this point uh so maybe I will with the bad news uh today uh I must say there is no self soverignty the web is closed Jeff Bezos Mark Zuckerberg and all these uh cryp not crypto but uh web to billionaires

are making ton of money out of your data that you're feeding them through your smartphones and computers and this is why there's so much inequality in today's world right because you as the owner of this data um you cannot capture the economic benefit of the internet so what's the business model for the internet so it's attention and they're selling you ads on the back of your data right so it's all about attention profit and greet but um this will get worse because AI is coming and if you look at who owns the AI it's all the same guys that own the data right so sorry but open AI

is very close to Microsoft so I think it will be very tough to change this Paradigm and Achieve s sell sovereignty the good news is blockchain can solve this right so blockchain can be described as a value layer of the internet that can extract some of the economic value of this fantastic thing called internet and share it with the user or developer who's building the stuff and not only they centralize entity and the company that is building and owning the the the applications so I will quickly tell about near because I think our origin story tells a lot about how we approach

this self serigny movement so we started in 2018 there are two guys Ilia and Alex one Russian one Ukrainian who figure out oh we want to build an AI startup called near Singularity is near but then they figure out very quickly that is very difficult to move money around to fund the uh AI uh research to pay the scientist and also their initial concept was to build a crowdsource platform so they can um pay money to all these people in emerging countries from Africa Eastern Europe Asia to teach uh and improve large language models but they

encountered this problem that it was very difficult to send them Bitcoin it was very difficult to send them e so they figure out we need to start our blockchain so they built near blockchain and they figure out that okay so we try to solve this AI problem but maybe there's a bigger problem to solve which is around the self sovereignty and the open web which is extracting the economic value from the Internet thanks to the blockchain can help to achieve this self- soverignty Vision so how do how do I Define this self- soverignty so it's all about giving people control over their data and assets so instead of having your money in the bank you self

custody in your wallet instead of uh sharing your data through Facebook app maybe there is a way to um uh ring fence it and you can give the access and get some money out of it on the smart contract so we started to think how we can really open the web and share this economic benefit uh thanks to near blockchain so we started as many of our uh colleagues in the crypto Valley as a layer one blockchain uh we were one of the first blockchain that achieved sharding to scale uh our proof of stake uh blockchain and uh we uh are very proud

to say that we're one of the few blockchains that are able to handle millions of transactions and millions of of user traffic every day and then we figure out that it's not enough right because there are like plenty of layer ones some of them you met already during this conference but maybe there's a way to merge all the blockchains together so we started to work on the Chain obstruction which is a texag of technologies that will enable you to control from one account from one wallet all the blockchains together and then AI came last year with chat GPT and so we figure out hold on we have two best guys two best Founders in the AI space one who wrote attention is all you need that

was the paper that started the Transformers that power um large language models and the other who was one of the first scientists for open Ai and we figured that there is a natural Synergy between blockchain and thei to built this uh full Sovereign operating system uh for the internet where the user and the community can own their a data and can own ultimately uh the AI so I got asked very often how near is different than ethereum or Solana etc etc so I think if you just to simplify I'm not an engineer so you'll find

plenty of buzzwords on this slide but the way I personally think about it is that we have the best stuff of layer one that is monolitic like like sonana and the best things of a modular uh blockchain like e so to give you a couple of examples thanks to our modular design we are able to provide data availability and settlement execution not only for the near blockchain but also for some of our blockchains so for example data availability storing data on near is 100 time cheaper than on East so we have a lot of layer tools like arbitrum Optimus that come to us uh and

they want to store the data from transactions on year at the same time we have this scalability of layer one which is the monolitic approach where we have the sharding execution and and settling done on one chain right and on top of it we started to find this to to Define this middle Circle which we believe is the textto for the open web uh plenty of buzzwords I am personally the most uh uh excited about the chain obstruction one which is all about merging all this layer ones layer twos Etc in one right so um if you go to near the dark and uh

find chain signatures you'll find that we built a textto that enables developers to build the application where from from one wallet they're able to control and uh send transactions on multiple uh blockchains e uh Optimus polygon Bitcoin Etc you can do it all from the near uh account and we build all this cool Tex stack for blockchain but we need people to use it right and we need DBS to use it so we since the beginning as I mentioned during the panel we're super focused on building a decentralized ecosystem so that developers Community can build really cool applications and

uh I'm very proud to say that over the past few years since the beginning we have uh scouted one of the best teams in web 3 that have uh the largest uh applications in web 3 I will give you a couple of examples you can go to D radar and check them out uh sweat is the walk to earn application that has 1.5 million uh monthly active users another cool project called hot which is a telegram wallet uh with a Louch pad and uh Dex capabilities uh 6 million plus users and it was the fastest growing up that in the history of web 3 another cool

project is Cosmos AI which is a lock screen product um out of Asia now available in Asia and America and in a few countries of Europe where uh people can get the recommendations what to shop on their lock screen and get rewarded for data sharing in crypto called Kink and finally uh our gaming uh um project called play Amber which is casual games with the cryptonomics tokenization models so now all these projects and some other projects generates 250 million transactions PL months which proves that we achieved on our vision of building a scalable blockchain and you

know just to give you a couple of starts to million uh daily active users on near near currently is the most used blockchain bigger than Solana bigger than polygon Etc and uh we're super proud that uh these people are super sticky right so they still sit within the apps they don't come for a quick trade some airdrop defi stuff and they disappear and they move to other chain so just to sum up near number one in active addresses 12.5 million number one in transaction fees less than uh 0.006 cents number one in retention so all our people that are using our adaps they stay Within These platforms and

finally uh we are improving also on our transaction per second uh speed and uh and the number of transactions so they goal is to be number one soon um so okay so we have this fantastic near blockchain which is the economic value of the internet that enables to merge different blockchains and use it from one account but what about this whole AI thing and how it's going to impact the self sovereignty so AI is near okay and coming soon so Dominic from definity he had showed us they Road mapap their technology they've built

some cool things we are also investing heavily in Ai and this is uh the framework that we're using to work around our web 3 AI stock so there is a data layer of AI that we really want to have it decentralized there's the infrar layer and there's the apps layer so what we're going to attack heavily and we've started doing it um over the past few months is the data and infr layer and this is our strategy so we're launching near. a so it's our R&D arm that is going to be led by Alex skidanov and IIA to build cool web 3 AI texto we're going to large a couple of AI

tokens from our within EOS from our ecosystem the first one will be Cosmos AI which is the king up another one really cool is called Min base check these uh projects out on the internet then we're stting an incubator to incubate more of this ecosystem projects coming to us great Founders and we're going to build a community around them and finally near license so near license is it's still the ideation phase how to use near tokens to have access to access to all this Tech stack of our ecosystem but also built by IIA and Alex uh to to use for different applications So speaking of uh our road

up so the first product that we're going to launch is called near AI developer I'm really not sure if I'm allowed to uh share the slide or I'm sharing Sal Alpha but okay that's too late so near developer it's a tool where people like me who know nothing about coding will be able to build DBS and smart contract contracts then we will have near a researcher um which will be the idation Hub to build new AI stuff uh on on the blockchain and finally our ultimate Vision will will which will require heavy R&D investment is building our own AGI and speaking about the incubation so

I think next week we are announcing the projects and teams that got qualified for our incubator program five fantastic teams all of them phds in AI science a lot of them from San Francisco Valley Super nerdy super smart people that are going to build great stuff on near for AI and um we already have some cool uh ecosystem projects that are showing what can be uh built within the intersection of AI and web 3 one is Jutsu so Jutsu is our ecosystem project that enables developers that are building smart contracts to build it faster on the back of AI and the um the other one is called

minb and mbase built a really cool wallet that you type a prompt hey wallet buy me two Bitcoins hey wallet buy me this nfts and uh this will do it for you so you don't have to like nerd out log into your wallet go to this nft Marketplace and do the transactions yourself so more stuff is coming thank you for listening to me if you want to stay in touch this is my Twitter handle Swiss Hustler and uh my email okay so you can shoot me an email and I'm round so feel free to to to to to ask me any questions a big round of applause for Conrad especially because he stepped in with a half day notice