ZKPodcast: The DAO, the white hat hacker group & Giveth with Griff

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero knowledge a podcast where we explore the latest in blockchain technology and the decentralized web the show is hosted by me Anna and me Fredrik [Music] today we sit down with Grif green to hear his very special story from the Dow to the white hat group to giveth in this week's episode we're gonna be talking

about something called the Dow but the Dow sometimes gets confused with the concept of a Dow so Frederick maybe we can start by defining what a Dow is so a Dow is a decentralized autonomous organization and the idea is you organize people around like or with an aetherium smart contract or organize people or assets or what have you in a completely like autonomous fashion so you don't have a CEO that dictates everything and everything is a little bit more fluid and there's a very specific time in etherium history when dowse were talked

about a lot and there was a specific town that was started called the Dow and as well here in the interview there's a reason behind that name but it's stuck as the Dow and people always talk about the Dow as a thing and this is one specific Dow that was started and the goal was to raise a bunch of money and then distribute that money to projects like let's people vote who in like in let investors vote how this money is distributed and then the idea was to generate revenue off of these projects that got funded and pay back the token holders but as we know history had a different path planned for this Dow for

the Dow right so it got hacked it was a really big thing a lot of people had a lot of money in this and eventually it finished in a hard fork and this is a big part of a therians history it's it was a large events and this is definitely colored a lot of the decision-making and thinking around the since then and so I think anyone who enters the space will definitely hear about this this this episode we actually get a chance to speak to someone who was there right in the front row kind of seeing all of this unfold and so this is why this is kind of an exciting episode to share so we're sitting down in this episode with Griff Greene who I think it

merits painting a little bit of white or a picture of him he gets to introduce himself in this episode but he's a very humble guy super nice guy but he's a big like player in the etherium community everyone loves him if you go to a conference like there's Grif hugs to going around all over the place and he's just a really great guy and he has this persona and the community and and I think like we like you said he was actually involved with coding on the Dow and other project sins and really has this sort of firsts like first row very

personal experience to share with this which is why I think it's a very unique story to hear this was actually recorded right after edy Khan in Toronto at the beginning of May we didn't get a chance to air this until now but we've been sitting on this episode and we've been really excited to share it because I know Fredrik you and I sitting there hearing this story we were kind of on the edge of our seats and I really hope you guys like it here it goes we have a very special episode with a guest Griff green welcome to the show hey thanks for having me guys welcome so

we'll maybe start digging a little bit of your history and and you as a person because you are fascinating history you've been in this space for a long time tell us a little bit about yourself well let's see I was a classic I'm actually I have a mess I have a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and yeah kind of was doing the normal like you know corporate thing for a little bit and then just couldn't handle it and became a crazy hippie and I was traveling around I've been nomadic for about seven years and I'm a huge burner I love Bernie man it's like a yearly ritual that keeps me going to actually

run camp D Central and so we have a lot of crypto currency and dissent lists that come in like it's not all crypto it's like see studying and any of those things so we try to bring that to the playa and give a lot of people that exposure and I guess I ended up getting the crypto as a lot of people did in 2013 when the price went through the roof I had already invested in the Sun because I'm just crazy okay like I was literally living off a physical gold and silver that I like bought off of my corporate sellout so I just was selling that you know as I was traveling through

some people and you know crypto seemed to like a lot easier to handle then than gold and silver so I was blown away when it went through the roof when Bitcoin went to a thousand and litecoin went from two dollars and 50 cents to 40 bucks and it's just like what is this and the more I read the more obsessed I got to the point where I was just spending all my time in it and I just decided like I'm out of here I went to Ecuador and wanted to become a Bitcoin evangelist like Andreas Antonopoulos and was like pushing really hard there and then unfortunately Ecuador decided to make digital currencies illegal so that whole idea kind of went out the window of being like a small fish in a smaller

pond you know so I was luckily I was getting a master's degree in digital currencies with the University of Nicosia and I started working with locket and then of course flakka became a really important piece of theorem history I guess with the Dow and when the Dow got I was gonna be manager for the first locket and the Dow and then when the dad I helped organize the recovery and redistribution of the funds that were recovered from pretty much every angle and learned a lot through that whole thing and that's what started giveth go back to that early those early days when you were getting into it what was it

like was a community like then uh it was not nearly as cool as it is now I definitely have to say I you know there was you know isn't in as a newcomer in the space I never really used Reddit I was still getting used to the different tools where people interact and Bitcoin talk forums I actually didn't have a computer for several years before cryptocurrency just because you know as nomadic as traveling it's kind of heavy to carry around so I'll show you back then yeah exactly I didn't need it that much you can go get a computer somewhere else so uh you know there was a little bit of I mean I've always been tech savvy and generally like cool with it but you know getting used to these reddit's and getting used to the way

people talk in subreddits and just that whole I don't know I'm kind of a lovey-dovey guy you know I'm not really into this all this talking the heavens oh hey can I swear totally that's fantastic okay so then when I found a theory amande the subreddit was so amazing like that it's just the fact that they took out the money out of the conversation just raised the level of everybody's like like awareness and you know everyone was so nice and I made this why I was never really a coder you know and but I made my first silly smart contract for a homework assignment and I wanted to make it a walkthrough because I had

to make I had to explain the silly program to my professor anyway so I was like I'll make this blog post for socket and alex van de san actually edited it and like improved it and i was just like well and he did it in such a nice way i was like no one trolled me and my crappy code and i just couldn't believe how sweet everyone was in aetherium and that sucked me and i was like this is where I'm hanging out I'm done like aetherium his home well it sounds a bit like a free we talked to him early days and he had a similar I mean I I think it's actually it's it's cool to hear like that the space has been like that and and like I still see that to

some degree but going back to when we were talking to a freight about this topic he said that like in 2017 when the price really boomed that the community kind of changed tone from being this awesome like super helpful place to like being a lot more toxic to being a lot more about like pushing the eye cos maybe to some degree but not necessarily just generally the tone changed it have you found that as well absolutely I mean for me it happened really after the Dow you know the Dow slack was a really sweet place to hang out back in the day and then after the hack it was like it was it wasn't really after the hack it was three days after the hack just all

sorts of weird accounts started coming in and just like bombarding the place with horrible trolling and really like you know just not a productive conversation and I you know there is like I don't know how much of a conspiracy theory it is or what but there's this block stream funded organization called the Dragon's Den that actually supposedly pays trolls to come in to different chat rooms and really disrupt the flow and the engagement of things and honestly the way it is there's so much money in this space we really can't put past that the idea that there might be some kind of

like force at hand here I mean you see all these phishing accounts you see all how social media can be manipulated to push certain agendas and you know I think aetherium is big enough where that's definitely happening and so it's it's really hard it's really hard to find a safe place to like get true signals can I ask because we keep mentioning the Dow but I think on this podcast we've never really talked in depth about what that what it was what the original idea was and what happened can you can you give us a bit of a history sure it's luck it originally started building the Dow with this idea that we would create a place because this was before I SEOs right the I SEOs were

happening but not like as easily as they happen today I was ten I see Jose day right it was uh it the idea was let's put a place where people can vote on different proposals to like figure out what ideas are best to fund and then have them compete against each other in this like arena and the Dow was going to be the place where Dowell token holders could choose which projects they want to support with a very simple governance model in fact you know one of the things about the Dow is we called it we let it be names that Dow I mean we look because we didn't we wanted it to truly be decentralized and we saw that socket was a clear central point of organization and we didn't want

to name it so that's why it was called the doubt we are hoping that late eventually that it would vote to make its name something else right and so socket was building the Dow and then we were a little low on funding honestly and we pushed the thing forward as fast as we could because we saw that as a clear funding mechanism for what we called the universal sharing Network which was my baby I loved the universal generic the idea was that we could create a true sharing economy where objects could be be really owned by a collective and you'd be it'd be like I want some rental economy at first but

then when we introduced like autonomous objects and you know really build the community around this piece of technology we could distribute resources more effectively than we do today that was kind of the dream but of course that dream did not happen for many reasons it wasn't there was definitely the bug was the was the killer but honestly I'm pretty skeptical that the doll would have been a success anyway at least it wasn't looking very promising because there was this moratorium that happened right after we raised all the funds that people were trying to stop the gal from working because the governance wasn't really very like well thought out or it

wasn't it wasn't perfect you know there were definitely biases towards one way or another and it was a really young project and it was too big too fast and it became a dangerous thing for the etherium community so when the Dow hack actually happened we were three weeks in and we had proposed some security things additions that may have helped it but it was too little too late and there were you know I woke up one day and the funds were being drained and I had to just kind of like call it and tell everyone hey guys for being hacked you know this is not a drill like watch out like we

don't know what to do we had some actions we try to get people to spam the network to slow the bleed you know but I was sitting front row I was not joined parodied relatively recently but I was sitting front row for when that was happening and I remember is like this call to action to actually spend the network and people responded I think I thought it was pretty amazing like that was the first time as well that I saw like there there was actually it's funny that you say like it was like three days after the the hack that that the subreddit turned toxic and yeah like while the heck was going on and like in

that first day in the first two days and there was like a sense of community and like everyone was actually trying to help out ever met I like I visited like viscerally remember that it was it was a cool experience yeah I mean we got really lucky because right after the heart the the hack happened pretty much maybe two or three hours after I made the announcement there was already a relatively strong consensus that a hard fork would be the way to go just to stop the attacker I think it might have even happened before the attack had finished that we had relatively come to the idea of a hard fork would solve this we came just like because the magic of the Dow

we did have a you know unintentional security feature that the funds were locked in place for a certain amount of time and that in this case it was 35 days we had 35 days where we knew those funds would not move so we had 35 days that we could actually rewrite the code in aetherium to take the money from the hacker and put it somewhere else and so all of a sudden we had this time Todd I liked its pertinence like there was a time limit that we had to work in and we had a mission and we had an enemy and it's just like it all made sense to push this hard fork and because we could

start that narrative I could help start that narrative early with podcasts and pushing and trying to rally the community around these ideas it worked out really well and really we did have a strong consensus around the hard fork and when there were a lot of and that's when you know when it was seemed like there was a pretty good consensus that's when all the dissent came in that's when all the people in my opinion from outside bitcoiners with an agenda came in to really you know seed seed distrust in in what the general community was rallying around and yeah and so then it kept you know we just had all the devs kept working and there were lots of

little things we try to soft fork and then that wasn't going to work for technical reasons and then in the end we barely got the hard fork through and while all that was happening the white hat group had a lot of adventures honestly there were some crazy things going on that most people don't really know about I'd love to dig into some of those adventures but maybe like I thought that others of race with means something that I'm interested in and I thought some of it myself is like what if the DAO hard fork never happened and like the the concept of a dhow has been tainted like there's there hasn't only been anyone trying to do a major dowel in the past you know two years or

whatever since since this happened and like have we lost this concept or like it has this been a detriment to the community that that this happened or what's your opinion on this well there's kind of two ways I can answer that question right so I'm gonna pause so you can pick your favorite okay there's the dowels have definitely gotten a bad name because of the dowel and that was one of the things that we as the white hat group really wanted to alleviate with giveth we started giveth because we knew or at least we could see the writing was on the wall that dowels were considered

either you know not safe to try anymore and that decentralization and trying to have a blockchain based entity might be seen as a bad idea and that was definitely the case like you see everyone the only smart contracts people are trusting money with is multi sinks and man no even those are not necessarily safe so they are - right apparently yeah no I I mean smart contracts in general are not safe were early days in this and there's a lot of money involved I honestly think that there would be a lot the problem is that real security features are centralizing and there's you know first off I deal I there's a lot of idealism in this space

you don't want to centralize if you don't have to write also you want to avoid liability when you centralize all of a sudden you become responsible right in my opinion ether in an experimental contract should be wrapped in a contract that has an escape hatch right and you move that rapt ether around and at any time if something goes wrong you know one person can pull the escape hatch which sends it to some trusted multi-sig like the white hat multi-sig and they can redistribute the funds right that's like the safest way and but in the end that's all inspired by the dow and the problem that happened there and it's really sad to me I have a question about that I know you have a

second answer there but do you feel like because I think when we speak to a few people about the doubt like do you feel like it was traumatic like or was it the biggest learning experience now what are you I'm more on the learning experience I'm generally an optimistic kind of guy you know I don't I don't know maybe a lot of my friends told me that I have like the opposite of depression right they're like a chemical imbalance that just like keeps it's a different kind of thing and so like I didn't actually experienced any trauma from the Dow which I mean it was I was definitely affected my life but honestly I always have this perspective that like the

hardest things and most difficult things I've ever happened to me have been the most important things I've ever happened to me right and I feel that way for the etherium ecosystem we had a chance early days to experiment with a really contentious hard fork and it is really important like the current hard fork that we're working on and thinking about like we are able to make these decisions much more informed because of that you know major issue that affected so many people and really put it in people's minds about smart contracts security and the idea like we learned how hard Forks worked out a most people didn't know that a currency is always created you know most people just now that's obvious

right you know there there's so many clear lessons about like how to deal with hard Forks which is something that every box chain needs to really consider now and it was mostly learned from the DAO experience what was you had sort of you'd started with two different sort of paths what was the second path second path is what happened is the dow had never happened like literally like what happened what would happen what would have happened in aetherium right so this actually brings me back a little bit to the things that people don't know about the white house was the white hat group was doing kind of in secret right because we didn't want to divulge our movements to the dow hacker

and there were actually seven Decker's and we were able to pass proposals that would move the extra balance there was a bunch of money that wasn't in the Dow but was raised by the Dow in fact if you look at Wikipedia right now I keep meaning to go change it they say the Dow only raised 11.5 million a third but really it raises about 12 million either and because half a million of them were actually in this other contract called extra balance and we were able to move the extra balance into the Dow and then take that using proposals in the proposal system the white hat group was able to send those that that ether to all of these other dowels and gain I'm

legit 51% and then attack the dowels within of you with those funds so that we were able to take over the Dow come those smaller dowels completely and then have them be controlled by the white hat group but we couldn't do that to the big one to the major Dow hacker but we were able to funnel some of the money in there and we found a loophole where we could buy dark Dow tokens in them dark in the bad Dow and the main Dow hackers thing so then we had like a thousand dark doubt tokens and because of this bug that was that was called what was it called oh my god this bug was it was like basically you

could create a stalemate where you're constantly splitting the dow and you could split it forever such that you could never get funds out so if the Dow if the hard for can never happened and we decided that you know the doubt Ogun holders had to take a hit the white hat group would have been able to return 70% of the funds but the 30% that the Dow hacker had there would be a constant battle every every week basically or as it'd be every 35 days there would be a battle that would continue the stalemate until either the white hat group or the Dow hacker

stopped fighting for those funds and we would have just kept battling and battling and battling and then those funds would probably still be locked up and honestly I was a little bit worried about that information coming out because it to me it was really important that the hardfloor campaigned because that this is just a mess if that kind of stuff is happening it's such a distraction for all the really good things that ethereal you know a developers had in mind and in store for the world and then there's this crazy Dow war that's just ongoing for the rest of assyrians history you know the V so annoying wow I did not know at all this part of the story yeah

so this white hat group I mean you mentioned some of these adventures during the DAO Wars that you were just talking about this amazing story and like who is in this group and like what is the white hat group how did it form and like have you whatever you like what is this bean group in doing since there's only at least four the DAO work for the work that we did with the dow there's only two public members which is Geordi Billina and I and but then the Y hat group is really just a loosely affiliated group of trusted hackers in the theorem space and we have done a lot of actions for some different token

sales and there were some other things that happen with the devil you know and just little random things that happen in space where we kind of get alerted from our network within you know the we I'm very well connected in the space and it seems like whenever someone has a problem I get to hear about it like that trusted friend you know as a shoulder to cry on right but then sometimes we can actually take action the biggest ones were at least more recently there was the parody multi-sig hack the the first actual hack where a swarm city eternity and edgeless all had their Multi SIG's emptied and then a swarm city called me and the white hat group kind of happened

of all being at least a lot of core members of the white hat group all having to be in the same place at the same time so it was like Geordi come over here we got to look this up you know and then we were able to drain the other I think this is about 163 other multi-sig wallets that had ether in them and tokens and that ended up being like 210 million dollars the Geordi had in his personal account right and so he was pretty paranoid over over all that you know it's like we're just hanging out he's a public person on the internet and all of a sudden he has to newton million dollars you know I honestly it was like we were probably over blowing it you know but in his head this is yeah you

know he was more a marked man right so we we were working of course with all the people that we could there's like lots of security channels in the theorem that we connect with about what to do with these funds and how to deal with all that but you know it's just funny story we like when we went to bed that night like Jodi want Jodi and his wife wanted to sleep at home and so like me and another white hat went down there and I literally slept on a mattress and from the door with a baseball bat right because they don't have guns in Barcelona you know like are you gonna do you know it's not America right we've had salt rifles but um well yeah so then

it was a you know we had this like week-long adventure where it's like listen we don't want to hold this money we want to give it back as soon as possible but it's like what how where do we put it Oh we'll put it in a multi-sig no I don't think so you know we want to give this back to people as soon as possible so we created this we deployed a new multi-sig for everyone while we are doing this other while we were like really looking over the old multi SIG's and trying to figure out a safe way to give everyone back the funds we ended up having all the old multi we deployed a new multi sick for everyone and then had them vote on to tell us where to send the funds using their multi-sig create a signalling contract so they could say in input a

certain address and then we'd send it there and then for all the big accounts we also had them call us and we just like said like you made sure they were them and had them read us the Hat dress like it was a big ordeal and that was that was one thing and then so that multi-sig action was pretty crazy but then there's so many other random things people don't get to hear about because we get there first there was a this exchange vulnerability that happened just a few weeks ago that there was a internal transit there was a way that you could make it look like you deposited funds into exchanges and determining on depending on how they actually process

their deposits they would give you money even though the transaction had actually failed either scan would say it's a success by all accounts the transaction looked like it was a success but if you look at the parity trace it had failed in like in the middle of an internal transaction and six out of the top ten exchanges were vulnerable and so we've you know I had to like figure out how do I alert every exchange that deals with the theory of you know get all these emails and this was actually through a white hat that wasn't involved with the Dow hack but he came in for the parity multi-sig adventure and he discovered that vulnerability and so like Alexi

he's another I guess like publicly known white hat person and he he's a superstar you know and there's there's a lot of other random adventures that we have this this for me Harkes back a little bit to something you mentioned before we started recording of like with smart contract security and and this question know like what if that down ever happened you know there's you were saying like contract security was overlooked and it's really not something that people knew a lot about how do you feel that that has changed over the years first off solidity at the time I think that I was written in like zero point

three point six so solidity has gotten a lot better and there's a lot more tools I mean we didn't even have the page modifier back then right you could just send ether anytime you want with any function call there's a lot of UX problems and but you know people learn from experience and you have a lot more you have a lot more developed audit ecosystem so like if you write a smart contract you can find an auditor in in 2000 when we did the doubt they're the only auditor we had there's no one who knew how to audit solidity period zero we went to the people that audited

aetherium anything they don't know about solidity right so now there's lots of options there's a lot of clear patterns that people know to use and it's it's a lot more developed and a lot easier to write safe-ish contracts but in the end you know you're putting money in programming language that's two years old and I mean we're if there's a bug in the solidity compiler which i think is just now being audited for the first time right like I mean there is so many ways that your money can disappear right there's and sadly I get to hear about

all the time because I'm that guy you know that gets to hear about these things and so I'm like paranoid I have a question to go back to the Whitehead story what is what's the mandate of the white hat hackers might white hat group I just do good I mean we don't really have a mandate we're really not organized in any way we just have a couple chat rooms that we hang out in and when there's something interesting that's happening you know it's like we just kick it around and say well what's this you know and then when it's urgent you know there's like usually a call to action because basically we're just like good devs with balls that's all you know we're not worried about like oh what's

the liability what will this could happen no it's just like oh you know we have the opportunity to do something so let's do it so somewhere the decision was taken to actually do the hard fork what was the lead up to that like I mean the decision was first started when Vitalik basically blurted it out when we were having like a discussion with all the bigwigs in etherium that we could find you know but was like the NEA the council of elders you could say it's like let's let's figure out what to do and he was just like we should just hard fork and then after that it was it would became almost like I just kind of decided yeah because I always felt you

know Iowa's always coming from the perspective of the community I was a community organizer and that's the only way that was the only clear path for everything to be cleanly resolved and for the people who you know put their funds in that contract to be made whole so it was a clear the clear path for me to push so I just went on every social media I went on a social media campaign all month just pushing and pushing and pushing and explaining why the hard fork was the right way and you know which brought up a lot of questions about immutability and all these really interesting things that we learned about how block chains actually work and you know they're based off social consensus and not necessarily immutability but

then when there was this idea that maybe we could get around the hard fork by creating a soft fork that would lock the funds in place and you know my memory on this is it might be a little rusty so and I have to fact-check me or double-check it but basically that was the soft fork was found to be technically infeasible because it would allow people to das the network by sending transactions to out you know allow the DAO hacker to das the network or allow someone that does the network there was also this idea that if the DAO hacker has 4 percent of all Eastern existence and we eventually moved to

proof of stake that could be a huge problem right like we have this clear person who does not have a theorems best interests in mind so because of all these you know weird things and and of course the fact that he's a bad person and at least one of the things that I was always pushing is like all it takes for evil to win this for good men to do nothing I'm butchering that the quote but you guys know what I mean so I think my brain is fried after so many days of conferences but uh but yeah so we you know we had to do a lot of testing a lot of auditing over the smart contract that we were going to put all the funds in

there was a lot of work pretty much every core developer from parody and goth had to take a pause on whatever they were doing and start looking at this like really urgent chain major change in the protocol they had never been in a regular state change before and it was everyone was making it up as they went along and so it was really important and it was really really I felt really bad because it slowed etherium down by who knows how long how many dates did you have 35 days from the hack yeah 35 days from the hack it was basically when you split the dow the that was the function that the dow

hacker called you have a 28 day funding period where you have your own new dow right you have a new dial that can receive funds from anything to buy tokens in and then after that you have seven days before you could split or if no one else had tokens in the dow hackers down then they would be able to have after 14 days they'd be able to have a proposal go through that would send all the money somewhere else that then it could go to exchanges or something so 35 days before a split and that would move it to a new day a new dal and then you have another 35 days before it can move again right or 42 days for it to actually hit in exchange

but to keep everything clean we really had to hit the 35 days because we didn't know what the address would be that the new Dow would be generated at how many people do you think in total were working on that at the time oh man probably in one form or another I'm sure over a hundred you know I mean basically the whole aetherium community was distracted by that though all time there was nothing else going on I mean everything else was put on pause there was too many unknown variables so pretty much the whole a human community was working on it but concretely on the core clients they were probably like you know six or seven on each a lot of advisers and well-known people in the

community were auditing the withdraw contract and then you know obviously I love locket so I would say good 50 people were like actually yeah officially working on that all month did people bond through this oh yeah I mean the white hat group for sure right we went to war together and I would say a lot of people start you know the why had group never even met each other in person until we you know the et Cie thing happened and we had to run off to Switzerland like figure out a legal strategy right and well met each other in the Swiss Airport you know so like there were a lot of friends made and a lot of a lot of people went you know

became solidified there like there were a lot of startups that were planning to work with the Dow like Gollum Gollum actually had a plan proposal for the Dow you know and there are a lot of other groups that were planning on proposing things to the Dow that probably all I got to have that experience of this major shift and like in a way like a like not like quite a rite of passage but you know like a boot camp kind of experience and I'm sure their their relationships were stronger afterwards that's what I'm sort of sad to see see that original vision of the Dow go away and not like it never really came back you know for in full force of like it

was like an actually good IC o---- model like it was you could actually raise money and there was community voting and there were like you would have the good things of like a normal traditional VC round where like you could actually talk about you know milestones and funding for you know specific project it's in like not giving someone a hundred million on day one and just hoping that it was okay absolutely I cannot say that enough and that's why giveth was really started because and that was our first mandate effectively you could say was to create that proposal system and the I what it just

is so disgusting to me the way I SEOs work today you just throw all the money in the multi-sig and hope that they're gonna you know do what you think they're gonna do that is so silly that is no no one works like that nothing works like that and what we did is we created a mini-me token contract so we can have better governance we created the vault contract which had an escape hatch whitelist time delay an owner to cancel payments and all of these others centralizing security features that could then be removed as you trust the code base and we created a milestone tracker and we created these for charity this was the white hat group's vision was that we

could practice becoming like a real block team based entity in the in the area of making the world a better place because when in the donation space you don't have investors you have donors and there's a lot less of a hang-up on am I going to get an ROI and a lot less pressure to push you to make something like really profitable it's just they want to see some good work be done with their funds and in that environment we felt it was a lot easier to play around with decentralized governance mechanisms and and blocked becoming a blockchain based into that becoming a real Dao so as but then as we and we did that in a response to what

was happening with the IC OS so although we didn't really know that at the time how so I guess it wasn't really a response because it was just a premonition in a way because we could see that smart contracts weren't trusted anymore and so we we then started this like decentralized governance project called giveth and but it was in the charity space and as we evolved we gathered more people from the charity space and also as we have other projects cropped up like Aragon and colony and we were like oh these guys got it you know I mean we're not trying to change that we're just trying to fill a gap and if Oregon and colony I seem to have like a good strategy here

we don't need to work on decentralized governance they'll do it for us and we started working more in the actual transparency and accountability space because that's what charities need and a lot of people from the charity space started joining our team and really pushing us more towards that making the world a better place with blockchain tech to the point that givethe became a community focused on blockchain for good well you don't have a legal entity we're really just a group of people that are trying to use blockchain technology to make the world a better place and we have all sorts of random projects and people that are you know generally the people that hang out in the giveth riot are the kind of guys that don't they

have a really good idea that they're really passionate about working on but it doesn't have a clear funding model it's really more altruistic or at least at attacking a problem they feel needs to be solved sometimes it is like directed at the less fortunate in some ways but a lot of times it's just like hey you know I want to solve this proof of uniqueness like this bright idea or I want to create a wedding contract a wedding death right because I got married on a blockchain and I want to create a DAP that everyone can use so they can get married on the blockchain right and there's all these other cool projects that we can kind of support with some random tools that we built that's that's in the it all evolved out of the Dow and the hard fork

and this whole white hat group experience it just kind of floated into that how would somebody use givethe like what from what you've described I mean can anyone use it can any group uses so giveth giveth it gets almost confusing like Bitcoin right there's the Bitcoin network and then there's bitcoins that you can pass around okay and it's same with giveth we have the giveth DAP which is this is our flagship product which just won the super demo yesterday ahead Conn which is so cool but what we do with the with the DEP is we try to allow anybody to create their own decentralized altruistic community a community that's focused around a cause

so that cause could be open source block Explorers it could be ending homelessness in Toronto it can be anything you want and this is a place this is kind of instead of starting a non-profit or an NGO or something like that some kind of legal structure you can start a blockchain based entity and just define your own terms around how you want that to be governed and organized and you can collect funds and then distribute those funds in a completely transparent and accountable way so that the donor when they send funds in they can actually see where those funds go and at some point if they don't like it they can even veto and say well I actually don't want to support that open-source block Explorer I like

the other one or I don't really trust you as my delegate anymore I want to move it to something else or even like hey my you know brother just broke his arm and I need this money to pay for hospital bills I'm gonna take my money out completely right but they can only do that before it's locked for a specific purpose so this is what's really cool about the giveth DEP is it's really trying to solve the problem of transparency and accountability that we have in the charitable world today but right now our deaf isn't quite done and it's still we had this issue where the gas was too high good old Krypto kitties you know we were like we deployed it and then we were in the crypto kitties

started cropping up and we just couldn't bring ourselves to actually say this is a final answer even though we had it all done it was so sad so now we actually are doing this crazy thing and we moved our DAP to rinkeby and we're bridging the rinkeby chain to the main net and that because of that experience of scaling issues we started a whole group around scaling now and started investigating different scaling solutions and the parity bridge was actually probably our favorite which we interviewed first but because we wanted you know attack these tragedy the commons issues we are all the way through and interviewed a bunch of people about their different scaling solutions and had a whole little

gathering in misen podium you could say in Barcelona where everyone got to present their ideas and and talk to each other in person and build relationships so they can solve their scaling issues and that all started because we had scaling problems you know and so we're still recover our def is almost usable right now we have a successful like kind of what we call the ghetto bridge between Rothstein and rinkeby it's pretty centralized and how do we know we have to do these extra security precautions because of the centralization but eventually when you guys finish the parity bridge and when I guess you guys do you guys work for parity I work for parapet okay so then I can say that when you guys finish the

parity bridge which will hopefully be soon yeah then then we can replace our ghetto bridge with something a little more secure and trusted across those waters right but then yes and that's when we'll probably open it up for people to actually use it but right now if you want to use givethe you use our community structure we have these cool projects like reward dough that help fund people that are just doing what they want to do if you want to do some kind of work on some kind of project and you just you know want the community to bounce ideas off of maybe to find contributors from a group of people that are all interested in just kind of working in the space and learning

solidity and you know learning how to work in the theorem world you can join our group called social coding and we actually have a project where we dish points to people that are doing cool things and then at the end of the month anyone we kind of count up the points and $4,000 are given away to the people who receive the points and what's really cool here is it's you don't know how much money you're getting until way later so there isn't this like cheapening of your labor by getting just like a little bit you know this is one of the problems in the charity space and that's why we created the reward l is that volunteers don't want to be paid

but yet they need to be rewarded because of the opportunity cost of devoting their time like how do you tell your girlfriend like yeah I would go on a hike with you but I want to do this really nice thing instead right it's like no but I'm I love you you know like like I want to I want to go on a hike it's a lot easier to be like oh yeah yeah I did this other I was like diving on my computer in my mom's basement instead of hiking with you but like hey I just got like you know three hundred dollars you want to go out to a nice dinner right there's this at least there's a positive feedback loop and it's a kind of an experiment to distance that weird thing that happens with money when you receive it and your money your

monkey mind goes wild with that stuff and so like we're just experimenting and playing around with decentralized governance tools and but at the same time trying to support people that are doing cool things in space like those super demos that we that will be destroyed yesterday no I want I'm like gave my cards are like half of them saying you guys should come into our you know into our space and we can help like we can help with advice because you know it's kind of like this group that is all really cool like back how the theorem subreddit used to be you know I mean we're all just like working on our projects and trying to help each other out and we actually have this like we have different strategies to get people

to work together and then of course yeah you know at the end of the month if you make a video and tell us what you are doing you'll end up being able to cash out your points and you make like you know three five hundred bucks okay that's cool you know and it's it's fun and you get you get this feedback and you get to keep going and you feel motivated continue working on your project can I say something yeah what a journey you just took us on with this story this has been epic yeah and it lands in this place that's like you know we're recording this right after Edie Kahn and you had just done this competition and won based on this idea that sort of all started back during it pretty it's it is quite an amazing journey and it's been a

fantastic episode do you want it do you have any sort of last thoughts that you want to share I mean the only thing I would say is if any of that interested you and your in you want to come join our community and giveth its giveth io / join and join our riot and we just hang out and have a good time and you know hopefully we can you know fix these tragedies of Commons issues in aetherium and then eventually the world awesome well it's again it's been an absolutely fantastic episode I love this story through and through thank you very much for coming on the podcast and speaking to us yeah my pleasure thanks guys thanks so much you and to our listeners thanks for listening thanks for listening

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