Bankless - EthCC #8 | "1 Million Devs, 1 Billion Users" - Kevin Owocki & Austin Griffith

Episode Date: July 30, 2022

🇫🇷 Welcome to the Bankless EthCC 2022 Experience 🇫🇷 With fantastic guests from all corners of the ecosystem, this 8-part series is an exploration of crypto culture and the current state of Ethereum. In the 8th and final episode, we bring on the powerhouse duo of Austin Griffith and Kevin Owocki. This one is a lot of fun, and both of these builders are moving the space towards a more just, robust ecosystem. ------ 📣Rhino.Fi | Massive Mystery Airdrop https://bit.ly/3o9trRE ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/   🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  🌱 LENS | ACCESS CODE: WAGMI https://bankless.cc/Lens 🚀 ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🌉 JUNO | BRIDGE FIAT TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Juno ⚡️ ZKSYNC | THE LAYER 2 SCALING ENDGAME https://bankless.cc/zkSync ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Welcome Bankless Nation to the final episode of the ETHCC experience. Yes, I'm sad too. It was a fantastic conference. It was a lovely three hours with some of my favorite people in the crypto space. Bringing up the rear, we have Kevin O'Waki and Austin Griffith. When you put these two separately, they're very serious individuals. But when you put them together, they are just two dudes from Colorado who have a good time. So we're bringing in the most comical conversation out of this whole entire series to bring up the rear and to close out this ETH. CC experience. I hope you've been enjoying these episodes. I had a ton of fun producing them. And this is what I try to do when I go to all these conferences. I try and bring back the experience that if you did not go to the conference, well, if you listen to these, I hope that you felt like you did. Kevin Milwaukee and Austin Griffiths, two dudes from Colorado, as I've said, those dudes tend to enjoy public goods. And these two individuals are, of course, public goods, enjoyers. We also have a ton of fun. Recording this episode, we make a little bit of a game out of it. I'll let you experience that for yourself, as you'll.

listen to the game that we play. Austin and Kevin, of course, are some of my favorite people. Kevin is relentlessly obsessed with trying to get people to coordinate. Austin is relentlessly obsessed with getting people to speed run Ethereum. That's his project. But they are both on a quest to get people to go more bankless. So I hope you all enjoy this fantastic conversation with Kevin Awaki and Austin Griffith. We usually do our pre-recorded ads for these episodes, but because they are so awesome and so fast, we're doing a speed run of these ads. Here we go. One of the big themes of ETHCC week was the launch of the ZKEVM. Three different teams all launched their test net.

And while everyone is trying to claim who was first, we can confidently say that ZK Sync has been focused on the ZKEVM for the longest. The golden end game of the ZKEVM has been the vision of ZKEVM since the beginning. And during ETHCC week, they launched their 100 days to main net plan, which is now already down to 93 days. So if you're going to join the ZKEVM Wars, make sure you post about it on Lens, the first decentralized social networking graph. In crypto, we say not your keys, not your crypto, but on lens, we say not your keys, not your

content. Own your own social media handle, choose your own algorithm, and mint your profile using the secret code word in the show notes. And something that's likely going to be talked about on lens is, of course, the Ethereum merge. And the merge is why you should be staking your ETH with Rocket Pool. It's a decentralized Ethereum validator network where you deposit ETH and get your ETH in return, and then you can take that REth into DFI. And if you run a node, you can let other people deposit their Eth into your node, and you earn 15% of their staking commission as payment for your node operating services. And then maybe you want to take your RETH over to Arbitrum.

For all of your defy things, Arbitrum is where you have to be. With over 35,000 contracts deployed and 1 million unique addresses, Arbitrum is leading the way into the age of roll-ups. You know how I know all these numbers? Because I watched Arbitrum's talk at ECC, which you should definitely also watch, but not before you're done watching this video first. But in order to get your money over to Arbitrum so you can buy your R-Eath natively, then you should use Juno, because Juno is the fast.

assets bridge from your checking account to an Ethereum layer two. A checking account to an Ethereum layer two is absolutely crazy and it just takes minutes. Juno is your crypto checking account for the crypto era. But when you're doing all of these things, make sure that it's on a privacy first browser, which is why you should be using Brave. It blocks all the browser ads. It's got a native web three wallet and it puts the user first the Web3 way. I hope you use all of these sponsors on your quest for going bankless and now I bring you my in-person conversation with Kevin Milwaukee and Austin Griffith. Kevin, Austin, what's up, guys? What's up? Hey, I believe both of you were at ECC last year, but here we are again. Here we are. Here we are, yeah. Yeah, how's it feel different? Same,

same, same, different. How's it feel? How French is it? It's so French. I haven't gotten COVID yet this year, so. Yeah, you and I got COVID last time. I had the Delta variant, like the alpha version. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Awesome. You escaped from COVID last time, right? I don't think, I got it in Portugal, I think, but I didn't get it in Paris. Oh, you missed the Paris COVID Po app. Yeah. Yes. Okay, Kevin, you have a talk.

Austin, did you have a talk? I did. Yeah, I talked about tooling today. All right, let's do a TLDR of Kevin's talk, and then we'll go to Austin's. Yeah, so we just launched GICCoin Passport, which you can get at passport.gitcoin.com. Basically, we just allow you to take the civil resistance that you have on GICcoin grants and bring it to any other DOP in the ecosystem. So if you're a DAP developer that needs civil resistance for your app, then you can

just integrate Gipcoin Passport with a couple lines of code and instantly find out how much proof of personhood, how much personhood score your user has. So GekcoinPassport, get at passport. Gipcoin.com. Yeah, there's like a kind of a meta shift. I've been calling it towards the world of like identity and reputation. Gekcoin is leaning right into that, but you guys have been building that out for a while. Yeah, you get three years of civil resistance and all of our thinking and the fraud defense team at get coined dial at your back if you integrate get coin passport sick uh awesome what was your talk about mine was about speed run ethereum if you're a web three organization and you're bringing in web two devs and you need to get those web two devs up to speed go to speedrun ethereum dot com it takes you

through scaffolding takes you through you know you'll get the syntax quickly but then it also teaches you the mental model of what are good things to build on ethereum and what are not so in your guys's talks who said the word coordination more definitely have it's got it i think you probably I always said speed run Ethereum a couple of times. Yeah. Did you? Or I did. No, you did.

You did, yeah. That's the Austin Griffith drinking game is how many times did you say speed run Ethereum? Speedrunethorium.com. This is like seven for this interview. I think we're doing good. There should be like a little counter. If I could say coordination as many times as you say speed run Ethereum. I wouldn't put it past Luke.

If Luke is editing this, I bet you there's already a number counter up on the screen. Okay. Cool. Well, great coordination, Luke. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so what are the themes of the recent state of crypto that you guys have really been leaning into? What's been like floating around in your guys' brains?

Kevin, go first. A number went down and it went down again and then it went up. And I think that we're all kind of building through the bear market. I think that the next cycle, I'm really excited about projects that have object level of impact on people's lives and do good for average people, not just rich people, are going to be what's a big part of the next cycle. So I think about this as like the region investment cycle. How can we disrupt NGOs with impact dolls and leverage the properties of blockchains like transparency, immutability, global scale and disrupt the impact sector? There's actually $25 trillion per year that's spent on public goods through governments and we can do it better with impact dolls. So basically building and regent stuff is what I'm focused on right now because just when I provide utility to everyday people using impact dolls and actually have a,

an op-ed going live in bankless called front-running the region and opportunity, which will link in the show notes. That's all about that. One of the themes that I've been tapping into lately is repairing crypto's broken image after the mania that was 2021. So like gamers now hate us. A lot of artists hate us for like, you know, NFTs. Like people just like, oh, crypto, we got way bigger and like way more injected into every single conversation. And now we have like a lot of repairing to do with that broken brand. We need crypto games that aren't Ponzi schemes.

We need some like to actually support the artists and that have that not be a meme. But I think also the Ethereum merge plays into this. But also Kevin, I think public goods and legitimacy through like public goods funding also plays into this. Have you thought about this as well? Yeah, totally. This seems like a really good opportunity to show my book, which I just wrote. We get out of my bag here. It's called Green Pilled, How Crypto can regenerate the world.

And so there's lots of opportunities to create what we call regenerative use cases of crypto that help everyday people and increase their capacity over time. And, you know, I think the first thing is first do no harm. So let's reduce the climate impact, which the merge is already doing. I think the ecosystem has to develop an immune system against scams and Ponzi schemes. And, you know, the next Terra hopefully won't be able to rug so many people because there'll be an immune system for that. And, you know, I think Bankless did a good job of calling out Terra before it had even grown. and if more people have listened to you, then hopefully people wouldn't have gotten rugs so much.

So first, do no harm, and then we build these impactiles that are actually good for people and good for the planet and good for the world. So anyway, in sum, you can get my book at green pill dot party, which is all about how crypto can regenerate the world. Austin, you interface with a lot of developers

for their first time into Ethereum and just crypto at large. Does crypto's brand, does that make things difficult for you, or are you not really interfacing with all that? I think so. I think that, like, my target audience is Web2 developers

that are interested in Web 3. And when their first interaction is with some NFT bro, like, mansplaining to them about crypto, like, as a developer, they're kind of turned off by that. So I do think that we do have, like, some image stuff to work on. But every time, almost all developers I know, like good builders, start to tinker with smart contracts and just get bit by the bug. They get, you know, goosebumps on the back of their neck

when they start thinking about the fun things that they can build with it. So you just have to get them through that initial stage of, There's some garbage, but there's some awesome tech, too. Yeah. So if I'm one of those developers, there's a site that I can go through to, like, say, speed run the development process. And what is it? It's speedrunethorium.com. Okay. Speedrunethorium.com. Cool. Yeah. Guys, what are you doing after this? We're at the close of the second day.

We got one more day. We've got Thursday. I think we're probably all here in Paris until the weekend, though. What are you guys doing after this today? And then what are you guys doing for the rest of the week? You first? I, so I have a nuts workshop. We're doing a full day workshop on Friday, where we start with what is solidity, and we end with, like, building a decks and learning how to audit smart contracts all in one day. Would you say you're speed running? We're going to speed run Ethereum.

Yes. And probably drink some beer on a boat, too. Nice. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. For me, a sustainable blockchain summit is Thursday and Friday, so talking about how we can coordinate.

Is that with one? Yeah, I'm not sure who it's well. They put things on my calendar and I got it. And then tonight going to a dance party. So you're going to teach me how to dance? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, some of this. Okay, I got it. Like this?

Yeah, that's it. Okay, wow, we got to coordinate. I'm so coordinated, like physically. We can speed run it later. I can take it to do it. Okay, I can't move that fast on the dance floor. We're with a sloth. So, yeah, coordination is hard in the real world.

That's why I got to talk about it in the metaverse so much. Right, yeah. Does it count to talk about coordination? Is that a form of coordination? I mean, I think it's all. Or is that just a LARP? It's all a LARP. It's all a LARP.

Everything is. Yeah, totally. Is there any, like, other talks that you guys are looking forward to, or you guys talked about some of the things you're going to, but just, like, other people you're looking to engage with or also, like, just like the other conversations that are going on in the space that aren't speed running Ethereum or coordination. What's another, like?

Yeah. Well, it's all coordination. at some level. But okay. No, I'm excited about DOWs in the future of work. I've talked to a couple of mainstream outlets, you know, Yahoo Finance, CNN, that are talking about how DOWs and Web3 can allow access

to a Western middle class style of living to people across the world. And, you know, so going along with the themes of what has object level impact on everyday people instead of just the rich people, the fact that, you know, on GIC-coin, you can earn a six-figure salary with grants and with the,

the bounties on there and you can earn from anywhere is really compelling. And, you know, we kind of take for granted having access to Western labor in the United States. But we have users on Gitcoin that are from Nigeria and are from Eastern Europe that just can't trust their banking system. And if they were to get payments through the Fiat system, their bank might seize it on the way to them, but they can get paid within 15 seconds on the Ethereum network when they work for a Dow or they work on Gitcoin. So future work, I expect to be a big part of the next cycle. Or I guess since it's already happening, the president of work. That sounds very bankless.

I'm behind in the word count, but I should be saying bankless. One. Luke, add David to the scoreboard. He's on the board. Mine counts is 10. I need to catch up. And I would lean toward like Juan Benet. Like Juan Benet is talking about incentives and how we can actually like make real changes happen in the world by creating the right incentives to drive that kind of thing.

So like this mechanism design, game theory kind of thinking about. behaviors and how we kind of move people toward the behaviors that we're looking for. And even going back to like Amin at MCon talking about like nation states failing to coordinate and how it's not us first them. It's all of us. Yeah. Oh, shoot. Speed run Ethereum.

There we go right back to you. Thank you. All right. Just what else is on your guys in mind just generally? Anything particularly rise up to the surface? Building. Like just getting builders in, getting them. speed run Ethereum. Did you guys have the same level of, as soon as the bull market happened at

like the start of 2021, because like we were in the bear market, but like we saw 2020 happen and that was like the first part of the ball market. That was pretty exciting. But then like the second half of the bull market in 2021 really got kick started. And then that was when like irrationality was just like off the table and what we're building was confusing to me. And so like 2021 was for me, it was like super exhausting. Did you guys kind of feel that too? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, It's a marathon, not a sprint at this point when you've been doing it for five years, but 2021 had some crazy things that happened in it for sure. Yeah.

And some of those things give us those bad images, like talking about, like you were saying crypto has a bad image, but the word Web 3 was working for a while. And I think possibly it got tarnished in that enough that like I go to speak at a React conference. And as soon as I say Web 3, there's a couple people that get really excited. Right. And then there's a bunch of people that just like check out. and they're out of there.

Like, this grifter's trying to scam me somehow. Yeah. Well, we rebranded crypto because it had all of the negative branding from pre-2020 earlier. Like, it had the ICO, Mount Gawks, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's like, this new thing, this Web 3, and then we effed that up too. Yep. Yep.

It's a permissionless ecosystem. Anybody can say they're Web 3. You know, any Gibroni can throw that at the top of their Twitter and then act like an idiot. And then we get... Do you think this is a thing that we're just going to have to fight for, like, the rest of time. Yeah.

I think so. We just need the honest builders to outbuild the dishonest builders. I think what you need is to have headlines grabbed by things that are like good for the world and good for people instead of just the Ponzi schemes. And, you know, Vitalik talks a lot about in proof of stake how you want to build a protocol that's much economically cheaper to defend than it is to attack. And that's how you create anti-fragility in the proof of stake protocol. The analogy that I'll use here is like if you think of a scoreboard of like D-Gen versus

regent use cases or like Ponzi versus regent, then basically what you want to do is you want to make it the incentives of the builders such that it's like not profitable anymore to build like the next Ponzi scheme, but it is profitable and like attractive to build like more region stuff and things that are good for the world. And so, you know, if we can shift that incentives, if like capital could rotate into region projects, then I think that that kind of solves for the incentive. And then it'll just happen naturally. Like I don't think this is a narrative that we can meme until it's actually true and happening. And so trying to engineer that is kind of like what I've been focusing on coordinating. One of the themes that we're talking about with Van Spencer in our most recent podcast with

him was like what is the next like mania in the world of crypto? Like what's the next meta that we shift to? And we were talking about like layer two is because they're the easiest thing to spin up and produce a very significant amount of capital, which is kind of like a grift. But like it used to be like proof of work for confer launches. And then it used to be like, you know, the defy yield farms. If it eventually shifts into layer two, it's like I'm sure it can be just as degenerate as the manias before them. But in that particular version of like a mania, if there is a layer two mania, it produces a ton of cheap block space as an exhaust, which of all byproducts, cheap block space that's hooked into Ethereum securely via layer two doesn't actually sound like the worst negative byproduct. It actually sounds like good coordination. Yeah.

I mean, I will say that we just built, thank you by the way, kind of Luke. We just built Voting.Gitcoin.co.co, which is a way of staking on Gitcoin grants that you think are quality to provide signal into the quadratic funding mechanism. And one of the neat things was that we bridged GTC over to, I didn't do it, actually. You and Danieli did it over to optimism. And what's really neat is that you get the security of the Ethereum main net at like a thousandth of the price. And you can just deploy any contract to it because it's EVM compatible, EVM equivalent. Equivalent. Yeah, that's right.

That's the word. And so I don't know. It's really great for builders to be able to build stuff with the security of the Ethereum mainnet and a thousandth of the price. I think that that could drive alone a bunch of different new use cases that have been priced out of the main net thus far. And speaking of Daniele, he came through by doing speed run Ethereum. He's part of a region system where I'm streaming ETH to him. And now he got hired at Gitcoin, like a single developer. We did. We did. Coordinating at Gitcoin. Yeah. Who does to create more coordination in the world. Maybe he could come back and help me a little bit with Speed Run Ethereum. though. Yeah. I don't know. That'd be a coordination failure, I think. As long as he's bankless, it's okay. Okay. There we go. We're all just going to be reduced to a meme at the end of this video. Guys, this is going to be the last interview because it's also the funniest interview I've done

so far is at the very end of the show. And so since this is the end of the show, goodbye, listener. Thank you for tuning in. Can we say bankless 10 times fast? Ready? Three, two, one. Bankless, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, man. You really ran up the scoreboard. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That's three points per. David has the home field advantage and he won. What a shocker. You guys are just like the banks, actually, now that I think about it.