Bankless - Kevin Owocki | Layer Zero

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

Kevin Owocki is the leader behind the Gitcoin project, but he is also a husband, a father, an ultimate frisbee player, and a self-described hippie. As one of the most compelling individuals in the space, for Kevin it all boils down to coordination. In this episode of Layer Zero, we focus on Slaying Moloch, Incentivizing Public Goods, the Solarpunk aesthetic, and much more. Dive in and find out why we're optimistic about the future of society. ------ 📣 TracerDAO | Perpetual Pools are now Live on Aribtrum! https://bankless.cc/Tracer  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha  🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:00 Kevin Owocki & Gitcoin 9:12 Public Goods 13:05 Open-Source Business Model 19:59 Kevin’s Start 28:02 Who is Kevin? 35:00 Running on the Shoulders of Giants 42:00 Solarpunk 50:00 Nightmare Fuel & Branding 54:58 Ethereum vs Moloch 1:00:55 Regen Finance 1:06:24 Optimistic about the Future ------ Resources: Kevin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/owocki?s=20  ----- 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. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Ethereum is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the Ethereum community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks knew that the code that they write impacts the people that use it. And Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because the Ethereum is people all the way down and it always has been. Today I'm talking with Kevin O'Waki, the leading mind behind the whole Gitcoin project and one of the biggest, most vibrant proponents of public goods that I know of. And I obviously have a ton of respect for Kevin O'Waki as one of the guys that has really helped me formulate my mental models and ideas about what this whole crypto thing is and why it's meaningful for just the, and why it allows you to be bullish on humanity. Bankless listeners will remember Kevin from our Slang Moloch episode, which is referenced in the show a few times. And if you like the conversation that I'm having here with Kevin, that is definitely a fantastic follow-up episode to you to listen to to get more of the same type of conversations.

Kevin is a guy who wears many, many hats. He is a software developer. He is an entrepreneur. He's a business leader. And then he also reminds me during the show that he's also a community manager. in addition to a father and a husband and a bike rider and a Coloradian. But I focus on the first four that I listed in because Kevin has built so much in this space, not only with what he's been building at Bitcoin, but just being a general contributor,

both to the discourse and conversation around Ethereum, as well as contributor of actual software that we use in the open source world. So immense respect for Kevin. Kevin, thanks for coming on the show. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get right into the show. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys, not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallets, which makes proper private key management a breeze.

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for the great migration to the Arbitrum layer two. To keep up to speed with Arbitrum, follow them on Twitter at Arbitrum and join their Discord. Hey, Kevin. What's up? Hey, David. Thanks for having me. Oh, glad to have you here, man. What do you want to talk about today?

Layer two. This podcast is called Layer 2, right? Yeah, we focus on scaling. Scaling only. Okay. Yeah, no, I think the name of this podcast, Layer 2, is really interesting. Layer 0 is the humans of Ethereum. Is that right?

Yeah, right. Yeah, it's humans all the way down. And I've always had mad respect for what you're doing, because to me, the whole, like, funding public goods side of Ethereum is, like, almost everything else, like, defy, speculation, NFT, JPEGs is, like, kind of a means to an end just to, like, spin up the flywheel that ultimately becomes funding public goods. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, it's been really exciting. So, Gitcoin's mission is to build open source software, to build and fund the open web. And it's been a lot of fun to help builders get into the space. And then once they're in the space, make sure. that they can get coins for their work in the space. And when I was at ETHCC, I think I saw you at ETHC maybe once or twice. I had maybe a dozen or two dozen people come up to me and say, hey, thanks for creating

Gitcoin. It created my first opportunity in the space or it affected my career in this or that way. So in a way, layer zero is where Gitcoin is focused. It's on helping builders find places to work for public goods and get paid for that work. Hey, like both me and Ryan, before bankless was bankless, both me and Ryan, were getting Gitcoin grants. And this is always how I tell people. It's like the Gitcoin grant model was like the first way that I was actually able to

receive input from the market that my work was valued and that I could actually turn that into something that I could like actually generate like a livelihood with. And I wouldn't have had that opportunity had it not been Gitcoin funding people, people funding other people. Totally. Yeah. And I got into this space sort of aiming to help software. for engineers be able to quit their corporate jobs and work on open source software.

And then also to some extent be able to work on public goods and stuff that didn't have a business model instead of ICOs in 2017. But it was kind of a happy accident to see media people like yourself and like Sassel and Eth Hub all start to use get coin grants. And I think that it was kind of a happy accident that we pioneered, well, Vitalik pioneered quadratic funding. We just implemented it. But that it works for open source, which is a part of.

public good, but also journalism, which is a public good for the space. Right. Yeah, it seemed to be kind of like a breakthrough moment where maybe you can elaborate on this, but like you said that it was a happy accident, as in the Kikoyn didn't intend or think to really fund anything that wasn't like developer and coding and software, software focus, but instead just like at some point, people just use this thing to the market just chose the outcome of this thing. And all of a sudden, like, it turned to Kikoyin.

into it, not just a software funding platform, but just a funding platform for anything. Yeah, totally. Well, I mean, the Genesis story of is that I've been a software engineer all of my career. And the idea behind Gitcoin was, hey, what if we can use this crypto economics thing to fund open source software? Right now, open source software doesn't have a business model. It creates $500 billion per year in economic value. And there's no business model if you're an open source software developer.

And so it just felt like an asymmetry between value created and value captured. And the fact that there was billions of dollars of capital, now trillions of dollars of capital, sloshing around in this financial system that's open source meant that instead of that money going to some back office on Wall Street to do IT stuff, that it would go to open source software. And so that was sort of the idea behind Gipcoin. And, you know, I think journalism is great. And I think that there's a lot of really other public goods. Privacy is another digital age private good, public good that I care a lot about.

And we had nothing against those niches. It just really wanted to focus on software development. And yeah, the pivot, it's not really a pivot because we support both audiences, but I think came from Gitcoin grants maybe around three or four. I think that Vitalik realized that, oh, my gosh, we can get more people talking about get coin grants and therefore more funding for open source software if we support all these bloggers and people who are creating public goods in this sort of journalism space in Ethereum. And so it's kind of a happy, happy marriage where I think like having L2 clients

and ETH2 clients on one end sort of legitimizes the journalism and the journalism brings more eyeballs into the funding of the open source software. So it's been, it's been in that sense, it was a happy accident. So Kevin, here's here's a question for you. Did you care about public goods before Ethereum? Or when was the first moment where you were like, oh, public goods, I like those things and I want to help those things grow? Yeah, it's not like a real natural thing, I think, for people to come to a moment like that unless they're studying economics, maybe.

But for me, there was, I've been a technology entrepreneur basically since I was 23. And I went through tech stars, learned how to run a engineering shop there, and ran an online dating website, basically for the first five years of my career. And every time I wanted to do something new for that online dating website, if I wanted to install a database server, I didn't write my own database server. I used an open source one. It was my SQL. And then when I wanted to build a web server, I didn't write my own. I used Apache or later EngineX. And so I think with open source software, we're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants insofar as there's so much value created by open source software developers. And as a technology entrepreneur,

I was just deriving so much value for open source and really understood the power of it as open source came to prominence as GitHub came to prominence. This is before Gitcoin. And over the last 10 years, I just kind of jumped from technology to technology startup. And everywhere I went, open source software was something that was used. It was something that we recruited on. It was something that we virtue signaled about. But we never really gave back at any of those startups. And so it was open source software and the sort of like visceral.

experience of working on open source software through the last 10 years. And then the idea of an open source financial ecosystem combined that was the genesis of Gitcoin. And so I just have that sort of personal experience with open source software. And that was the first public good that I really, really appreciated. It was later conversations with Vitalik and other economists, nerds in the space that sort of turned me on to the wider world of public goods, things like journalism, which is really important for making an informed public or clean air, which is really important if you don't want to have lung cancer. There's just so many public goods in the world. And that was, that was sort of how it all snowballed for me. So when you were developing your dating website, which I

definitely want to unpack that later, and then all the other, like, things you were doing with software development, when you would go and tap into public goods, were you, like, cognitive, were you, like, consciously aware of what was going on is like, oh, I wouldn't be able to do this because of this open source software. Thank you developers that came before me. Or was it just like, oh, I'll just go to, I don't know where you go to the library of open source software and just pull out a book and like, was it a cognitive thing? Like, oh, thank God that this is here. Or was it more just a mindless thing where you didn't really realize, you know, how awesome this thing is? Yeah, I mean, you know, my first startup, the dating set, it was like 23-year-old CTO and like,

You have no business being chief anything at the age of 23. And I was just trying to keep up with everyone else. And I was trying to get good at shipping software. And so you spend a lot of time on hacker news. You go to meetups with other technology entrepreneurs and you try to learn from them. And they were all leveraging open source software. And yeah, GitHub is kind of like a library. You pull a book off the shelf and you install it in your repo and you don't think much more about it.

You don't think about the maintainer behind that software until you have to file a library. bug and then they don't respond to it. And so that was kind of the experience with open source. But when you're a technology entrepreneur, like we had, we had like three months of runway left at some points in that company. And I wasn't thinking about supporting public goods at that point. I just wanted to ship and I wanted my CEO to be happy so that our investors could be happy and so we could survive.

And so that was the job to be done for a technology entrepreneur that leverages open source, but maybe doesn't give back. You've always said that open source doesn't have a business model. and that, I mean, I understood it, but now what you just said makes me understand, stood it like a lot more in the sense that like, oh yeah. Yeah. Like we have all these people touching this product, which is free. And then there is a maintainer or maybe not.

Maybe it's just been abandoned. I always like this question. When, if you can envision a world in which like, Gitcoin is maximally successful or just like business models for open source is maximumly successful, like what would that world look like? Yeah, so I mean, if you go to giccoin.co slash results, you can see our live results page. And I'm super proud that we've always been metrics driven and KPI driven. We've delivered $32 million worth of funding to open source software, which, you know, when we crossed a million, I was like, yeah, this is legit.

We're going to make an impact on the world. But then I quote that stat of how $500 billion per year in economic value is created by open source. And just do some math, there's maybe three orders of magnitude, 1,000 X per here from here until we're math. maximally successful. And I think that what that world looks like is people coming out of school and just working for the open internet, people quitting their jobs at JPMorgan Chase and working for the open internet. And hopefully, systemically, more people are building infrastructure, digital infrastructure, and less people are going to projects that extract value. So I think more ETH2 clients and less Avatar PFP projects coming out of the Ethereum space.

So that's what I think a world of Gitcoin being maximally successful looks like. And then the secondary effect of more people working on our digital infrastructure is a more solid digital infrastructure. So no more bugs in open SSL that cause the secure contents of all these servers to be dumped to the open internet. There was this maintainer of an NPM package that just got burnt out and was tired of all the support requests. And so they're like, they posted on their forum, hey, I'm going to give up this package.

Who wants to maintain it? And they found someone who wanted to maintain it. Well, that person ended up injecting malware into that NPM package and every downstream site that used it. And so stuff like that will not happen anymore. Black Swan events where open source maintainers get burnt out would not happen anymore if Gitcoin was maximally successful. So if, if, if you get, GitHub as like a library, I'm kind of also getting like, kind of a Legos vibe too, right? So like if we have all these open source packages of software, books of software,

and then if there's a lot more, like, and there's some of them, some of them have been created very much out of just demand. And someone's like, all right, all developers have this problem. I'll fix the problem posted to GitHub. Now other people can use it. And then boom, now we have something open source. Without that, whatever level of that that we have now is a function of having that before we have a business model behind open source software.

And so, like, once we unlock a business model behind open source software, like, we can actually incentivize the creation of these, like, software Legos. And then, like, perhaps, like, it, illustrates, it begs the question, like, is the internet even close to be remotely close to being, like, a done, which it never is? But, like, imagine how much progress the internet itself and all of the things on top of the internet have gotten off of not having public goods, funding for open source software. Totally, yeah. Yeah, the motivations to contribute to open source are basically you're doing it for exposure,

you're giving it to bit give back, and sometimes you can find a job that will, you know, maybe Google is at the scale where 0.1% of their, their person, OPEX, can go back to contributing to open source, but even then it's just a virtue signal for them. Oh, one other thing about this world where Gekcoins maximumly successful, probably software repositories will not be hosted on GitHub. be hosted on something peer-to-peer like Radical. R-A-D-I-C-L-E is a name of a tool in the Ethereum ecosystem called Radical, and it's actually a peer-to-peer GitHub.

So they're trying to build the collaboration layer for software that isn't owned by Microsoft. And a lot of people say, hey, Kevin, are you trying to disrupt GitHub? And I'm actually not. We're trying to build an incentive system for open-source software. We're not trying to replace the collaboration layer. And it just so happens that I met these other entrepreneurs, Ellie and Abby at Rappie. Radical that are trying to build that. And so I think the interoperability between Gitcoin and Radical is something that you'll

see in that world as well. And hopefully most of the software designers are not going to be using a centralized service like GitHub in that world. They'll be using something like Radical. Very cool. Very cool. I would imagine just like another conversation to have about like what happens when we can finally figure out how to like increase the order, increase like the availability of open

source, quality open source software by orders of magnitude. Like once that happens, like the cost of producing something on the internet like drops significantly and the ease of either, the ease of implementing it goes down. And like maybe it actually gets to the point where like the technical knowledge to create something really, really cool on the internet, like drops away from actually even needing to code. Right. Like at some point, like the internet can be created by like drag and drop like systems or which is not, don't take that literally. but just illustrative of what could happen when just like costs, costs and complexity keep on getting dropped

because we keep on building open source things on top of open source things. Totally. And progress becomes exponential. So basically every new money Lego that gets added to the Ethereum open source world means that there's a new possibility that I can build when I walk into a hackathon.

I like to say that you walk into an Ethereum hackathon today and you can get enough software off the shelf to build something, during the weekend as three hackers, that some bank 10 years ago would have to have 100 people and $20 million worth of budget to build with closed source because there's this exponential ability to just pull new Legos off the shelf and every new Lego creates a new permutation of something that can be built. And so I think we're going to see exponential. This is why I think the open source financial system is going to beat the closed source one is because progress

is just exponential in it. You can build things so much faster with open source libraries. libraries than you ever were able to in the old financial system. So that's what makes me almost certain that defy is going to beat out TradFi eventually. Cool. Cool. And I mean, I think everyone listening can probably like understand that. Like we talk about defy money legos all the time. And that's just like the economic financial side of open source software. Like that's not even just like all the other parts of the internet too. But like now that we have the open source financial side, that's probably what we needed to unlock the. business modeling of like the rest of the internet yeah yeah i think so cool so now i want to get into

like tech stars can you tell us your tech star story yeah so um i let's see so my entrepreneurial journey kind of started when i was in when i was in high school i was working as a cashier at a supermarket and this is like when i was like 16 or 17 and i had this friend who was running a web hosting company and making like $400 a day, which in your 17 in the early 2000s is a lot of money. And I was like, yo, you got to cut me in on this. I can program. I was always kind of a programmery kind of kid. And he did.

And my friend, his name was Mike. He was on my street hockey team. And he showed me the ropes of how to basically rent servers from Rackspace or it was called Rack Shack back then. And we would pay like $100 per month for servers. And then we would just sell WebExpress. posting to people across the world for something like $50 per year. So like you had a break-even point where you've sold a certain amount of web posting. And I was, and I got to

the point with it where I quit my job at the supermarket. Is it just reselling? Just purchasing, marking up and reselling? Yeah. Putting a brand on it. Yeah. And like, by the way, I'm competing with all these web posting companies that have like a staff of 30. And I just like some kid by parents house. So I've like, I've like no cost. I could undercut everyone. And there were, there were shifts at the supermarket where I would make twice as much online during my shift than I would at the supermarket. And I was like, you know, F this noise. I'm quitting. And I just, and I kind of ran that. And I didn't know anything. I ran it into the ground. And, and so I kind of gave up on that. And I got my computer science degree from University of Delaware. And after that, the corporate career

services just ushered us into corporate America. This is Delaware. And like all these banks are located in Delaware. And so they're just trying to hit their KPI of graduates that they place. And I'm a computer science major. And so I'm an easy mark to just go place at a bank, you know. And so I go work at a bank when I'm 23. This is like, I graduated with the degree in computer science in 2006. Wow. You're the second guess on layer zero that worked at a bank. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's, there's, and now I'm on a podcast called bankless. There we go. But anyway, so I was so miserable at my corporate job. I mean, imagine going from being 22 and hanging out with your ultimate Frisbee friends, going to tournaments on the weekends, and then all of a sudden you

have to spend your Tuesday morning at the coffee maker talking to some 47-year-old about their kids in like soccer practice and stuff. I was just, the culture was not the right. I hated how hierarchical it was. I hated the technology. And I was looking for anything else. And so around then the Facebook platform came out, the Facebook API. It was like when Facebook apps launched and I ended up launching this like flash games website and again was making more money off of flash games than I was off of my corporate job and it's like oh I got a like this is a sign I have to get out I have to do something else and this is this is 2006 flash game like advertisements just ads everywhere I could put like find pickles I would put ads and you know I was like 23 I didn't know how to build a scalable business but I did know how to get eyeballs in in in in in in and stuff like that. So that got ran into the ground again, and I was like,

it was a sign to me that I needed to do something else. And this is 2006. This is before I think things are really, like it was still the nuclear winner after the dot-com boom. Anyway, so I'm getting to it. I'm sending my resume out to anywhere I can. I'm looking for anything besides corporate America.

And I find these two guys from New York City who are looking to run an online dating website, which I think is a little bit scummy at first, but, you know, it was a ticket out of corporate America. and they had just gotten into TechStars, which was this seed stage accelerator program for up-and-coming entrepreneurs. And their CTO had just dropped out. And so I was like, oh, this is my golden ticket. Like, Willy Wonka style, this is how I'm going to do it.

And I went from being in corporate America wearing a suit and tie every day to just wearing a t-shirt and hanging out with Bradfeld and David Cohen and trying to build this online dating website. And it was just one of the two inflection points in my career. one was getting out of corporate America and into startups and the second is out of startups and into crypto and that was a huge one that dating site was not successful but I learned a lot about how to run technology startups from that wait so how to where where did tech stars come into that um so tech stars was the startup that I got a job offer from they had already been accepted into tech stars but they needed a CTO and I was looking for any path out of corporate America oh okay okay I thought tech stars Am I wrong in thinking that tech stars is like American Idol but for tech startups? I didn't do any singing. No, it's like it's no, they take they take 10 startups per cohort per season and they basically put them through. Month one is like what is your business? What are you trying to build?

Month two is building. And then month three is they put you in front of a bunch of investors, VCs and Angel investors. and then you pitch and then you graduate. So it's kind of like an MBA in a summer for tech startups. Oh, wait, is this not like a reality TV show? No, there's no... Oh, because you told me the story forever ago, and I thought that this was like some sort of like,

yeah, you would build a tech product, but you would also like be interviewed by people like on camera or something. Is that not at all the right way to vision it? Yeah, no. It's a tech service, I think they consider themselves to be in the echelon of Y Combinator style of Xelior. Oh my God, I thought this was in entertainment. Yeah, but they later did launch a reality TV show about tech startups, which I don't think did all that well.

But their main business was, the way it works was that they gave you $6,000 for a summer and you gave them like 6% of your equity. And then they only made money on you if your startup was successful, which was their way of aligning incentives. And so I learned everything that I know from the TechStars Network and I'm super thankful to them for giving me my start. Yeah, that sounds like a kid who figured out how to make money via developing software and tinkering on the Internet twice. A dream come true. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And this is before startups were cool.

Like, before 2008, I would describe finances being cool. And then we had the implosion within 2008. And I think the geek became chic again with that and the rise of Web 2.0. Okay. So between TechStars and Ethereum, what happened in that gap of time? ran the online dating website for five years. Oh, five years. Okay.

Yeah, I stuck around. We raised VC money, but we didn't figure out how to monetize it and it all just imploded in spectacular fashion. I mean, I was aqua hired. My resume says I was aqua hired. And I just worked as kind of like a director or VP of engineering at different tech stars companies for 10 years and ran engineering teams. And so it was through that experience.

of, I think I hired something like 40 or 45 engineers through those 10 years at these startups. And, and I just found out how broken recruiting is. I mean, basically, the median recruiter on LinkedIn is just like a $99 LinkedIn subscription plus a bunch of spam in both directions. And then they charge you like 25K when they place an engineer at your company. So me learning to recruit software engineers by just like being outgoing and friendly to them was like, Dio in the matrix. I was like, oh my gosh, I don't have to pay a recruiter 30K. to bring them onto my team. I can just run a funnel myself.

And so realizing that sort of arbitrage was another part of the GICCoin Genesis story. Like people really care about having engineering candidate flow into their organizations. And I would describe that as what we do for the Ethereum ecosystem. We help engineers find their next opportunity in the Ethereum ecosystem. And without my experience of learning how to recruit engineers at these startups, I don't think Gitcoin would exist. So, Kevin, I see three different things. of who you are. One is a software developer. One is a entrepreneur who likes to find business models

and make money. And then the third is a manager, a CEO leader. Which one of those do you think, A, which one of those do you like, three questions actually? Which one of those three do you like the most? Which one of those three do you do the most in terms of time? And what do you most personally identify with? I guess that last question was the same as the first. But take that as you will. Right. So, I mean, I think that, you know, all of us have multiple layers to their identity. In addition to being a developer, an entrepreneur, and a manager, I'm also a husband and a father, and I play Ultimate Frisbee, and I got a bluegrass concerts. Like, you know, we've all got, like, different parts of our identity that we just, like, display in different times. But now we're contained inside of the professional lens of Kevin. Yeah. Yeah, true.

I mean, maybe, yeah. I think that it really ends. Maybe this is a non-answer, but I think it just really depends on what I'm doing. You know, if I'm in the mood to build and I want to do deep work, then I like software engineer, creative Kevin, more than anything. And I actually think when I did Web 2.0 stuff, the CTO, like the engineer, was just like the quirky guy that you like hid in the back. It was like the drummer in the band.

And I think it's really cool that in Web 3 that I can be the CEO instead of just like, you know, like the guy that the VCs don't talk to. And you know, geek is really chic in Web 3. And so I think that that's really cool. I spend the most time. Sheik is in Web 3. That's not the first time you've ever said that before, right? Yeah.

I'm not sure. It could be. Wow. But, you know, it's just like, it's just so neat because I never thought that I would do CEO stuff. I would lead engineering teams for the rest of my career. And when Gitcoin raises its round, and I was kind of like hanging with multiple VCs,

like hanging out on Sandhill Road, and they were into Gitcoin. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is really neat. This world exists where someone who's nerdy and kind of not as charismatic and can, like, do these things. And I actually think it's a prerequisite because if you don't understand the technology, then you really can't be an effective blockchain software.

They move so fast that if you're not keeping up with the latest trends, then you're not effective. But so when it first started, Gekcoin, I was building all the software and I was just kind of rage building a lot of our software and the manager stuff would be on the side. But now it's kind of flipped. Like now I'm doing financial models and spreadsheets

and managing and coaching people. And I spend most of my day in meetings, but it's still that acumen that being able to hang with software engineers that I think informs our roadmap and helps keep us grounded And so they're complimentary, all three of those, I think. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And we definitely know that, well, A, we know that this crypto industry is inherently multidisciplinary, right?

And especially in the, like, bootstrapping phase of this crypto industry, in the first, you know, first 12 years of Bitcoin and the first, like, six years of Ethereum, like, it's, there's such a supply glut of talent and labor that, like, Ethereum will suck up all the talent and labor possible. And so it really, really incentivizes and rewards people that. that can just wear multiple hats, right? Because like there's multiple hats that need to be worn. Yeah.

Well, and I think you actually missed one hat within the professional sphere of Kevin Milwaukee is that I learned how to community manage, community build. When I moved out to Boulder, Colorado, and Andrew Hyde, he's at Unicorn on Twitter, and he really is a unicorn at community building. He invited me to be an organizer at Boulder Startup Week, which is this one week celebration of entrepreneurship and technology every May. in Boulder, or at least it was every May before the pandemic. And the way that worked was that you got to run a track.

I would run the data science track or the engineering track at Boulder Startup Week. And I would just invite these prominent people to come speak about whatever they were doing. And that, to me, putting together an event, the hospitality associated with that, getting 100 people in a room to understand some later trend in technology, making them feel welcome, looking them in the eye and shaking their hand as they walked in, making sure they had a good time, and then hanging out and vibing with them afterwards, I think that's a really important skill in Web3. And Andrew Hyde, like, if you're out there, thank you so much for, he's like the Yoda to my Obi-Wan when it comes to community building. And so I think that's a really important skill for a Web3 entrepreneur or just person to

have. Yeah. And then I guess, like, the meta skill is just like straight up, like, intellectual curiosity, probably like or curiosity and just like a desire to in yeah a general generalized desire to build because i think that's what we find across almost everyone no matter like what domain of crypto they find themselves in is like everyone's really curious everyone likes to learn and everyone likes to build shit yeah totally and i think that it's it's it's almost like a space that through natural selection will weed you out if you don't have those traits because it moves so fast that you're

just never going to keep up if you're just punching the clock ends and you're not really intellectually curious about all the things that are that are happening. But the way I look at it is it's it's hard not to be intellectually we're reinventing the internet of finance. It's an incredibly huge opportunity. I mean, can you imagine going back to like 1997 when the internet was just getting started and and not trying to learn everything you could and gain every little alpha that you could? The opportunity to reinvent how humanity transfers information was just so large. And you really got to seize that. And I think the opportunity with blockchains could be that big with Web3.

And so that's why I spend a lot of time thinking about about blockchain. And God bless my wife because whenever she wants to go on a double date with someone and the other guy is like a sports guy. I'm like, no, find me a crypto guy. We can we can vibe with. Hey, guys, in the second half of the show, we continued the conversation about an increasing rate of change that we are experiencing in Ethereum, in Defi, and with the power of open source tools.

And we also bring up some of the conversations that bankless listeners might have remembered from our Kathy Wood episode about how so many different industries are all hitting new levels of rate of progress innovation. And then I ask and talk to Kevin about what happens when we add a Gitcoin type financial innovation, financial collaboration or capital coordination layer to all these other industries that aren't just about crypto. We also bring up conversations like the regenerative finance movement, which Kevin started, Kevin coined in the 2020 food token era, as well as some other conversations about how and why Kevin is bullish on humanity as am I. But before we get into that second half of the show, we have to take a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

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Unigrantz.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring bankless. We were talking about, like, increasing the rate of innovation by making, like, software and tools more accessible and, you know, applying that to both crypto and Ethereum, and then we have, um, or, you know, software outside of crypto. And then we're also talking about how, like, how you just said, like, if you, this industry

weeds you out if you aren't like intrinsically interested in it because you're not going to keep up with it. And so like, and there's also this, the idea of like we had like the proof of work fair launch. You know the reference of the euthanasia roller coaster to all of these like crypto phenomenon's that happen. I actually don't. Can you explain to you? Do you know the euthanasia roller coaster? No, I don't. Oh gosh. Okay.

So it's a roller coaster that with multiple loop-de-loops and it goes up really, really, really, really, really high. And then it drops you on the first loop to loop. and then you do like 17 more loopy loops afterwards and they get tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter. And because they get tighter and tighter and tighter, the G forces that you get kill you because you have too much G force is for too long. It's euthanasia roll.

Oh, I see. Okay. And so the phenomenon is like, it's like a fractals of forks of forks of forks, right? When we saw the 2013 Fair Launch phenomenon, like it was like just like the 2020 D5 food token summer, which is then just like the 2021 profile picture, or the avatar movement. It's just like somebody unlocked something and then like the whole entire crypto industry goes on forks of forks or forks or forks or forks until like we just bleed

out all of the possible energy of that one little phenomenon. And so like, okay, so the point of that was to we were talking about how like this industry weeds people out who aren't like able to keep up. Then we just recently had the whole loot phenomenon, right? And so like loot launched. Everyone like had this aha moment and then we had forks off forks off forks or forks. And the thing is one of the reasons, here's the point I'm trying to get to, one of the reasons why the space moves so fast is because the space moves as fast as the fastest person in it. Whoever's moving the fastest, and like, for example, Dom, the guy that did the loot, the loot thing, or Robert Leshner with compound, or like Will Price and Dan Ellitzer with yams,

it's always, it's like a, there's that, there's that, there's that, gif of caterpillars that are crawling over each other as they go forward. So like some, some caterpillars going on the ground, but some caterpillars crawling on top of that. So as a unit, they are all collectively traveling faster together, right? And so this space moves so fast is because we all, maybe a better metaphor is a peloton, right? Like, you know, 20 cyclists all in a line. They're all dragging on each other. And then the last person who's taken the most rest, then speeds up to the front and sets the new pace and then it takes turns. And so each, all these developers with all these open source tools are all taking turns going faster and

faster and faster and faster and faster. It's like that's why a lot of people I think are so inherently like subconsciously bullish on the space is because like the rate of change isn't going slower. It's going faster. And it's because we have like a open source tools and now open source incentivization to pay for all these things. Yeah. Yeah totally. And and I think that there's there's even more multiple levels like it's not just caterpillars on caterpillars. I think it's caterpillars on caterpillars on caterpillars like you know we're all built if you look at the seven layer stack it's you know all the networking foundation and the chips and all that kind of stuff that we just kind of take for granted you know i i took computer engineering in in college and

i'm not good at low level programming so thank goodness i don't have to do assembly language stuff but there's there's just so much progress that and we're all standing on the shoulders of giants i think it's really it's really incredible um we we get coin and and gick coined dow is a four of Uni, which is a fork of compound. And so I like to think of what we did is like Robert Leshner sort of pioneered the delegation system in compound. And I think that Hayden and Uniswap, in a lot of ways, pioneered or made popular retroactive distributions. And then what Gitcoin did was we did a retroactive distribution and we made it so that you had to delegate when you did your claim of your tokens. And that was important because a lot of people don't actually even

use their governance tokens. We wanted 100% of the consent of the governed. We wanted 100% of people to delegate to someone in the get coin community when they got their air drop, which is when we had the captive audience. And so I'd like to think that we're all sort of standing on the shoulders of giants and pushing the space forward a very little bit on top of that, which hopefully enables the next cycle of innovation. And I would never compare what we did to like what Dom did or what Yam did. But I think the space is expanding in many different directions. at different magnitudes at a time. And it's always excited when there's that new punctuated equilibrium

where you see a new idea in a new light and it enables that cascading bit of innovation. Yeah. It feels like there's always that like slime mold metaphor, right? Like you've seen like slime mold like try and find new food and like sped up terms. Like it's searching in like 50 directions at once. Then it finds food and all the directions it wasn't searching

and it redirected to that new food source. And then it goes again again from there. And it's kind of like the natural way to have like maximize, maximize progress. Yeah, you're a big biomimicry guy. I'm realizing as we're having this conversation, lots of natural metaphors to the web space, web three space expanding in this new design space. Oh yeah. That's my schick.

Yeah. No, well, A, metaphors are like scaffolding for learning and understanding and therefore conversation. Do you just have a metaphor about a metaphor? That was, like, that was. Yes, I did. That's a really good point. Yes, I did. Yeah. Well, it also allows for conversation to happen faster and more precisely, right? Like, just like, oh my God, this is great. Just like how, like, rather than having to build something for scratch, I can just go into the library of your own brain and pull out a metaphor of like a Peloton. So I don't have to explain as much stuff. It's the same thing. We can make the conversation move faster. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I'm a pretty verbose guy. So I'm going to take a page out of your book. But I also just really like nature. I mean, I am out in Colorado and I have to show Colorado.

really quick just the beautiful sun and sunshine and the way the natural ecosystem out here it's it's it's there's something refreshing to your soul about spending time in nature and so i think it's a source of inspiration on multiple levels to draw from that yeah yeah civilization or like the order imposed by nation states is like hey there's that nature thing but like we're going to find a way to for you so you don't to have to live in it right like we're going to give you like asphalt pavement streets and like lights that light up at night. But yeah, Colorado, Washington, all the like the outdoorsy cities or outdoorsy places. It's just like it feels like it's just easier to live more harmoniously with nature. I actually, so I have to tell you, I've been on

bankless podcasts maybe four or five times. And I think it's at this point that I have to reveal to you all my secret, which is that I'm not much of us, I'm not much of a cyberpunk. I consider myself to be a little bit more of a solar punk than a cyberpunk. And it's because I am just really inspired by the solar punk art and the philosophy of humanity evolving past its contemporary challenges, whether that be climate change or misinformation or cancer and all these different things that exist out there. And so the cyberpunk ethos, which is very like anti-nation state and about the independence of cyberspace, you know, I vibe with that on a software engineer level. And there are things about it that I appreciate and I think are really interesting. But I would consider myself to be a

solar punk more than a cyberpunk. And it's because I think we need these, we need some sort of web scale coordination and we need to work together as, as humanity and as a planet in order to move past these global, these global public goods problems that we have one day. So I hope I'll still get invited back if I don't identify as much as a cyberpunk. Well, can you define for me and the listeners what a solar punk is? Because this is the first I've heard of it. Yeah, for sure. So I've actually been tweeting a little bit about solar punk. It's an art movement that envisions how the future of humanity would look if we solve major contemporary challenges, like with an emphasis on sustainability stuff like climate change and pollution. And so basically

like integration with nature and sustainability for the planet and for people is kind of the the vibe of the movement. But if you Google Solar Punk, you will see a lot of really beautiful art that has humanity integrated with the environment that they are in. This is insane. Yeah, okay.

So this is like that, that meme about like if society, like society if like this was like that, right? Like society if, I can't remember a good one. But like there's that one society meme. Society meme. Template, right.

society if oh i don't know that meme oh yeah that's right society if we have solved if we had solved public goods sure yeah that's exactly yeah that's exactly what i'm going for but yeah um okay yeah well as a guy who like plants who likes plants in architecture this is uh exactly what my vibe i just i just solar punk pilled you david yeah i forgot how much of a plant guy you are i can't believe we haven't talked about this yeah no this is really cool this is exactly what i want society to look like Did that website just call it Hope Punk? Oh, I did not. Which one?

That's pretty funny. I'm not sure. It's what you just clicked through. I think that's a funny name for it. I think is this one? Hope punk. Yeah, it did.

Wow, that's great. Hope punk. Yeah. It's harder to say. You know, like, I'm a little bit of a hippie. I'll just come out and say it. And so, you know, I do think that there are places. Yeah.

Well, and I think there are times in which the nation state is, there are people in the nation state. state that are genuinely trying to solve global coordination failures or nationwide coordination failures. And it's just such a shame that there are other people that are trying to use the nation state to oppress people and to corrupt people and to basically milk the system for government contracts and freedom to their friends and cronies. And so, you know, like, wouldn't it be great if there was a transparent, immutable, programmable, incorruptible basis for finance and for governance that we could actually trust its ability to coordinate because we could inspect the code.

Like the solution is not less coordination. It's coordination on a more solid foundation so that we can solve these contemporary problems. And that's not always against nation states, but sometimes and maybe many times it is. Sure. Yeah. I would summarize like the biggest, the big problems of the nation state is like it's fantastic coordination infrastructure. And it's because it's fantastic coordination infrastructure, the entity, that is most likely to leverage that fact

is going to leverage it for personal profit or for oppression or power or control and then that drowns out the people that want to leverage that the coordinating power of the nation state for public goods. Yeah. Well, I'd say that it's good coordination infrastructure if you're

someone who's well connected and can pull the levers, but if you're someone who's poor, then there's an information asymmetry because it's not transparent. There's no open source code that you can take a look at. So there's an information asymmetry that comes out of that. And then there's also just like it's not incorruptible. So basically, you know, and this is the problem with like Web 2 companies, right?

So like Travis, I forget his last name, the Uber CEO, basically can go into a city, can give all of the drivers really great wages, can give all the consumers discount to attract them. And then they had a network effect where every new driver that joins the Uber network makes it better for every rider and every rider makes it better for every driver. and the cycle just circles itself. That's called network effects. And then they get inevitable,

and they stop trying to attract the drivers and the riders, and they start extracting from them so that they can pull more profits out of the system. So that's a corruptible system. And what's great about Web3 is that we can build incorruptible systems. We're like, if Kevin O'Waki turns evil one day, then Gitcoin can still be fulfilling its mission because, well, we're still working on decentralizing,

but eventually we'll be on this decentralized, immutable sort of substrate for our coordination. And so you won't have to rely. It can't be evil instead of don't be evil. And I think that's a huge part of it. So with earlier I asked you, like, what's the maximally successful version of the world where, like, open source software is funded in uncorruptible ways and all the good thing that happens?

What's the thing that keeps you up at night that's like nightmare fuel for like why that will never happen? I'm pretty. Well, running a startup is, what does Elon Musk say? It's like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. Eventually, you never stop staring, but eventually the chewing doesn't hurt so much. I'm butchering that quote, but that's how I kind of feel about running something as big and ambitious as Bitcoin. But the thing that keeps me up at the end of the night is like even if I do a really great job running Bitcoin, then I don't know where the regulatory regime in the United States is going to land.

And there's so much gray area that it really, really keeps me up at night. And so I don't know where we're going to land on that, but I hope that Wall Street and Washington see that defy and crypto is something to embrace instead of trying to fight the future. So that's something that keeps me up at night. And I really want to be a part of changing the story about what crypto is. I think that people see these stories about volatility and they see about gambling. and I don't think that they realize that we could solve our web scale coordination problems with crypto because it's such a more solid foundation for that. And I have a couple of aces up my sleeve about telling that story to the general public

that we may see in the next couple of years. But I think public opinion about crypto and telling them about public goods and coordination is a role that I would hopefully like to see get coin play in the long term, hopefully leading by example. Yeah, it's weird that like everyone in crypto who, Everyone who's in crypto is, like, by proxy crypto's marketing division. Like, crypto, Bitcoin Ethereum, they don't have marketing divisions. They have people like, you know, Anthony at the Daily Way or bankless or like what Bitcoin did. Or all of the, like, individual zealots, like you who just say, hey, there's this Ethereum thing.

It's really cool. And like, it's weird that like everyone in crypto is like, yeah, this crypto thing is dope. And then everyone, like, and yet somehow the narrative is like, it's for drugs and criminals. you're going to lose all your money. Like, crypto has the simultaneous brand of, like, it's going to make you rich and it's going to make you broke. Except one is always true.

And one is like, well, yeah, you, you, you, you, you,

something stupid and you got all, and you got an exploit, right? Like, and so, like, we haven't been able to, like,

control our own narrative. Our, the narrative of what crypto is still comes from the outside in. And, like, that is my concern that I have. Yeah, I mean,

you know, I was, and I remember when, I was in the 90s and like the joke was always that the internet was just for porn, you know. And so and people who were who were spinning that narrative were either entrenched interests or they were just, they were just ignorant about what the internet had to offer. And eventually you don't hear people say that anymore. And so I think that it's inevitable that we'll move past those type of narratives, but it certainly is there, it is misinformed. And I don't know how to really bridge that gap because, well, I'm a computer scientist, not a, not a communications and marketing person.

But I hope that someone figures it out. I'm really thankful for the work that that Coin Center is doing in helping inform our lawmakers about crypto. And, you know, that's a public good for all of crypto lobbying the government. Totally. Yeah. Not to say too much more on the nightmare fuel thing. But like the internet didn't have the problem of like invading the world of finance. and like the banking system.

Like there's no, there's no more entrenched player than like the banking system, right? It's like, oh, the internet's just for porn. And then all dudes in the world are like, oh, really? Nice. But then, that was a joke.

But then like, it's different when like crypto comes along and it's like, crypto, all it's good for is like, you know, disrupting Wall Street and banks and all the, you know, the money of the world's like, uh-oh, I don't like that. And so that is a different history rhymes doesn't exactly repeat. and that is a big difference.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's like, try to take yourself back 30 years. I don't actually know if you could do that, David. No, I couldn't. Because I'm an elder millennial. But newspapers were the way people got their information. And so it was not even cable news back then.

And so you had a lot of entrenched interests that were forming public opinion back then, too, maybe on a slower, slower speed and scale. But the world has changed a lot in 30 years. And I think a lot of technology is inevitable. and so you fight it at your own at your own peril. I'm remembering the record industry of America suing all of its customers because its business model is being eroded as a counter example of what to do. And they cause a lot of pain to a lot of people in the short term, but in the long term,

they certainly lost out. Sure, sure, sure. Kevin, can you rate Ethereum over the last, this is going to be a terribly imprecise question. Rate Ethereum over his lifetime, over his last six years. I'd say how well it could have made Moloch retreat versus how well it actually did that. Yeah. Should we explain to your listeners what Moloch is before I answer that question? Sure.

You want me to? You want to go? We could vibe back and forth. Why don't you start, though? Okay. Moloch is the god of coordination failure, but he's basically the simple example as to why humans can't have nice things. And the reason why humans can't have nice things is because we do it to ourselves because the more a bunch of people all agree,

we're going to do something that is beneficial for all of us, the more it rewards a single defector to go against that alignment, right? And then as soon as one person says, like, well, I'm going to let all the other people agree and not do the thing that harms us collectively, but instead benefits the individual. I'm just going to be the only individual that does that thing. And then somebody sees him do that or her do that. And they're like, well, they're doing it, so I'm going to do it. And then that just repeats until we're all back at the same thing. state that we started on. So it's basically why we can't have agreement and alignment towards working towards systems or things or outcomes that we would all want,

such as climate change. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think of the example I think of when I think of Moloch is cancer. So basically you've got a bunch of cells that are harmoniously working for the whole in your body and one of them decides to defect instead of coordinate with all the other cells. It starts becoming cancerous and that just basically means that it's consuming resources and it's reproducing itself more than the others. And it eventually, chokes off resources to the cells that are coordinating and that's why cancer is is is is is is is sort of the resource consumption game and the misaligned incentives associated with that and so there's like there's like a holistic body and then all these cells are aligned and working towards a common goal and then

one cell is like fuck you guys I'm going to I'm going to reprioritize for myself and I'm going to get myself as large as possible and propagate only myself yeah for sure and And, you know, it's possible to, like, make this into a moral thing. And, like, on some level it is. But, like, I don't know. I flew an airplane to ETHC and, like, hung out with you. So, you know, I was polluting the environment by doing that. And so, you know, that I'm someone who buys carbon credits.

And I think that that's an important thing to do is just try to stay as carbon neutral as possible. But I think that, you know, it's really hard on a global scale to get people to remedy their, their sort of, like, defections from the whole. And one of the things that's really powerful about Ethereum is that you have transparency at the base layer. You've got a mutability at the base layer. And a lot of people are really excited about the idea that we can build better coordination systems, identify defectors sooner, and just build less externalities into the financial system, which will help slay mulloch. Me, you, Amin Soleimani, and Ryan did a podcast called Slaying Mollock, which you all should check out on bank lists if you want to know more background on the on the question.

But yeah, so what was the question? How good has Ethereum been at slaying mulloch so far? Yeah, like basically how on a scale of zero, as in we didn't do anything in 10, as in we did all of the things that we could have done and we could have been very proud about what we did. Where do we fall on that spectrum? I think that much of the mulloch slaying energy of the Ethereum network, blockchainer at large, is in the form of potential energy thus far in not kinetic energy.

which is a little physics reference there, which is just saying it's like, the spring is coiled and it could happen. But only if we choose to, because all coordination is a choice. I am really encouraged to see lots of people in the Ethereum space support public goods on get coins, support open source software. And we've got something like $10 million in the get coin treasury for public goods and $50 million if you think that Akita coins have value, which is like a whole other thing. but I'm really encouraged that people want to give back to the Ethereum public goods. We've got multiple EPNS is an example, Ethereum Push Notification Service. They started off in Gitcoin kernel. They raised money with a Gitcoin grant.

And then they raised VC money several months later. And now they're giving back to Gitcoin's matching pool. So like full cycle of like the virtuous cycle of Ethereum. Have they given back more than they've, than they had donated? I think they have. I don't know the exact number, but I think they have. And so, so like this is actually the meme that came out of, you know, speaking of the, of the infinite caterpillar or whatever you said, like when Yam Finance launched and this whole

D-Gen wave started happening with vegetable farming, I started meming with a couple other people about how D-Gen was a thing and now we need to make regent a thing. So what if we had regent finance, a financial system that sort of gets better over time? And I'm really happy to say that we're seeing multiple projects, coordinate CLR fund, optimism, Gitcoin, doing good, Regen network. There's just a bunch of people under the radar that are working on regent stuff and are like legit builders that are doing it. And so I'm really excited for, you know, we had ICOs and then we had Dow's and then we had NFTs and like we'll probably have Web3 social networks and then we'll have Dow's and then we'll have Dow's again. and then we'll have NFTs again.

But when we get to the level where people are aping into public goods, that is when we've met the full potential. So I don't know if I answered your question, but I think most of the potential is ahead of us. Well, the point of the question was to trigger an argument or trigger a conversation. I didn't really care about a number or anything.

So yes, you did. But I also want you to open up and explain Regen Finance a little bit more because, yeah, just go into further detail. as to what that actually is. Yeah, totally. So basically, I mean, it's just a meme. And, you know, a lot of meming is trying to take what's in the zeitgeist

and to repurpose it for something that you can just vibe on. But I guess, like, the best way that I can explain it is through this idea that I learned from Yenzi Strickler. He's the founder of Kickstarter. And I'm going to share my screen real quick and just to show you what I'm talking about. There's this thing called basically Benzzi Strickler. bentoism. And the idea is that instead of just making decisions that are good for you now, instant gratification, what if we extended those incentives into a bento box of incentives? And the first

axis is self-interest to others' interests. So basically, what if we made decisions that instead of just being good for now me are good for now us? So like making decisions that are good for me and you, David, and Ethereum at writ large and then extending that out to the world itself. And then the other axis is time. So what if we created more anti-fragility by instead of having our incentives be about now-me, but also being future me, three months from now me, three years from now me. I'm going to take a drag of a cigarette because it might give me a little buzz for the next 10 minutes, but what does that do for future me and for future us?

And so to me, D-Gen finance is just thinking about instant gratification. and only thinking about yourself. And then Regen Finance is building a bento box financial system that rewards people with a long-term time horizon and rewards them for coordinating with each other. And that's what I hope that with a transparent, immutable, programmable system that we evolve past the decentralized casino stage. Like that's just the bootloader. And then we eventually build a regenerative finance system that doesn't externalize that has a long-term time horizon. So when I heard, you explained to me, Regent Finance, I got an image of, like, people aping into, like, DeFi apps, right? This was, that came around during, like, the food farm fork mania, right?

And then part of the social contract of a lot of those, like, new DeFi food app farms, whatever's, was to actually repurpose money back into Gitcoin, right? Like, we would commit X amount of money towards funds, right? And this is, like, part of, like, the inevitable ways that, you know, Ethereum can. like slay moloch right like by if we can keep on funding a ourselves and then only actually allow for funding to go into places that fund of their public goods we can repurpose the energy uh the energy of to ape and like have that to uh to ape into like good things right and this is like one of those the fundamental shifts that ethereum we all hope brings to the world is like you can act in your self-interest and by definition you are acting in this in the uh self-interest of

everyone else and their future selves in moving into the forward and committing to that as well. Yeah, for sure. It's been really promising to see that. And I'm super thankful to Andre from Yerin Finance for starting that wave. I remember there's a couple vegetable forks that were going to do it in their community really revolted when they were like, you know, we're not given that 2% to public goods. And then Andre from Yerne did it. And all of a sudden it was the cool thing to do. And so, you know, it's, it's been a thing that's ebdened float in the, in the ecosystem. And I'm lucky to say right now we have eight get coin grants rounds future funded. So if the market turns bare, then we want to be the pilot light that keeps the

ecosystem alive through the next market cycle and couldn't have done it without the community supporting that. Yeah. Yeah. So somehow there's a connection here to going back to what we were saying about like the accelerating rate of innovation and progress, right? Like if we can, if we have this flywheel going where like we can allow for products to get funding and then they was products become profitable. And then those products send money back to get coin to fund more projects.

And then all of a sudden like this flywheel turns and turns and turns, boom, we have like a self-sustaining economy with self-sustaining funding for developers to build more of the tools. We just came out of the podcast with Kathy Wood. we're recording this on the Monday where that Kathy Wood episode dropped if you didn't listen to it. The gist of it is that there are so many different technologies hitting their peaks of their S-curve of adoption.

We got AI, crypto, like gene editing, like energy storage. I'm missing one. But like all of these things are hitting their biggest points of like progress and innovation. Their speediest points all at the same time. And like these things can all interact

with each other, right? And so it's compound progress upon compounding progress. And it's kind of why I'm like with Kathy Wood in the sense that like the future is like there's so much left to be built. Like we don't have autonomous cars yet, but it is still so close. There's so many things that are so futuristic that we don't have it all today. And it's only a few years away. Yeah.

Yeah, it's really, it's really pretty incredible. I was worried for a second you were going to bring up the metaverse and then I was going to freeze because I don't know what that is. But I think that, you know, the crazy thing is that it's only going to be obvious in retrospect. You can't predict. Right. Like, you can use first principles and try to think into the future a little bit. And you can create allegories.

But, like, who would have predicted Google in 1990? Like, the idea of a search engine that could search all of the world's information back then was totally foreign. And this sort of point in which we're going to pass where AI and virtual reality and blockchain and gene editing and all. all this stuff goes forward is I just think that we're going to look back in 2050 and say, oh my gosh, they didn't know what they had coming in 2021 because it's accelerating exponentially rate of change.

Yeah. And like not only are all of these things, uh, having, going through like their own like massive acceleration of innovation, but like think about all the different surface areas behind all these technologies, right? Like combine crypto and AI, combine AI and energy storage. create like can put an incentivization layer which is crypto behind all of these technologies.

They're like one of the reasons I'm I'm cautiously optimistic but really really bullish and optimistic about the future is that like not only are each of these industries like their own like massive like job engine growth economic engine growth like sectors like the intersections

of all of these things also generate their own permutations of possible things to build or teams to fund or innovation to be ad. And I think if Gitcoin can play its cards right, it can play the role of helping facilitate and capital coordinate, capital coordinate, to help all of these intersections and all of these industries be built out. Yeah, I mean, I hope so. I published a post a few weeks ago about what Kik coin could be one day. And I think that, you know, one of the, one of the sort of possible

eventualities I call the Epcot of the Metaverse, which is like, Epcot stands for experimental community of tomorrow. And, you know, when I hear of it as a U.S. citizen in 2020, I think of Epcot, which is the Disney one, which was built in the 50s, their vision of tomorrow. But if you think about experimental community of tomorrow as of 2021, if you get a bunch of builders and a bunch a capital and you put them all together, then hopefully you get prototypes of what the future will be. And I want to bring this back to layer zero because I do think that a world in which that is all being done for the public good is much different from one in which it's just the ultra-rich that have access to those technologies.

And this is kind of like the ultimate vision of Gitcoin is to create middle class jobs for software engineers by giving them access to bleeding edge. technologies and opportunities at that, but also having the whole system be governed by the people that it serves. So it's not just this extractive thing that only Silicon Valley or Wall Street can really get the gains of. And so hopefully if we're right, we'll create this virtuous cycle in which we're helping builders find all of these technologies, advance their career, advance the planet, create a more solar punk future. And like you named this podcast perfectly. It's layer zero.

It's all, it's about the people. It's about the everyday people, not just the rich people. And, and I think that that's, it's just like, the future could be so beautiful, but we have to coordinate towards that. And I think that that's what keeps me up and gets me working on Ethereum every day and keeps me working on Gitcoin through all the chewing glass and staring into the abyss is that we can really create a better future with this technology, but we have to choose to do it. We have to coordinate in order to do it. And Kevin, I think with that. That is a fantastic place to end this particular episode of Layer Zero. Thanks for having me, David.

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