Bankless - Proof of Humanity with Santi Siri | GreenPill #3

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

✨ Subscribe to the Green Pill Podcast ✨ https://availableon.com/greenpill   🟢 Get the GreenPilled Book 🟢 https://greenpill.party/   Apple Show Link:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/greenpill/id1609313639   Spotify Show Link: https://open.spotify.com/show/0l6aXWC94dd0RA3tkKfxjd?si=5fdadfbcd8d34bd4   ----- Santi Siri - GreenPill #2 Santiago Siri—or santi.eth on Twitter—is building UBI on Ethereum through Proof of Humanity,  the "sybil resistant protocol for formalizing human identity on the blockchain" that launched in March 2021. Santi is a relentless source of optimism and innovation, embodying the phenomenon of Latin American crypto development. Santi comes from Argentina, a country with a rich history of culture, inflation, corruption, and resilience. Reflecting on his tour through Buenos Aires with Vitalik Buterin, Santi explores the circumstances and possible futures we can build with regenerative cryptoeconomics. Solving sybil resistance and building elegant mechanisms for UBI are massive pillars for human thriving as we seek to carve out 21st century institutions -- and Santi is helping to lead the way. Take the Green Pill, anon. ------ SPONSOR PILLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants   💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger   🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix   ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 3:00 Proof of Humanity 7:05 UBI 12:06 The Goals & Implementation 17:32 Buenos Aires & Vitalik 22:50 Argentine Legitimacy 28:00 Optimism & Validation 34:08 A Symbiotic Culture 38:24 Closing ------ Resources: Santiago on Twitter https://twitter.com/santisiri?s=20  Proof of Humanity https://twitter.com/proofofhumanity?s=20  Democracy.Earth https://democracy.earth/   Kevin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/owocki?s=20&t=A1yy1WYtQlNAOiSxXtGuNQ   ----- Music by WABI SABI - snowflake - https://thmatc.co/?l=7786B012   ----- 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 

Hello and welcome to the Green Pill. I'm Kevin Awaki, and this is the podcast about public goods and regenerative crypto economics. Today's episode is with Santee Siri, who is the founder of proof of humanity. Very, very excited to have Santee on the podcast. He is a source of relentless optimism and innovation in the Ethereum space and especially regenerative Crypto-Economics, I see him as a crusader for civil resistance and UBI. As a founder of Proof-Humanity, Gitcoin has a relationship with Santi-Siri where he is exporting civil resistance into Gitcoin, and we were one of the first integrations into Proof of Humanity, which is a civil resistance mechanism that is Ethereum native. Proof of humanity is a civil resistance mechanism as its base layer, but they've also launched

UBI, which is a token that is streamed to members of the Proof of Humanity Registry every second of every day and provides UBI upon which there's actually dozens, if not hundreds of people that are relying on for that for financial support. So using Ethereum to solve poverty, using Ethereum to solve civil resistance, and to create a more digital democratic world, that is regenerative crypto-economics. And I am so excited to bring you, Santee Siri, the founder of Proof-Ferrori, the founder of Proof humanity. Alchamix is a Defi app that offers self-repaying loans that lets you spend money and save money at the same time. Alchamix allows you to deposit the die stable coin into its faults, which earns some of the highest yields that DeFi has to offer. You can then take a loan from Alchamix of up to 50% of the deposited die, and that loan automatically pays itself back from the yield that is generated from your deposit. It's a savings account that the banks don't want you to know about. Alchimix also has Eath faults available, so you use. you can get a self-repaying loan that's denominated in ETH.

Coming up in Alchemix V2 is a bunch of cool new features, such as credit delegation, multi-chain expansion, and Dow revenue sharing and vote boosting. Alchemix lets you get your interest payments on your deposits paid to you up front. Check out the power of Alchemics at alchemix.fI. And make sure to join their extremely vibrant Discord if you want to participate in governance

or have any questions about the project. Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswop Grants Program is accepting applications for grants.

Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring bankless. All right. Hello, everyone. I am here with Santi Siri, the founder of Proof of Humanity. What's up, Santi?

What's up, Kevin? A pleasure to be talking with you, my friend. Yeah, likewise. Tell us about proof of humanity and what you've been up to. So, proof of humanity isn't even a year. We launched the protocol in March 2021, so it's been quite crazy since. It's a civil-resistant protocol for formalizing human identity on the blockchain. And on top of that, we're doing a universal basic income cryptocurrency called UBI.

And ever since we launched this project, it's been quite a roller coaster for us. It's a nice team involved with some folks coming from the Kledos team, which is an arbitration system built on the blockchain. and some folks coming from Democracy Earth, which is a foundation that I ran, trying to research democracy for the information age. And it's been quite a thrill to launch something like this. And so far, the registry keeps growing.

You know, more people keep joining from all over the world. And especially a lot of people also from Latin America, especially, because many of us founders come from there. Got it. So it seems like for me being familiar with your work, I originally knew you through Democracy Earth where you were researching democracy for the information age and I guess would it be fair to say

that you discovered the opportunity for proof of humanity through that work? Yeah, pretty much. Like when we started Democracy Earth was after the experience of doing a political party in Argentina, the Partido de la Red or the Net party. And we started building technology trying to figure out what it takes

to build a democracy over the internet. What are the big hurdles? And we kept doing pilots of democracy all over the world. We have done pilots in Hong Kong, in Tunisia, in Spain, in Mexico, you name it. And quite clearly, one of the killer aspects of this or choke points, aspects of these pilots was, whoever runs the registry of voters, whoever gets to decide who gets the rights to vote, pretty much can tumble the election. So pretty quickly we realized in some of the pilots we got civil attacked by a single IP coming from China in Hong Kong sending like apparently hundreds of thousands of fake users hijacking or shadow referendum to elect a major for Hong Kong which was done in Telegram or in Argentina we've done a pilot and also like the workers party suddenly.

injected a lot of fake accounts into the system. So the problem of identity clearly became very relevant. And like Edwards-Nodin once said, you know, identity is the one vulnerability being exploited across all systems. So it was really interesting to converge into this conversation around proof of humanity. A lot of folks were interested into researching that particular problem, including Vitalik himself. And that led to the creation of the process. Proof-of-Humanity Protocol, which will launch in March last year. And it's a very simple way to try to figure out how to create human identity without relying on a big brother or a centralized authority that could really influence or change the registry.

So it's interesting because now since we launched, we have been able to actually run a democratic Dow. The proof of humanity Tao is one person, one vote. It uses liquid democracy so you can delegate your vote to someone else. It's one of the first democratic experiments running on Ethereum. Yeah. I just think that there's a huge opportunity, Santi, to move a whole ecosystem from one token, one vote or one CPU, one vote schemes to one human one vote. And what I just like have a ton of respect for with proof of humanity is that you've solved that foundational building block.

And that enables not only UBI, which is the natively integrated crypto economic mechanism in the proof of humanity Dow, but also for what I'm working on with quadratic funding at get coin grants, it's a building block of what we're doing with quadratic funding because quadratic funding falls apart if you can make up new identities and vote with the mechanism. So first off, I just want to make sure that we pinch and zoom on that and that the audience can recognize how much of a foundational building block. for upgrading digital democracy, civil resistance and identity is. But I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the UBI side of the coin with proof of humanity. How does that work? I think that it streams to my wallet every block, if I'm not mistaken.

That's correct. So the smart contract of the UBI token is actually very simple. It's once you get verified on proof of humanity, that means that your address, the address that you have used for proof of humanity, is able to start accruing UVI tokens at a rate of one UVI per hour. So you start accumulating actually in real time. The token gets streamed into your wallet. So it's like a fraction of UVI per second.

Or actually, you will see it on Metamask updating every 15 seconds or so when every new block is changed to the blockchain. And the challenge with the UVI token, of course, to generate different use cases to generate utility and to generate an ecosystem around it that helps reduce the supply in order to help everyone that is accruing UVI through proof of humanity. So now we have different NFT projects

that are doing different kinds of games that are burning UVI. We have a couple of wire and bolts that accumulate ether and generate some yield with that ether, and we use the yield to, burn UBI tokens, you know, a wide range of projects that are coming up and being developed that are trying to, you know, burn UBI tokens.

And I think that as we become much more connected to the ecosystem of Ethereum as a whole, the whole narrative around the UBI will get very, very interesting. Vitalik himself, he actually bought a huge chunk of UBI tokens with his Shiba. an Inu tokens and burned them. He actually burned almost the entire supply of UVI, which was pretty cool. And then he started actually accumulating. Now he's one of the UVI whales himself.

So it's exciting to see that Ethereum can start addressing, you know, this social challenge of, you know, the thing about UVI that excites me the most is that it really hold a promise of, you know, addressing poverty or addressing people that are really, really trying to meet their daily needs. And this is a way that Ethereum can become very helpful in society. Right. And that's one of the things, as you know, I'm interested in exploring on this podcast

is ways that Ethereum can create positive externalities for the world and not just for the world, but the everyday people in it. And UBI is this exciting mechanism because once you get people able to pay their rent, pay their electricity bills, pay their groceries, they can focus more on the self-actualization layer of their human needs and less on just making ends meet. And I think that that's a really interesting mechanism for creating more human flourishing. Is UBI of the proof of humanity variety, the largest UBI experiment in the world? I just think it's so crazy that bureaucrats and governments for so long have been talking about

UBI and it seems like you've created one of the most successful experiments without the backing of a nation state or funding it with taxes. Yeah, I'm a bit shy of making a statement like that, but if you look into the academic literature of experiments of UBI being done since the 70s onwards, there's not a UBI experiment as large as this one. We had over $50 million worth of UBI being transacted with the token. almost it's going to be 15,000 people very soon joining the Proof of Humanity Registry. It's not a lot if you compare it with traditional Web 2 systems, but with other decentralized

identity systems, I think it's growing in a very nice way. And yeah, it's, you know, it's been going on for almost a year now. And it's exciting to see where this move forward because of the incredible support of the entire Ethereum community. Amazing. So can you paint me a picture of, Where this is all going, five or ten years out, what do you think that UBI proof of humanity ecosystem will have evolved into?

Well, definitely, I hope that we are able to reduce some of the hurdles of what it takes to do a proof of humanity profile. Like right now, the deposit requirement is prohibited to a lot of people. We have a crowdfunding mechanism, but of course we want to make that way more efficient. hopefully, you know, with scalability, layer 2s, we'll be able to make the whole system also work with much more friendly fees and trying to really start talking in the range of millions of users and not just thousands of users. And then there's the whole ecosystem around UVI.

I'm very supportive of projects out there, you know, either Metaverse projects or NFD projects or DFI projects that are looking into ways of using their fees to burn UVI. So any project that you start burning UVI with automatically becomes a project that has solidarity with everyone receiving UVI in the first place. So it's very easy to turn in a video game

or any kind of entertainment or any kind of defy system into something that has solidarity with the people. The second, you know, it uses fees to burn this token. So I hope to see an ecosystem of, you know, applications and cool shit built around the idea of burning UVI because the effect that it will have on the users, the embracement that, you know, it will automatically receive the lab of the entire proof of humanity community. And I think that, you know, it's a great way of making our entertainment hours a little bit more purposeful than, you know, just, you know, playing a game. and that's it. Amazing. I want to like pinch and zoom on the UBI bit because I know that there's people whose lives

have been changed by UBI today. I asked you the question of where is it going to be in five or ten years. And I think that it's interesting to think about millions of users using UBI. But the seed of that legitimacy for the millions of users story is the thousands of users who are using it right now and receiving, I think in some cases, on the order of $1,200 per month, like enough to pay their rent and really accomplish the goals of UBI.

Is that more or less accurate? Yeah, I mean, in Argentina, where I come from, you know, of course, there's a nice community over there, and a lot of people are suddenly actually using Web 3 for the first time in their lives through proof of humanity and through researching and wanting to learn about UBI.

So it's an exciting, you know, onboarding mechanism for crypto as a whole where, you know, you don't need to have a, bank account, you don't need to go through an exchange in order to get onboarded into something like proof of humanity. Proof of humanity gives you like a little bit of crypto and a little bit, you know, an account and a Web 3 account, and you're ready to go. And that's a nice way of, you know, starting onboarding mechanisms that are not relying on

traditional exchanges or traditional fintech or, you know, trad-fi, traditional finance, which at the end of the day, a lot of the onboarding of crypto today is still reliant on the traditional banking system. So it's been a great way to onboard new people to crypto for the first time. They are not coming, you know, maybe they are not even bankers, but through this mechanism, they have a little crypto to start spending or to start experimenting with the different systems that they will discover in Ethereum. And one incredible thing about UBI, you know, even though, you know, the founding team, we are all people that have been looking. living, you know, a nomadic life internationally.

But actually, our largest community right now is Spanish-speaking. It's mostly, has been most impactful in Latin America. Of course, we have users all over the world. But the fact that it's able to reach a region that desperately needs crypto, desperately needs an alternative to the financial system or to the corrupt institutions in our countries, I think it's a great statement that, you know, UBI is impacted where it's needed the most.

And I'm hopeful to see this, you know, growing over the years. You know, if you ask me on a 10-year or 20-year time frame or maybe 30-year time frame, you know, a couple of decades from now, I think crypto has the potential to help everyone anywhere in the planet to be able to meet their needs on everyday life. Like we can see crypto delivering global UVI for everyone. And to me, you know, the exciting. thing about this project is that it's also a level playing field technology. The person in Madagascar or Mozambique or in India receives the same amount of UBI than someone in Connecticut or London or, you know, LA. And this level playing field technology is a miracle of what we can do

with these crypto networks. And that's the challenge, you know, how we can grow and make sure this is, like everyone is welcome here. Absolutely everyone. And that's the biggest challenge we face. Yeah, I mean, I think the possible scale of this is just incredible, given that anyone can participate from anywhere across the world. So I want to drill in and really put a visceral note on this because I think that, you know, you can talk about the system and you can talk about the numbers until the cows come home, but until you really talk about the examples, then I think that sometimes it's not completely visceral for everyone.

But you were recently in Buenos Aires with Vitalik walking around. And I know that there's been inflation in Buenos Aires and the pandemic. And can you tell me what it was like to meet the users that you're affecting with this system and to be walking around with Vitalik? I bet he's quite the celebrity down there. It was wild. You know, I haven't been in Argentina since two years ago since the pandemic started. So suddenly I go back to my country two years later after the pandemic.

and it turns out that the perfect combination of high inflation, capital controls, subsidized energy, combined with the pandemic that apparently gave a lot of people time to learn about this stuff on YouTube, combined with the bull market of 21. Suddenly, I arrived to Buenos Aires. You know, I'm flying there to help Vitalik to, you know, have the best possible experience as he learns about my country. and hopefully my country to discover this amazing human being Vitalik Buterin is. And the first thing I realized very quickly is that Vitalik has Mick Jagger status in Argentina.

Like crypto became really, really, the adoption of crypto really accelerated, accelerated significantly. I'm used to seeing in the developer community, in the hacker community of Buenos Aires, I knew that we already had a lot of developers and a lot of hackers building on Ethereum. But suddenly I discovered that everyone, you know, under 30 years old in Buenos Aires, is using crypto. And they're using it because they need it, not because it's a theoretical quirk or an opportunity to, you know, make more money. They use it because we don't have a currency. We don't have a legal ability to buy U.S. dollars. We use it because we need it.

We desperately need to use Ethereum. We desperately need to use stable coins. We desperately need to use this technology for survival. and the adoption of crypto in Argentina is insane. And Vitalik, for the first time, I talked about this with him a lot. It's the first country he visits where he cannot walk one or two blocks without being recognized as someone asking him for a selfie. Suddenly he discovered a kind of celebrity status,

or he unlocked a level of celebrity that is worthy of a Hollywood star. And he was very wild to see that. He was actually able to meet a former president of Argentina. He met the city major of Buenos Aires. He did an event that sold out in three minutes for a thousand people. It was an incredible event in a beautiful theater in Buenos Aires and it was widely successful. He had a lot of proposals and he even had a proposal to visit a slam. And he chose to go to the slam.

And we went to this popular neighborhood in Buenos Aires, and we walked around with Vitalik. Even some left-wing activists joined the conversation there. So he made a wide range of politicians. He really saw the reality of Argentina, not just the nice places for the tourists. And he was really fascinated by the billboards in the streets of all of the startups offering crypto. he's discovering a new level of popularity. The affection and the love of the Argentines for him was enormous. The media went all crazy around him, television.

You turned on the TV in Argentina during that week, and a lot of TV channels were talking about him and who he was. So, sadly, a lot of people learned about Ethereum if they haven't already for the first time during that week. And it was an incredible experience. I think Vitalik went back. He kept on traveling his nomadic life, and he went back very happy from his experience in Argentina. And I was mind-blown.

This is something that Vitalik said. You have El Salvador where crypto adoption is top down. You have the millennial president pushing bitcoins through everyone's throat. But in Argentina, crypto adoption is bottom up. It's not a politician, but actually the people that need this and want this and are trying to explore. They are startups being made. There are developers building stuff. There's a lot of users growing the adoption.

So I was fascinated by my own city, my own city and my own country. I wasn't expecting that level. You know, I live in Madrid. I live in Spain. And it feels like here in Spain, we are 20 years behind Argentina right now. Like the level of adoption I've seen in Buenos Aires was crazy. And hopefully Vitalik had a great time while he was there. Yeah, knowing Vitalik, I know that he's a little bit.

shy and he may have Superstar status, but I don't know if he really wants to be a celebrity. So I think that that must have produced some probably fun moments. I do want to talk about how you said that everyone under 30 years old was using it and not because it was a theoretical thing, but because they need it and that they don't really have a currency in Argentina. Do you think that cryptocurrency is more legitimate than the Argentinian government's currency? That might be a loaded question, but... Oh, no.

It's not loaded at all. 100% like that. Argentina doesn't have a currency. It really doesn't. Wow. You know, we all Argentines, we have grown with our parents telling us, you know, never trust the Argentine peso. We have been, you know, fucked over and over again.

Either through high inflation or either through the banks keeping our savings and suddenly devaluing the currency. This has been happening in Argentina for, you know, they're going to. decades, if not probably centuries, since the country was born. And sadly, you know, it's a reality that led to everyone is used to when you buy property or when you buy a car or where you buy something relatively expensive, that's price in US dollars. That's never priced in Argentine pesos.

So it has always been unofficially like a bimonetarily, a bimonitory system, like where, you know, US dollars and pesos living together, even though it's. not like the legal narrative coming from the government. And when crypto emerged, it was a natural fit. In Argentina is a country where you will speak about inflation, with a taxi driver. You will, you know, discuss prices and discuss the economy with absolutely everyone you know. We discuss the economy as much as we discuss about football. And it's really a wild country in that sense.

So the fact that I think that there's a golden generation of developers right now, of engineers between probably between 20 and 35 years old that have been embracing crypto like crazy. And that's why a lot of the interesting protocols and projects that are happening on Ethereum, a lot of those projects actually had Argentine developers behind them. If you look into MakerDAO or DeCentraland or Cletus

or Proof of Humanity or, you know, open sepeling, hard hat, you know, all of these tools. It's this generation of developers who are the children of hyperinflation. These are the children of the convertibility that led to our savings being stolen by the government

and the banks. And we grew up watching all these misfortunes, literally speaking to our families and to our communities. And it's clear to me that that's why a new generation of

developers embraced Ethereum like nowhere else in the world. And that's why a lot of interesting innovation is emerging from there. And I think that's a, it's a blessing in disguise. You know, all of these economic tragedy that we have been living, suddenly, you know, it is leading to our country leapfrogging, you know, like in a very fast and aggressive way, the adoption of crypto.

In the biggest highway of the country, the billboards in the, you know, around the highway, it's all about crypto startups. And some of these startups raise 10. of millions of US dollars in funding. And these are not just startups like in the dot-com era that raise a lot of funding and have no clients. I went and visited some of these startups and they are selling credit cards

that do cashback in crypto. They are selling thousands, hundreds of thousands of credit cards per month. So the market is really there. People are really using this technology and it's growing in an incredible way. I haven't seen this in Europe where I live. So to me, it's mind-blowing the fact that crypto is impacting a place like that in South America in such a profound way that, you know, and you will see it on the streets.

You will see it in the, you know, more and more shops accept stable coins as a way of payment. No, it's becoming a very common practice. And I think it speaks greatly about this technology, this technology giving people an opportunity where they needed the most. Right. I think that's amazing validation. 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 wallet.

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If you're a user, keep an eye out for your favorite defy apps or NFT projects building on Arbitrum. Many of your favorite apps are already live, with many more coming over soon. You can find these apps at portal.arbitrum.1, and you can bridge your assets over to Arbitrum, dot I.O in order to experience defy and NFTs the way it was always meant to be, fast, cheap, and friction-free. And one of the things that I don't think, I don't know if it's coming across to the audience, but I've known you for years through your work with Democracy Earth. And before you had launched proof of humanity, I think that you were kind of like a niche star in the activist in digital democracy space as it was budding.

And just so that the audience knows that Santi has been toiling and working on these problems for years. And the success is not accidental. I know that you've been working hard systematically to find and validate opportunities for creating more digital democracy and human things. thriving. And so one of the things that I want to ask about, Santi, is like, you know, is this success, like, is it, does it feel validating for you to have found this use case that's really affecting people's lives? And, and where did the optimism come from for you when you were toiling in obscurity and you were kind of like lesser known, like, where did that drive come from intrinsically to really want to start to solve these problems before it was obvious to everyone in,

in 2022 that there was really something here. Is there something more intrinsic that drives you? Well, I think the optimism for me always came from community. I have very fun memories of my first step conferences. I remember in Prague when I suddenly opened the door, I discovered all of the amazing Ethereum community. And the fact of knowing that we are not building this alone, that we are all supporting each other,

that we're all learning from each other's projects, that everyone had a very open attitude towards everyone else. And I guess, you know, if I go back to the bear market years and, you know, trying to figure out stuff and doing pilots here and there, what kept me going on is definitely the thrive or the will to learn, the will to learn from amazing people, you know, a community that fosters diversity,

plurality, ideological plurality, openness to discuss any kind of idea. And the community was really important for me when trying to figure out what we were trying to do. And if you look into how proof of humanity was born, was born out of a communal effort. It was the Claros guys that were trying to figure out this problem as well and had an interesting technology to sort a key aspect of it. It was Vitalik himself, joining me on the different channels and sharing ideas, a lot of researchers, the radical exchange community, you know, all of the people that you keep meeting along the way. And I could give you a lot of names that you probably know them very well, of people that have been incredibly helpful that taught me a lot. And, you know, to me, the return of investment of working with these technologies, how much we get to learn and understand about the world.

And then if we can push some code in some repo that actually makes it, that actually has some adoption, even better because it's a nice validation to the effort and the ideas that we have been trying to research for many years. So to me, it's 2021 has been a very generous year, especially because of what happened with proof of humanity and UVI. And the fact that it's a growing community. Like when I think about what I enjoy the most about this project, it's not the price of the token. It's not the, you know, the profiles registered in proof of humanity. It's the community behind it that blows my mind. I discovered very quickly that, you know, members of the community were crowdfunding funds for people that really needed the funds to get their profile of proof of humanity or people that were doing, you know, NFTs to help the burn UVI.

And suddenly, to me, the mindblower. only thing about building with decentralized technology and crypto is that suddenly what it's an idea being built by a small team, suddenly all of these innovations get parallelized by the effort of a community. And ideas start, you know, appearing everywhere. And they don't just appear as an idea. Sometimes they even appear in final four. Someone has already developed a vault here or, you know, a contract there.

And it's all this conversation, all of these. incredible effort being led by a community. And I guess, you know, Vitalik probably feels the same way when he travels around the world and discovers the local community in every country. Must be a fascinating feeling to see, you know, a creation that you worked on, you know, very hard, writing the paper or, you know, pushing some code

and eventually discovering in all countries around the world more and more people embracing this idea and building stuff with it. And in a smaller way, smaller scale, with proof of humanity, the most satisfactory thing for me has been that. And I'm sure that you have lived through very similar things with, you know, the incredible growth that Kittcoin had over the last years, supporting, you know, the development of these public goods and these incredible resources

that all of us then find ourselves using this to build the next interesting experiment. Yeah. And there's one thing that I want to say about that is that I've known that there are many founders that kind of grinded through the barrier. market and toiled in obscurity through the just basically years without extrinsic motivation. And I feel a special type of kinship with those people who have just kind of systematically tried to solve this problem. And one of the things that I really love about Web3 is that Gitcoin and proof of humanity are so complementary. And then I think about Giveth and then retroactive public goods

funding and doing good and radical drips. And it just feels like we're building this pluralistic infrastructure for the public good where each of our projects can can slingshot each other and we can all be successful. And to me, it's just such a beautiful thing to think about how deeply this could scale to help humans all across the world, but also how pluralistic it is. It doesn't rely on any specific project for all of the success that can happen. And so, yeah, I guess I'm wondering if your vision differs from mine at all. Like, what is this? the space of regenerative crypto economics look like and how can we all help each other in order to build it? Yeah, with Web 3, I think it's kind of like, I think I treated this recently. Like,

if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together, you know. And in Web 3, what I found that has been incredibly critical for a project to succeed is, you know, where you fit in in the greater puzzle of everything that's going on. And where you can make a contribution that that is either able to compose with other projects or to leverage, you know, another project and contribute in a specific way that, you know, empowers not only your project, but also the community as a whole. And that's the ethos of open source development. That's the ethos of building with a community, you know, not caring about your code or, you know, intellectual property or stuff like that. I think a lot of that logic is rendered obsolete when you think about, you know,

how we build these networks and these systems. And that's an incredible way of building things. Like at the end of the day, you know, Ethereum is still a subset in the greater movement of open source and free software. And this has been going on since, you know, a couple of decades now. And it's just the fact that now we are, you know, when we build with crypto, we're actually building institutions. We're building the institutions of the future,

the way of coordination and organization that it can achieve, scale and it can really impact, you know, the planet as a whole, but we're doing it under a philosophy that is really not exactly not the philosophy of, you know, American capitalism of the 20th or 19th century. It's a complete new way of understanding how we can create value. And it's completely overtaking every single other model of value generation out there to the point that you have, you know, the largest venture capital firms today embracing Web 3 as well. which means it's a cultural triumph all over the place. And in that regard, I'm very optimistic about what we have, no, looking at what we have been able to achieve so far, it's amazing. But it feels like we are still a very small thing. When you walk around the street and when you walk anywhere in the world, there's still a world out there waiting to adopt or to discover these new technologies.

So it's an exciting time to be in this space because it's still the very, very early days. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that this is where the foundation is being laid for those, what did you say, 21st century native institutions? It's such a big statement, Santi. Oh, my gosh. I'm only for big statements. Yeah. Well, I mean, I do see the foundations of it, but I'm, you know, I think I'm trying to stay humble as we figure out the scalable path to long-term growth. And I think it's, you know, to me, it's holding those two opposing thoughts in my mind of how could this grow in order to be big? and civilizational scale while also staying humble about the problems that we hit day every day, which I know that Bitcoin has plenty, but I don't want to say that others do as well.

Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you want to tell us about proof of humanity, regenerative crypto economics, your view on the world? What didn't I ask that you want to tell us about? Oh, man, I don't know. It's been a great conversation already. I'm excited about proof of humanity. And the proof, you know, either if it's proof of humanity or if it's something else in the future, I don't mind. The fact that, you know, we are coordinating and building on Ethereum, the social Ethereum, I think it's going to be super exciting.

Because, you know, we have seen on the Web 2 movement the emergence of social media. Social media is incredible. It has given us a voice. You know, everyone has a voice. Everyone is able to speak their truth, whatever. that truth is sometimes not so much the truth, but everyone has a voice and that's a

thing. But the exciting thing about a social Ethereum is that it's not about the voice, but it's also about impacting, you know, the pockets of people, you know, really transforming the economy, really transforming how

we address society not just from the ability to give people the capacity to speak, but also giving people the capacity to be financially included, the capacity to become, you know, a member in society where their rights are recognized in a permissionless way without requiring a central authority or without requiring, you know, corruptible institutions in the middle, mediating for our rights. And I'm excited to see the growth of the social Ethereum.

I think that the next big chapter after DFI and NFTs, I certainly hope it's, it's, the social Ethereum where we start building technology that starts looking to society, that starts really pushing this innovation and putting this innovation in the hands of everyone.

No exceptions. And that's, you know, I talk with Vitalik about this and he gave me his view of, you know, in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, you have a lot of incredible technology being built, but a lot of that technology is only purely

software-driven and has no connection to society or to reality. And so you have a society where you have a lot of people living in the streets, you have a huge problem with homelessness, you have people facing very terrible realities living right next to the greatest wealth being generated in modern time. So when Vitalik mentioned, you know, was explaining me why he was supporting something like proof of humanity, he was telling me, I want to make sure. that whatever technology we build is not blinded from impacting society, that we are actually able to push innovation and technology that helps make society and real life, you know, for people

a better place. And I think that the more we start thinking about social applications on Ethereum, that's going to be, you know, very, very impactful in the same way that social media shaped the world in the last decade. I'm pretty sure that in the next decade, the social Ethereum is going to really transform people's lives. Amazing. So let me run this quickly definition by you for a genre of crypto economics that I've been working on focusing on, which I call regenerative crypto economics. So basically, crypto economic systems that create positive externalities and are generally

net positive, create balance in seek equilibrium and also those that satisfy human needs. Is there anything you would add, subtract, or change about that definition of regenerative crypto economics, economics that hits human needs. That's an amazing definition. And I think we should definitely meme Regents instead of Degence. I think Regents is a much better philosophy and attitude and spirit than the Degens that have been leading the narrative around D5 the last couple of years. Yes.

Well, you have done your small part in helping us meme Regent into. existence by appearing on the regenerative crypto economics podcast. So Santi-Sary, founder of Proof of Humanity, thanks so much for joining me today. This podcast will be released in February, so looking forward to meeting that forward together. When that happens, where can people find you online in the meantime? I'm at Santee City pretty much everywhere, and I spend a lot of time on Twitter. I like to troll and hang out there, and please come say hi. You're a friend of You're a friend of mine. Amazing.

All right. Thanks so much, Santi. Great to have you. My pleasure, my friend.