Bankless - The Explorer Mindset with Simona Pop | Layer Zero

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

This episode takes place in the geographical heart of Layer Zero: the middle of DevConnect, the 2022 Amsterdam conference. With the backdrop of a lively conference center, Simona Pop explores heavy topics like the 1989 Romanian Revolution and the pitfalls of DAO governance.   When you cut off the head of top-down totalitarianism, you must replace it with something better—otherwise, another hydra head will appear. Simona thrives on the cutting edge of big problems like these, working on DAO Engagement Strategy at Gitcoin, Community Strategy at Status, and founding the Bounties Network.   When Simona talks about crypto and the Web3 space, the epic proportions of this moment in history become clear and present.   ------ 📣 THE GRAPH | Graph Day in San Francisco | June 2-5 https://bankless.cc/GraphDay     ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/    🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/      ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:    ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALED ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum     ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across     🏦 ALTO IRA | TAX-FREE CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA     👻 AAVE V3 | LEND & BORROW CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/aave     ⚡️ LIDO | LIQUID ETH STAKING  https://bankless.cc/lido      🔐 LEDGER | NANO S PLUS WALLET https://bankless.cc/Ledger      ------ Topics Covered:   5:00 Simona, Amsterdam, and Real Life 8:55 A Revolutionary Childhood 12:45 Successful Evolutions 18:03 The Wheel of Time 25:00 The Governance Problem 30:30 This is Water 37:00 Replacing Nation States 40:55 Generational Change 48:50 Status and Networks 55:34 Why Simona’s Optimistic 58:44 Working for DAOs 1:02:41 Advice for Noobs   ------ Resources:   Simona on Twitter Simona’s Linktree DevConnect Romanian Revolution     ----- 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 

I'm a little bit of a child of the revolution, and I know what it's like to not have freedoms of expression, travel, all of that. And I think it's very, very important and very ingrained clearly in me to be able to enable that for other people. Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but is composed by people. And each individual member of the crypto community has their own story. to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down

and always has been. Today on Layer Zero, I'm speaking with Simona Pop, and we recorded this episode in the middle of DevConnect. And so there is a big conference room, a co-working space where a lot of people are heads down, building, whatever it is that they're building. So there's a little bit of background chatter, but hopefully that adds to the vibe rather than detract from it. We talk a lot about governance, and Simona is a child of the Romanian freedom revolution from the Eastern bloc, from Russia's dominance with communism. And so she was very, very young when the revolution in Romania happened and broke Romania free from communism.

And we use this as a metaphor to discuss Dow governance of all things. She talks about how, yes, you can cut off the head of top-down totalitarian communism, but you have to also replace that with something else, or else the same sort of structure just grows back in its place. And so we take this idea of if we are going to kill something, we need to replace it with something new, otherwise the same patterns will unfold once again, which is what happened in Romania post-communist Russia.

And so we talk about the different structures of Dow governance. We use this metaphor for a flowing river of liquid governance, of liquid representation, and allowing this river to adapt as rivers do to its surrounding environment. And if Dow governance needs to change and adapt over time, it also needs to act like a flowing river. And so there's plenty of metaphors with rivers and adaption in there. And overall, Simone is just a beloved part of the Ethereum community. She's working extremely hard, figuring out Dow governance, which is the problem of problems in this space right now. So let's go ahead and get right into this conversation with Soma Pop, right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

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go to Ledger.com, grab a ledger and take control over your crypto. Hey, Suana, what's up? Everything's damn fine. Why is it damn fine? Because we're in Amsterdam. We are in Amsterdam. We're DevConnect.

Yeah. Have you been to Amsterdam before? I have, and it was raining, and it was, the city was beautiful, but in the sunshine, it's a totally different experience. The consensus that I've gotten about Amsterdam is that everyone loves it. Yes. Everyone just has the best words to describe Amsterdam. It's beautiful. It's all the flowers are in bloom.

It's tulip season. and we are here. As a connoisseur of plants, I will have to say the plants of Amsterdam are top-notch. Right on point. And the street flowers. What is the thing? That's like a whole different level of street flower. I have walked hours.

I've only been here for two days. I don't know when you got here, but I've been only here for two days. And I have walked for like four or five hours total. Agreed. And it's like, why would you take a means of transport? We need canals, flowers, trees and bloom. Do you know how Amsterdam was? chosen at DevConnect? Do you know who made that choice? No, I don't actually. Well, they made

a good choice. They absolutely did. And the weather, they like arranged that to a T. So, pleased. I've asked you this question before, but not in a long form podcast capacity. So we're going to go into this a little bit more. But why real life? Why is real life important? This industry is on the internet. Like, we don't need a meet in real life. Why can't we just go meet on Discord or Zoom? Why can't we meet in the Metaverse? Because we're people and energy is important. important and being able to spend time with friends. Because at this stage, a lot of us are friends. Let's face it, we've known each other for, what, five years?

It's a long time, and it's actually a really, really nice kind of group of friends. And if you think about it, it's a really, really good dynamic that we have together, and the new people coming in and the OGs. It's just really, really important to just catch up now and again. And obviously the hugging. Now the hugging is back on the menu. It's like, it's great. I have been warning people that I am a hugger.

So they're not surprised. But it's also like, no, it is surprised because like the last time I've seen most of these people was months ago. Yeah. And so just the enthusiasm of seeing people here in real life is just lovely. Plus, like, we get to lock all of the East developers in a room and force them into having a merge date. So that's what's going on right now.

Amazing. Very true. At an undisclosed location. Yes, a very secret location. of only the privileged parties can get to. But yeah, look, and again, everything does happen online and we can obviously reach a lot more people online, but it is important to create all of these little moments

that we can touch base, we can interact with each other face-to-face, and then go back to being online. And I think having those catch-up moments is important. Certainly, yeah. DevConnect. It's called DevConnect for a reason. We are here to sync our nodes. Yes. Because even though I think obviously the crypto industry is probably the most adept at working online,

like we can be the most productive versus any other industry online. But still, in real life, like there's always these tailwind benefits of being in real life that will never be replaced. And think about the fact that most, I mean, I don't know about you, but a lot of the relationships that I have and a lot of the friendships and a lot of the collaborations that I've worked on started at certain events. 2018, 2019, and so on when we were first kind of doing these things and establishing the schedule of events. So yeah, it's important. So what class are you a part of? Like, what is your, what cycle of the crypto industry did you come in? Are you class of 2017 earlier? End of 2017.

And into 2017. Okay, same zies. When I actually started genuinely working on a project, because that's when I met Mark, well, end of 2017, beginning of 2018. And that's where I became the co-founder of the standard Bounties Protocol and Bounties Network. Yes, Bounty's Network. Yes. So what brought you in? Bounties Network is very, very Gitcoin ethos aligned, which is kind of where you found yourself close to Kevin O'Waqi, very much like finding ways to push development to the margins.

Like what about crypto brought you in? So I think for me it was always this ability to level out the playing field and allow more people a seat at the table. In fact, rebuild the table with a lot more seats, right? And that's one of the main things that attracted me to bounties. And actually, because Gitcoin was built on top of the standard bounties protocol. And so we were very much value aligned. But in terms of the core interest for me, and that's what continues to be my core interest,

is how can we enable access to resource for everybody, regardless of geography, regardless of social status, regardless of education, regardless of language, regardless of all of that. And everything that I tend to do is to push that forward and to try to create more pathways in for a lot more people. What were you doing before crypto? Did it kind of align with all that stuff? Or what was your mode of operating before crypto? It was very much in comms and experiential and always in tech, but, you know, the web two. Sure.

Yeah, yeah. So kind of getting out, trying to get the listeners grounded for who Simone Pop is. What did you know before crypto that you brought to crypto? Like what information have you blessed the crypto industry with? I think for me, it's interesting because being originally from Romanian, having experienced, albeit a very small part of, I was very young when the revolution happened in 89, but you still have that sense of what it is like to live in a country where censorship, complete lack of privacy and restrictions is the norm.

And so I think I say this sometimes where I'm a little bit of a child of the revolution and I know what it's like to not have freedoms of expression, travel, all of that. And I think it's very, very important and very ingrained clearly in me. to be able to enable that for other people. And so with that knowledge, and also the fact that knowing that, I'm also aware of a lot of, I guess the importance of why balance matters

when you are trying to completely redesign the flow of things. Because you want to make sure that if you're going to redesign it, you're going to not redesign it in the same image as what came before. Learn from what came before, but try to redesign it in a mindful and balanced way so that we don't end up in the same place or even a worse place. So this is going to reveal my little knowledge of that era of time in Eastern Europe. But I think this is what we should definitely dive into.

The revolution, let's go into that. How old were you when six? Okay, so you didn't know much else other than that. No. But also when you're a kid, you kind of don't really realize the magnitude of what's going on. And we're talking about, is this communism in Russia? Is this relevant here? Yeah.

So basically every... Give us a quick history lesson. They call it the Eastern Bloc, because everything that was around Russia and below was under Russia's influence, right? You had the USSR at the time. So anything Eastern Europe was like communist, controlled by, had the same modus operandi. as the USSR. And the idea was that it would be made in its image. And so what you had was the Prague Spring

that kick-started revolutions in all of these countries in the Eastern Bloc. And it almost went like a domino effect. And so all of them then removed communism from their governments and went on to, hopefully, rebuild and redesign so that it is, you know, in a democratic way. Now, what that also kind of showed me and made me understand is that sometimes a revolution doesn't really do much.

You cut off the head, but the body stays the same. So then you just replace the head, but everything else, particularly when you're talking about a bureaucracy, will just be exactly the same. Which is why when I talk about crypto, So it shouldn't be a revolution. It should be an evolution. It takes longer, but it changes the whole organism versus just the head.

Yes. I think there's a very common pattern throughout history is that revolutions are really good at breaking things. Right. But not necessarily putting them back in a way that answers to the problems of why the revolution decided to happen in the first place. Right. Right. All it does is says, well, this isn't working, let's end it,

and kind of fails to follow through. It just creates the vacuum of power. It creates a vacuum of power. And I think also, let's remember that a lot of the revolutions that have happened in the world are really orchestrated by completely other interests outside of that country. So you also have that.

Okay, so the revolution started when you were six? So it was all of a week. Oh, wow. Pardon me? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It went like this, yeah. Okay, very fast. Yeah. Okay, so it was more of the first.

process of recreation that probably, because I don't know, when people start remembering their first memories, but about six is about right? Right. So that's when it started building, let's say, towards a democracy. Again. Right. Right. So your formative years were all about just looking at and being under the paradigm of how are we going to re-architects governance. Yes. Yeah. Kind of. In hindsight. Attempts to it. Yeah. And so like, again, like history lesson. How would you rate that re-architection if you had to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10? Minus 1. Uh-oh. Why?

What should we learn for this? Again, it's very, very important to understand that things that have been almost cemented in a certain way take a lot longer to break through. Like if you think of plants growing through the pavement, right, that's going to have to push and, like, really work to get through it when it's so solid. And because like I mentioned earlier, usually the body of the beast remains the same. And so you have to work with a lot of things that were already in place and then try to slowly remove those and replace them with better, with better, with better. And so what you get a lot is, and I think that's still valid for the whole of the former Eastern Bloc. You have a lot of corruption. You have a lot of people who are in power

who then decided that they could maintain power, but this time it would be financial. And so you have that switch. Yeah, using the plant metaphor, if you have a tree, for example, like in the middle of a storm, it blows over, but it doesn't die. And then it'll start to regrow in a different direction, but it'll always be scarred by the storm.

It'll never be the perfect emblematic, vertical, beautiful tree. It will be the kinked tree, and it will never get away from the king. kink, right? Like, it'll always have this in its base, like, DNA, right? Not the DNA, the epigenetics, right? How the DNA is expressed. And so if you're telling me that, like, the Romanian government did a, or the Romania did a good job of taking the head off, but forgot to, like, replace the culture, right? The culture was the same, which is why the layer zero is always so important. Indeed, it is. And also taking, again, from that tree metaphor of breaking, I think what

looking at Web 3 and what we're doing now with governance, we need to look more at a willow model where it bends and it's a lot more flexible versus, again, just very rigid. Right. Right? Because as soon as you start potentially being very rigid about things, you could miss or could be, let's say, a little bit more fragile

when something happens and you can't, adapt. Yeah, that rigidity aspect is really, really important. We'll go down to that in a second. One thing I learned well kind of going down the Ukraine versus Russia rabbit hole is that this same thing has already happened. This happened in the 1800s. It happened in the 1900s and now it's happening again. And like my takeaway from that was that there's this like Russian, like Putin is very like focused on like this like kind of this manifest destiny of Russia. Right? Like this Russian sort of just like ethnic imperialism or something like Putin is like this embodiment of this weird like Russian energy that wants to like dominate Eastern Europe, right? I mean, yeah.

Yeah. And this the story of the Russian empire in the 1800s, whatever was called back then, coming in to dominate Ukraine. And then Ukraine like just not wanting that and revolting against that, this story has already played out once before. And so when you know that that was like three generations ago, there's something in the DNA of Eastern Europe that like makes this story happen again and again and again. And how do we get people to be aware of these things? Because it's, isn't it education that is how we get through this? It is education. And it's also a, you know, a level of respect for what has come before. Not necessarily in a must be revered, must be, you know, um,

glorified in any way, but it must be understood. Sure. Because if you, like you were saying, you notice patterns. And what that enables you to do is when you notice those same patterns repeating again, you can bend, adjust, flex away from it. You don't end the pattern. You redirect the pattern. Right.

Or you work with it and you kind of go, okay, what is it that we could do to essentially go on a different path? versus just repeating this one. Right. And that's a big thing that I think sometimes in Web 3, we kind of go, yeah, everything's trash, let's just rebuild. Everything's new again, new paradigm. New paradigm. Which is great because that's, you know, we're enthusiastic and we want to do these things

and it's wonderful. But are there lessons for us to learn in that process so that we don't just again follow that same pattern, go down the same stuff and then at the end of it go, shit. Did it again. Right. There's the, the wheel is something that I think Chris Berniske talked about where like, you know, in the future, we're going to be the boomers.

And like, our kids are going to be like, you know, you guys got to, you know, you guys bought Bitcoin before it had a market price. Right. Right. You guys got ether at the ICR price. What did you do? Right. You got ether before.

Remember when you got into Ethereum before it was proof of stake? Like, you boomer parents, like, work is hard now. Like, things are now are now, like, saturated and difficult. And just like the same complaints. millennials are having about the current institution. So when you see these governance structures, because governance is all of the rage in Web 3 these days. It is. Governance, governance, governance, when air drop, win token, win governance token. How do you see us falling into the same traps if you do see us doing that? I think one of the main things, and certainly this is very much

something that I'm interested in from kind of a multitude of different perspectives. I'm obviously one of the top delegates in Gitcoin in ENS and I also work together with Gitcoin on what I like to call governance engagement because right now governance and engagement are like this there is a lot of rubber stamping there is a lot of there's high high lack of context for different conversations happening and decisions being made that is because things are not transparent, things aren't necessarily easy to grasp context for. And also, most people are so insanely busy that to dig through notions, discords, and all of this, to gain context,

to inform a vote that may actually influence quite a few things is quite taxing. Right. So like a snapshot vote comes into existence and like the many, many voters of this snapshot vote, like, all right, like yes or no? And there's like, there is perhaps hours and hours of, like, debate and deliberation and arguments as to even what are the parameters of this vote to begin with. Or there should be. Or there should be. Or at least with the people that put this thing to a vote, right? Yes, right.

Okay. These four people are talking about this governance decision. And they are the experts in, like, the yes and the no cases, but they need to give it to the community because that's what decentralized governance is. But then the community is, like, they spent 30 seconds reading the snapshot vote. And they don't know the extent of the detail. and they don't know the impacts. And that's a problem. Because if I want to have context to be able to make an informed decision, that's incredibly

important. And you would do that in, you know, in any other area of your life. You would want to know what you are making a decision about. And so with regards to, and coming back to your original question, how could we perhaps make those same mistakes is that again, we go in this. direction where voting remains binary. There is no respect for nuance. There is no respect for, let's say, the in-between, the maybe, the ambiguity, because a lot of things that we're dealing with right now, it's okay for them to be ambiguous for a while until we figure out how they can

be clearer and simpler and easier to make a yes-no decision on. And so with that in mind, I think being comfortable with ambiguity and being comfortable with nuance and a spectrum of decision-making and a spectrum of discussion versus just, no, it has to be this or the other, is important to not only think about, but also weave into the processes that we're putting in place. I love a standard, obviously. But I think that's important, especially when you navigate various different. out. Like for me, even in these major two that I am one of the main delegate in, it's hard because they're structured differently. And they have a different flow for the governance.

Not majorly different, but different still. Importantly different. Right. And so I think for us to be able to really have the context and be able to make the right decisions, it's important to have a flow that is uniform is not the right word something that enables that access again in a very right right so there's there's one way to tackle this problem which is like just making governance easier yes like being able to make the nuance more digestible the debate more digestible but the other solution is just like let's just centralize it let's just say like centralize the Yeah, but we don't want to. But why is that bad?

Because, like, you know, we call these things Dow's, but they're, like, most of them, they're not autonomous. They're definitely not autonomous. No. And they're definitely not decentralized. I really call them digital organizations. Now, the cool unlock is the actual decentralized part of it. Yes.

But we don't have that yet. So, like, why can't we just, like, have the centralized governance while we figure this out? Because I think you want to, and look, we are in a very difficult situation right now, we're just as an ecosystem because we're so embedded in the current world whilst trying to build a new one. And so you're almost constantly enmeshed in the current way of doing things whilst trying to envisage what the new stuff will be. So it's hard. It's a continuous exercise and you almost have to do that daily practice, that daily exercise to maintain whatever it is that you want to build, right? That muscle mass, maybe, or those habits.

to build those new pathways and those two habits. I think the important piece is to have the right, either groups or structures dealing with different stages of the flow. And that's the thing that can unlock that decentralization where you put things, you know, imagine a river, right? Because we're in Amsterdam, imagine all of these bridges and all of those. At each one, you have a different checkpoint.

almost. And then the whole thing becomes clearer and it evolves and it involves conversations, it involves dialogue, it involves certain amounts of decisions but not a yes, no, right? And you evolve it that way. But to create that flow, you have to look at, okay, who's going to be involved? What is the end goal? How long can this take? What is the process? Will it be different for certain types of proposals and will it be different for others? When you have something to do with a budget, with a treasury, does that go on a different path versus one that has to do with, I don't know, removal of stewards from, right? And you have to map all of that out.

And I always, always use this analogy because I think it's so important. When you go to an amusement park, you see the map of everything that is there. And you know where you're going and you know how to get there. And you know if that is where you want to get to or you want to go here, in fact, or there, or stop halfway through there. And we don't really have that. right now. And that should be something that is almost, because we talk about doubt tooling, oh my God, doubt tooling. Doubt tooling, doubt tooling. It's raining doubt tools. But I think it's

important, again, to look at those and create those mindfully and from a place of experience. Like for me, I see the pain on both sides. I'm working on governance engagement, but I'm also a steward. And I know that, for instance, the other week, like two weeks ago, I was focusing so much on that and creating Schelling Point that I dropped the ball in my NS duties for a week. Right, right. Because that's what happened. Right. Yeah, duty calls.

Which is fine. Right. In a decentralized world, no is going to drop. Right. Right. Right. And so figuring out how to make sure that that isn't a tragedy or that isn't something that breaks something.

Right. Right. Right. Is something that we need to bake into the whole flow because we are humans. the whole Dow governance thing should be fluid because again using the river and the flow and all of that it has to be fluid, it has to flow, it has to enable people to kind of go,

oh, okay, I can't do this at the moment but I'm okay to come back in when I have more focus, when I can dedicate more time. Okay, so just to, I want to recap all of that. I think both for the listeners and also for my own benefit, the answer to like why not centralize is because of obvious reasons and the alternative is micro-centralization in pockets, which I think are like committees,

where, like, you talked about these certain proposals, such as if we're talking about a treasury, like a treasury proposal, as we are going to do this with the treasury, and perhaps, like, we can have two different versions. It's like if this proposal is above $10,000 or below $10,000, you can go, the river will split. Right. Right. And it will go to this committee first, and then this committee will tinker with this part

of the proposal. Maybe this is the clarity and definitions committee. Sure. And then the clarity and definitions committee do their work. One of, maybe there's four nodes, four council members of that particular cabinet of sorts. And then once they're done, they pass it off to another node which does the, I don't know, the allocation of funds committee or something. Right. And it goes, it follows, flows down this river.

And you always ensure that those little pockets have the right representation in them. Yes. Right. Okay. So like microcentralization as in like, all right, four. Four people have the role in responsibility. Four people have the block. I wouldn't even call it centralization.

I would call it... Delegation? Specialized delegation. Specialized delegation. I think we mean the same thing. I think that's a semantics difference. But it sounds better. But it definitely sounds better.

Definitely sounds better. And so, okay, so we have like this, like, mesh network of, like, a river. And the concept of a river is that it always flows downstream, right? Like, water will always go where it's easiest for it to go. And, like, right now, when I said, like, dows aren't on top. rivers are autonomous, right? Like they just go. And so one of my bull cases for DALs, not DOWs as concept, but the DOWs that are the most bullish are the ones that lower the threshold for participation down to the bare minimum, right? Like how can you make a verifiable contribution? Yep. The easiest possible way. And so if we're going to extend this to governance is like how can we make sure that the governance proposals always go downhill, whether or not they're accepted? Like maybe downhill means it's rejected, but like a rejection is a choice either way. Like successful governance can reject a choice.

Oh, absolutely. So how do we make like a governance proposal, hit all these subcommittees to refine and digest and do all these things with these governance and make sure the thing always flows downhill so that it comes to a conclusion? Because I think so many of Dow governance right now is like we forget to come to a conclusion on a lot of things. Like it gets lost in the river. Or we rush to a conclusion, right? And sometimes that's not necessarily a good conclusion or it's not necessarily.

surly thought of as much. But keeping it, as you say, on that path, I think that's where potentially those standards that you put in place come in. Because then it's almost like the banks of a river. Right. And you create that versus just like letting it spell all over the place, in which case, again, with the river, you lose control and it damages things. Right. Yeah. Yeah, turns into a flood. Right. And so what you want is to, have that and because you were saying with the flow of water obviously you have like the whole bruce lee thing be water my friends like all of that right and you take that shape and you enable those the banks of the river to be that tooling that you put in place but you have to understand what

the substance is right right because you could make the you know the banks of the river out of material that is not conducive to the flow, right? It could be too porous. It could be like breakable. And then the river always automatically corrects for that because the river will erode of the broken banks. Voila. Right.

Right. Lovely. Lovely. And quick, this is beautiful. This is so, I mean, I'm impressed with us right now. Also, just quick side quest. Rivers are inherently decentralized, right? And so like top down government could become like, I want to stop this river and build a dam.

But all dams break over time. like we can just route around the river. There's that meme of just like governments banning Bitcoin and it's like the fence that has no edges and people just like walk around the fence. Same thing with the river. Like you can dam up a river, but like over the long time frames,

the river always breaks. Exactly. Or the dam always breaks. Exactly. Let's take this back to Romania and governance. Okay. Where we cut off the head, but then the same similar shape reappears.

Yes. How does this model fix that? I think, and again, another analogy that I particularly like is this idea of the puzzle. If you lose, you know, you're making jigsaw puzzles and you lose one piece, you have to replace it with a piece that is exactly the same shape, exactly the same pattern, exactly the same.

Sure. So what we are doing is we're scrapping that puzzle, or at least the image that's in that puzzle, and starting from scratch. Because if you just remove the piece, one piece, the head, the rest keeps it. So you have to put... The void still has the same shape. Same shape.

Yeah. And so my hope is that what we're all doing here is actually redesigning and re-planning a whole new puzzle. Learning from how puzzles work, learning from how long it potentially takes what type of thing you need in there, what type of material, what type of whatever. But it's a different image.

It's maybe a different structure. Maybe it's 3D1. hopefully it's a 3D one that's a lot more fun right so you're kind of evolving it and again that evolution from your very basic one to something that can really really uh capture the richness and the not richness in the cash bags right the uh aspect of it what's the other word for this yeah vibrancy Vibrancy of what we can all do to ensure human thriving, to ensure that we are in a much better place, that everybody is in a much better place.

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logical progression from a couple of other layers of yours I've done. Yeah. Starting with Turrum and then also most recently, tracheopteryx. We were talking about like, okay, cool, Dow governance. Eventually we're going to get this thing perfected and refined and the engine's really going to start to turn. Right. And all of them are like, well, eventually, this will start to eat out the role of nation states, right? Like, eventually United States governance, the original Dow, by the way, will start to start to incorporate some of the models and the efficiencies that we've innovated and developed with Dow governance, right? Tarun gave the example of how he thinks that it's really going to be the finance sector that comes

first where like a lot of financial contracts use prices of a certain thing at a certain time to be embedded into the contract right and this like we just agree that the price of this thing is at this time at this date by this by this Oracle which is like the NASDAQ but they could start instead of using the NASDAQ which is a centralized company with with that kind of a gameable system yep instead you could use the Oracle of UNISWOP yeah and you what we're doing is we're taking out the NASDAQ puzzle piece and we're re-put implanting the UNISWAT puzzle piece in this place. And his theory is that over time, we're going to find more and more ways to swap out old puzzle pieces with new puzzle pieces. Until you create a new puzzle. Until you create a new puzzle,

right, from the inside out. Do you have any thoughts on that? So again, I think it's really, really interesting thinking about, because you mentioned the financial system and because we chat about money, it's really interesting to remember that we came up with that whole thing. And we just just perpetuated in the normal system now, in the world, it was decided at some point, but we can always change our minds and decide something else. And this is something that for a lot of people, I guess, even sometimes when they come into our space or into the Web 3 space, it's very difficult to really get comfortable with the fact that that is just a decision some people made at this one time.

Right. It's not canon. It's not canon. You're not contractually bound to do anything. People just agreed that the U.S. dollar was going to have some value. People just agreed that this other thing was going to have value. That's all it is. It's an agreement.

And we are making new agreements and we can make new agreements and we should make new agreements if the ones that have been in place are no longer serving us. Because that's what you would do. If a car, if you had a car that broke down as much, as the current financial system? Yeah. Are you joking? They would remove it from the market.

It would be a death trap. We've had more systemic crises in the financial system since I don't know when they started measuring it. Right. But it's 50, 60 across the world. And again, think about the analogy of a car. It broke down that much. You'd be like, I don't know. I'm not getting into that death trap.

I need to buy a new one. How do you think about the rate of change? Right? Because the younger generations, the millennials especially, Zoomers seem to be in their own world, but they're going to get the brunt of this and eventually probably once they graduate from college. But like the rate of change of the world seems to be not not be satisfactory for a lot of the younger folk. Yeah. And so like they're just asking for change now, now, now, now, now.

Meanwhile, the other half of the world, like the older folk, the boomers are like, this is pretty Gucci. We kind of like where things are right now. We're at the speed limit. This is nice. Right. Let's not go right. No faster change. Like no more change. Like I haven't even figured out my iPhone yet. How do you think about this conflict? Again, I always say balance in all things. I think nature, if you look at nature, and again, I love all of everything that comes with biomimicry. I love everything that we can learn from nature in the way it behaves and in the way it does things, because it's very clever. And there's this thing in nature called the optimum window of viability. where it's in between diversity and efficiency.

And it's always in the middle point. What we tend to do is always go way too efficient. Anything happens, restrictions, sanctions, all of, like, every, austerity. You always go way too efficient and you disturb the balance. Too much diversity is also bad because then that doesn't work because there's too much. Right, there's no coordination. But in the middle, that's where the sweet. what is. Now, in terms of the pace of change, I think if we again look at evolution, if a fish

swam up on the shore and suddenly grew a leg out of its gills, that would not be very good because it would die. It wouldn't evolve. But slow evolution, little by little, ensures that it can become a successful new species, a successful new thriving organism. But it takes time because it needs to take into account all of the elements that it needs to build and build well. You rush one, you're like, I don't know, one side is lopsided and again, it's not conducive to thriving.

So I think if we can get to that point where we balance, out the speed because we do need to move, right? We can't just be like, ah, it'll be fine and because, again, things aren't rosy in the real world, right? So I think if we can reach that balance of doing things mindfully and doing things properly, that we don't cut corners, very important, but we move because stagnation is also not good. Do you think we have time? like global warming is not being solved by nation states. No, it's not. I think that's generally a thing that most people across outside of the crypto industry would agree with.

Like, no one's really taking nation states seriously. Granted, it's not like the crypto industry is doing anything for that. But we kind of think that we can. But also, do we have the time to actually be methodical about this and not rush this? I think it's almost a conversation around. having that urgency, but not making mistakes because you're under pressure. Which, again, is not easy. Like, we're not in an easy situation.

It's a big ass, right? Go like, okay, so the world is going to am. But you need to be like, you know, make sure you focus. So look, it's not easy, but I think it's one of the main reasons why we're sort of more and more people are coming into the space because like, okay, okay, but this. This is how we can. Right? And this is what, at the end of the day, this is what the web three pieces about.

It's that choice. It is that alternative. Because for so long, we had none. And we were just stuck with that track. And that was it. You can do, you know, turn things up and down over here and up and down over here. But really, it's the same road. Now we have a chance to a new one.

And obviously with a new path, you have to, you know, remove some thorns, pave it, do all of these things, and we're doing it whilst we're carving it. So hard. And it takes a lot of people because you need everybody involved to be able to get to where you want to go. Right. And Steph connects, right? Why can't we cut corners? Why can't we cut corners to get there? Because look at what cutting corners has got us into.

Everybody's been cutting corners for like decades for generations. The point that I'm making there is I think the technology that we're building is so, so powerful that if we enable back doors, cut corners to, you know, deliver for VCs a little bit faster, don't quite focus, ah, privacy, all of that, right? We need to ship. Again, the balance, it's important. Yes, move, yes, ship, but don't sacrifice the principles to go get your VC some returns. Because that's what everybody has been doing.

Okay, my next question was going to be, what's the corner that you see being cut the most? But would that be your answer? Like, optimizing for VCs? I think privacy and security. Privacy and security? Yeah. What security mean? Just think about the amount of projects that have, like, one, the first version of their contract audited,

and then they say they're audited, but they have had like five cents. Right. Okay. So we're talking about bug exploits. Just a plethora of risks that is just not exposed, not addressed, not even thought about. And it's important, right? You're building these new things, and we've seen so many recently. Oh, this.

Oh, here's another one. Oh, here's another exploit. Oh, this broke and the bridge fell. It's cool. It doesn't matter. Oh, is that the trend? Oh, yeah, yeah, cool, cool. Damn, I didn't get exploited.

Oh, shit. Right. Is it a right of passage? I don't think it should be. Okay, the other one was privacy. Yeah. How are we cutting corners on privacy? I mean, just, I think the concept of privacy has been so diluted and so,

I don't even know what the word is, but almost we've just become so, detached from what privacy actually means that for a lot of people, as we know, you know, why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide? That type of thing. It's like, well, no, that is not what privacy should be about. Privacy is a human right, and you should not be tracked for things that you spend on, and you shouldn't be tracked for everywhere you go, and your face shouldn't be scanned by a supermarket checkout. Are you joking? What? But again, is that erosion of and people are so comfortable giving away so much of their stuff at all times that actually now there's this process of having to claw it back and for a lot of people it's like

yeah but why bother there's like so much out there already it'll be fine but again getting back into a place where our identity isn't correlated with our money and everything else so that a simple switch through a backdoor of an application can just cut your access to everything. It's bad. I'm reminded of a, I'm a clear member because there was one time I was not going to make my flight and so I had to sign up for clear to skip the security line. And all you have to do is go and get your irises scanned and boom, your name comes up with your birthday and everything.

And every time I do that, I'm like, that's going to come back to bite me in the butt one It really will. And I love that you spend those seconds to think about that and then like, carry on. And then get on my flight, right? Yeah. Oh, well. Well, at least I'm not going to miss my flight. Silver lining everywhere. No, but it's that, right? And we've been so pushed to think, or like, of course you realize that's like probably not okay. But like, what can you do? But it's, we've so been pushed to being comfortable with all of this stuff that the moment, like status, perfect example, the moment you kind of go, actually let's build the whole thing as a pseudo-anonymous thing

that doesn't require a password, a phone number, or who you are. people go, this is hard. Right, right. It doesn't make sense. Oh, and I can't pull all of my contacts from my address book on my phone. Right. Well, this is a bit shit. Right.

Let's go into the full status show mode. Can you give the listeners and me the pitch for status? What is it and what does it do and why is it good? Status was obviously one of the first players in the mobile wallet space back in 2017. Right. And then they also started building a chat. and the idea with it and a Web3 browser. The idea for me is that now it is perfectly poised,

that stack is perfectly poised, to create spaces for the Web3 community to actually switch from the centralized tooling that they use to a Web3 native stack, space, app, whatever it is that is going to become. So one of the things that I came in back in 2020, again, and we say it's important to have that back, between speed of shipping and doing it properly,

I propose this feature of the community's feature that is now being worked on, but there's obviously so many implications in that where if you are going to have, let's say hundreds of thousands of people on it, you want that messaging reliability to be on point, which right now it is not. You want the design to flow.

Right now, it does not. It needs a refresh, it needs, like, updating, it needs a lot of things. But even something as simple as pulling from the OpenC API to show your NFTs in your wallet. That's technically, let's say, an infringement on your privacy, right? Because you're like, I'm finding things out about you. But the point is, the user should make that decision. Give the option.

And then for those who don't care that much, just pull. For those who do, go and via the browser to access your open. And it's those little things that actually make a big difference. And it's important to make sure that when you do build it like that, you do take your sweet time. But again, urgency is needed there. Sure. So that's that. And again, that kinectomy is back to like real world stuff back in the revolution.

What was the revolution called? Draw my memory. So the whole kind of sequence of events in the Eastern Bloc was the project. It started with the Prague Spring, and then all of them kind of... Right. And so the fact that it went off like fireworks, right? Like it was like a... Domino.

It was like ready to go. Right? And it just needed this one thing to light the match. What was missing probably was like a messaging network of people who are like, hey, are you tired of this bullshit? Yes. Because I'm tired of this bullshit. And if we had a messaging network that was private, people would have been more comfortable

communicating their dissent. Communicating and congregating and being able to coordinate. Yes. Coordination technology. Exactly. And it's important and this is the thing. And again, we're drawing parallels here between, you know, late 80s, early 90s and where we are now. But if you think back then, you had landlines and the phone was probably bugged.

100%. Couldn't trust it. Right? Couldn't trust. You couldn't say, oh, meet me there. We're going to like throw some shit. Right. Right.

No way. And now you're in the situation where you have all of these, like, privacy messaging applications, privacy, using the loosest of terms. That, again, if you think of most of them, it has your phone number. You know what your phone number tells about you? Your address, who you are, everything. So unless everybody has burner phones, which I doubt that they do, we're not that far off.

Okay, it's not as nefarious or as entrenched as it used to be, but maybe it is. That's all I'm saying. And then if you start, and again, this isn't necessarily about, I think that's the other perception that you will always use these things to do bad things.

Right. No, just you can have conversations. I'm hearing crypto for the drugs. Right? Like all of the things that can be bought with U.S. dollars and have been for generations. Right. Yeah, all of the good stuff.

But it's that thing, that perception, and maybe that again has been the narrative that has been publicized of, oh, these guys, that's why they're using it for, like, bad things. And it's like, come on. I just want to have a conversation about things that I maybe don't agree with

or I want to have a conversation to be able to coordinate some sort of protest, movement, whatever, something that does not agree. with my values and my human rights. There are so many countries in the world where you need people to also be protected. Journalists, because we brought up Russia, because we bring up all of these different countries

where journalists are genuinely at risk all the time. You want to be able to offer a space, a safe space for them to be able to speak to their sources, speak amongst each other, be able to share information, be able to share situations that would, put them in a safer place than they are right now. I mean, all of these things, it, that perception of it's always bad is simplistic and a lot of it is, um, dare I say,

just it potentially can be dangerous for all of those people who need that protection. Certainly. Certainly. Certainly. Victims of abuse. Again, there's endless. Simona, what about the current state of the crypto industry makes you optimistic? I think everything that we, and this is a great segue, because obviously one of the main reasons why I'm at DevConnect not only to support and speak at the different events, but also I'm curating Shelling Point again. So Shelling Point, Amsterdam is happening on Thursday,

and for me, and this is the way I've kind of designed the experience, is for it to genuinely be that antidote, to a lot of the events that we're seeing popping up now, and that usually tend to happen in a bull market, that are all flash, no substance, and kind of gross. From what I've heard of described as a pile of money searching for a soul. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

With a hint of dumpster fire. Right. Right. So I think a really, really important thing to keep in mind is that we must protect and elevate. the conversations around what we are genuinely changing and where we're going.

And that's what I want Shelling Point to be. That's kind of what we did in Denver a little bit. But this time around I'm doing, we have almost three hours of workshops just on climate and what Web 3 is doing on climate and bringing all of the projects working in that space to have these hands-on workshops, chat about things, have conversations,

the participants into whatever the solution may be. We also focus a lot, a lot on, again, discussing this governance situation, discussing public goods, how are we moving the needle, how are we progressing things, discussing decentralized science, discussing all of these things that we need to be focusing on because that's the stuff that actually matters.

That's the stuff that's going to evolve us from here to there, not a sprinkle of cash in like a party. parties are great, don't get me wrong, and the shilling point one is going to be amazing. But it's important to have those conversations and delve deep into those conversations. And I'm playing a little bit with the format as well because after so many conferences, I am bored two tiers of the traditional format. And so what I've asked all of the speakers to do is to do 50-50 in terms of their content. 50% can be, you talk about whatever you want to talk about.

The other half, you involve the audience. I don't care if you do yoga with them. I don't care if it's playing Q&A. Do something. Where it is a collaborative effort. Everything that we're doing, it isn't the work of one person, it's not the work of 10. Everybody has a contribution to make,

and everybody can and should feel comfortable making that contribution and figuring out what is on that, what's it, amusement park map everybody should see the whole map and decide where they want to go and how they want to get there what are you looking in addition to all of your work

at Shelling Point which maybe is taking up a majority of your time here but what else are you looking to get done here at DevConnect so I think it's a lot of again catching up with a lot of the stewards so because of the work that I do with with Gipcoin around governance there's a lot of the stewards particularly in Gitcoin and in the new Stuart Council that we created, a lot of them are here in person. And I think it's important, again, to have that connection because we do have a lot of, let's say, flows that we're putting together together, right? And we're figuring out, hey, does this work? Is this better?

Did we achieve something here that is moving us closer to that flow of the river, to that more structured? pattern and I think in addition to that of course there's also so that's important to have those governance conversations also IRL right and then be able to take them to the online realm and be okay here's where we've

decided we're going to observe this for a while and then improve it but of course also I'm a perpetual judge of the if global circuit and I absolutely love seeing all the new projects I'm excited every single especially after a week like this, how inspired will those people be?

What will they take from everything that they've listened to that they've participated in? What will they take to genuinely create something that is better, that is getting us, that is a stage of evolution? A new Lego. A new Lego. A new Lego. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So at Bankless, we often say like, hey, go work for a Dow. And it sounds like you work for at least two Dow's, if not more. Yeah. For the people that here, Ryan and I say go work for a Dow from our privileged position

of having the centralized company, what does it like to work for a Dow? And do you get compensation for the Dow's that you work for? Like, is this how you buy groceries? So right now, actually, this is a fortuitous event because I am actually now transitioning into the GitPoint Dow. where I'm going to get paid by the different work streams within the Dow. So, for instance, because I do the content curation, I did the content curation for a shilling point,

there is a certain amount that will be allocated to me for that work. Then the stuff that I do with governance engagement will come from another work stream. Then I also help out with funding public goods. There's a lot of relationships that I have and we pull funds for the grant. rounds. That's going to come from another stream. So it really is this very interesting and multifaceted, again, taking that whole thing of streams into a river type dynamic of what is it that you contribute to and what is the level of that contribution. And that's how it flows. And do you feel that the DOWs that you are part of, how would you rate their adeptness as

to properly balancing contributions to her? We're just getting started. Okay. No. Okay. A lot of of that needs to be improved. And a lot of that, it's fine that we don't know and we haven't figured it out yet. And again, coming back to that thing of like being comfortable in ambiguity and not feeling like we have to get it right from the beginning because every single time we kind of miss something or we don't do it right and so on, it just enables us to improve on it, to do it better, to make it a little bit more transparent, to make it a little bit more accessible, to make it a little bit less taxing. Nice.

But like, yeah. Yeah, contributions over taxing. They're the same thing, but one, people like that one word much better than the other. What was going to be in my last year? Oh, yeah. So for the newer comers to the crypto space, people that came in 2020 or beyond or more recently. Oh, welcome. Well, yeah, welcome.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for being here. We're so glad. We're so glad you're here. What advice do you have to help these people actually stay in the crypto space? And why should they stay in the crypto space? I think definitely make sure that, and again, man, this is going to be your most analogy-laden episode of all time. Oh, I'm not so sure about that.

Oh, really? Oh, yeah. We're pretty hot on the analogies at Banquist. So I'll keep going. So I think, again, with that whole idea of the path, right? There was this one that just is established and everything. And when you start off a different path, it's going to be a little. little bit trickier. You're going to have some obstacles in the way. You're going to have to be

like a little bit more uncomfortable. Like I say, there's like some stinging metals here and there and whatever. A frog here and, but just casually laying out in the grass, but not. For me, it's don't feel or don't give in to feeling overwhelmed or being scared. If you read some article about something or if you go into a discord and you feel, this isn't really my vibe. I would say look for those communities that are value aligned with you and what you want. This is one of the reasons why, particularly with Gitcoin, right, there are so many people coming in because they are genuinely interested in regenerative stuff,

public goods, solar punk stuff, like all of this impact. And it's that value alignment that really makes that ability to start to start, contributing so much easier than if you go into, let's say, a discord that you found somewhere that's full of price talk and all of this, that you just don't feel like, where do I even start? What do I even want to be here? And so I think there's that kind of shock sometimes of, oh, I didn't think this was, or you go to one of these events that I mentioned earlier, not the good ones, but the other ones. And you go, oh, is this what crypto is all about? It's not. It's not. And so that exploration, I think, almost have that explorer mindset. Go and look behind this.

Go and talk to some other people who are also on this path with you. Maybe share some maps. Okay, I've got this bit. You have that bit. Maybe let's do things together. Colonel also is a very, very good example of where this can be done, right? A colonel was started by one of the the Gipcoin co-founders, VEC, and it's a great, great journey to take people from that very edge of the path a little bit further. It won't take you all the way, but it will take you and enable you to meet some people to have that journey, to take that journey together. So, explorer mindset, absolutely.

But like, again, the curious, nice kind, not the invader kind. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Simona, thank you for coming on Layer Zero. Thank you so much. This has been fun. Cheers, and I will see you all around Amsterdam.

See you in the dam. In the Dam, of course. Oh, beautiful.