Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Griff Green: Giveth – Creating the New Economic Model of Giving

Episode Date: April 23, 2019

We're joined by Griff Green, one of the founders at Giveth. The organization, which emerged out of the ashes of the DAO, aims to create a better model for charitable work. Operating as a Dapp, Giveth aims to bring new governance models in the nonprofit space. The goal is to create better incentives for donors and charity workers, in all types of social good projects. Topics covered in this episode: Griff's background as a gold-hodling digital nomad His time spent at Slock.it and his involvement in the aftermath of the DAO collapse How traditional charity organizations work The problems these organizations face and how funds get allocated The Giveth backstory and why the team chose to start the project Incentive alignment in the charity space The use of bonding curves and continuous organizations to fund charity projects The project's roadmap and future Episode links: Giveth website Rewriting the Story of Human Collaboration Griff's talk at EthCC Crowdfunding the Commons The Future of Giving is Crowdfunding the Commons Deep Dive: Augmented Bonding Curves Episode 282 with Simon de la Rouviere The Giveth blog Giveth on GitHub Join the Giveth community Sponsors: Azure: Deploy enterprise-ready consortium blockchain networks that scale in just a few clicks - http://aka.ms/epicenter This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/284

This is Epicenter, Episode 284 with guest, Griff Green. This episode of Epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft Azure. Do you have an idea for a blockchain app but are worried about the time and cost it will take to develop? The new Azure Blockchain DevKit is a free download that brings together the tools you need to get your first app running in less than 30 minutes. Learn more at aka.ms.m.s.combs. Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebassiqw. And my name is Sonny Agarwal.

So today we're speaking with Griff Green. Griff is one of the founders of Giveth. And Giveth is an organization that is trying to re-engineer the altruism economy and the incentive mechanisms around charity work. So Griff has an interesting background. So he's one of the first employees at Slocut, and he was involved in the Dow. And he was there when the whole Dow hack happened. And Giveth actually kind of came out of that whole fiasco.

And we talked about the Thou. We also talked about Giveth as an organization and how it aims to solve the problems in charity work. And they're doing some interesting things there too with token bonding curves and continuous organizations. Yeah. You know, the Giveth team, they seem to be working on a number of different projects. They have their hands in a project called DAPNode, which is really cool, an identity project called Ident3. They're pretty involved with the Gwifi project in Barcelona. And so, you know, Giveth is like very large project that touches on a lot of different things.

And so today we actually talk with Griff specifically about the Giveth Dap. They're like core DAP, which is around helping nonprofits. But, you know, coming in the future, we'd love to like, you know, have Jordy, who's one of the other co-founders, maybe come in and talk about some of the other stuff that Gibbeth is working on as well. Yeah, absolutely. So just a heads up, we had to record this interview in two parts. So there's the first part, which is about 20 minutes where we talked about Griff and so it was background. And then the rest of the interview where we talk about Giveeth is a separate interview.

So if you're watching this on video and you're wondering why the backgrounds are totally, different. That's why audio listeners shouldn't really be concerned about this. So without further delay, here's our interview with Griff Green. We're here today with Griff Green. Griff is one of the founders of an organization called Giveth. He's also one of the founders of DapNode, which we'll also talk about today. But primarily we'll be talking about Giveth and re-engineering altruism with blockchain and Ethereum.

Hi, hi, Griff. Thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me. This is cool, man. We have a pretty international thing going on. I'm in South Africa, Sunny's in China. I don't even know where you are. I'm in an undisclosed location. Oh. No, I'm in France, as I usually am. So, yeah, thanks for coming on. So why don't you start by telling us about yourself and how you got involved in crypto?

Yeah, I'm a crazy crypto anarchist. I got involved because I didn't even. have a bank account for a while I was actually using gold and silver to move money around like physical bars and to store my value because I just hated the banks so much back in the day I've actually grown to appreciate the value of the banks ring in some ways much more than I used to seeing that how hard it is to do banking but but yeah it was a pretty clear advantage to use Bitcoin instead of gold and silver right so I a long time ago I think I traded like three grand worth of gold and silver for some Bitcoin.

And then I kind of forgot. I didn't really forget about it, but I wasn't watching it closely. And then November 2013, Bitcoin went to 1,000. And I just like was blown away. I was a nomad traveling around. I didn't have a, I was living very cheaply. And I think I made $24,000. And I could live, I was like telling myself, I could live off this for two years.

Like, what is this stuff? I need to like, and the more I learned, I just became entranced. Like, I couldn't stop learning more and investigating about what is this stuff, you know? And I ended up getting a master's degree in digital currency while traveling to Ecuador to try to bring Ecuador Bitcoin. Unfortunately, Ecuador made Bitcoin illegal, so I had to kind of leave the country because I didn't feel like ending up in a third world prison. and part of my master's degree, I was writing a paper about a white paper for a bike sharing economy.

So it was called a bike coin. And it was very similar actually to the Dow and what Slokit was doing. And so I sent them a video that I made about how excited I am about decentralizing the sharing economy with Dax. At this time, I was using the BitShare's terminology. In fact, I didn't realize how awesome Ethereum was at all. I was really in more of the BitShare space, and I was following Mastercoin and Nxte and all the other. MasterCoin doesn't even exist anymore. It's Omni.

All these other web, like 2.0 platforms is what we called them, Bitcoin 2.0 or whatever. And Ethereum was last on my list. Everyone told me is vaporware. But I heard Slokket was decentralized into sharing economy. So I just emailed them, told them I would work for free, and I want to just be a part of what they're doing. And eventually, I think they watched my video explaining my bike sharing economy, and they let me in right after they hired Stefan, actually, Stefan Toll. And then the whole Dow thing happened. Yeah, we'll get into that in a little bit.

But I'm curious, tell me a little bit more about what it's like to be literally, living and storing your value in gold and silver, were you like lugging around silver bars and stuff over distances and perhaps even international borders? A little bit, a little bit. I definitely would, I still carry silver around with me because I'm just kind of crazy, you know, just like jump silver, like old quarters and dimes. But most of the time it would end up with me storing golden silver with a friend in Seattle, and then he would find someone to sell it to or just buy it himself whenever I needed money, and then send me money via wire. Eventually, I ended up getting a bank account to make some of that easier. But yeah, it's not that hard, you know.

You just have to have friends. I'm very a social guy, so I have lots of friends that are always down to help me out. So use your friends as banks essentially. Yeah, exactly. Decentralized banking. It's a real thing. You don't need crypto, dude. And then so from there, tell us about your experience at Slocut. What was that like? I mean, I hadn't even realized that you were working at Slocut. But yeah, tell us with that. Yeah, ah man, I had a great time. Slokit was amazing. I really dove head first into all the crypto stuff. I learned to write a little bit of solidity and hanging out with Christoph and Lepteris and Simon and Stefan it was really amazing you know it was like a family there was only five of us at

Sloket so eventually we added a couple more people or one more guy very near to the Dow launch but we yeah it was you know it would we I helped build the community on the slack and it you know it felt like we were on to something so huge with the Dow that was just everybody was so excited by it and I got to kind of be the leader of the community and like shepherd everyone into learning how to use the Dow and how to uh I met Georgie Bellina by creating this uh Dow Ninja like test so everyone if you wanted to be a Dow Ninja you had to like figure out you know how what is approved you know at the time solidity was in 3.6 Like the ERC 20 standard wasn't even really a thing.

It was a thing, but people weren't following it. Like Golem, they just made their own token. Because back then, ERC20, that was an idea. So people didn't even know what the approved function did. People didn't know how to vote. And so I created lots of cool walkthroughs and to kind of educate the early Ethereum Dow people. And I mean, yeah, it was the time of my life, man.

And I couldn't believe the opportunity I got straight out like that. Like this was my first crypto job and probably my almost kind of my last. Yeah. And then, you know, I guess most of us are well aware of, you know, the end state of that project that what ended up happening with that. How did you actually meet Jordy? You mentioned you started working with him on some Sloket tutorials and stuff. Was he working at Sloket as well? No, no. We were probably going to hire him, honestly. But he built something amazing. Like the day before the Dow launched, he built a, he actually made a poll request to the Dow repo and wanted to integrate liquid democracy into the Dow from the get-go. And he had coded it all up and it was a piece of art. But, you know, the Dow got launched. So it wasn't going to come in. And we weren't going to delay it.

So then he actually started working on how to do it without it being a native to the Dow code itself. And so he built a system for doing that. And literally the day that the Dow was being hacked, I was writing a blog post about how we could integrate liquid democracy into the Dow using his amazing work. Because he had actually delegated votes for me already at that point. This is like three weeks in. So he was a really interesting character, one of the best devs. outside of the crew that we already knew. But then when the Dow got hacked, he also knew the code better than almost anyone.

And so I brought him into the Robin Hood group, which was trying to rescue the funds that was left over that the Dow hacker didn't steal. And there were a bunch of us in there. And then he actually wrote some, after the first person wrote the code that ended up stealing a lot of the funds. wrote the second Dow Hack contract, then it ended up also stealing the funds. And then after that, you know, when it came back to, okay, now we have all the money. Now what? You know, stealing funds in Ethereum is really easy. Giving it back to people is so hard. Like, it's ridiculous.

Everyone has an idea of what you should do and blah, blah, blah. And so most people bailed on the, on the Robin Hood group. And so we formed the White Hat group. And Jordi and I, I think, are the only public members at that time. And then we ended up after the hard fork, we ended up helping another person who actually sent half a million dollars to the Dow.

And there was another Dow hack that had to happen to get that money out. And then there was, I mean, there's so many Dow hack stories, which I hope we can blow through and keep going to talk about Giveth and these things. But after that, there was this ETC thing, right? Because ETC all of a sudden two weeks later, Polo puts it up, and it's like, oh, my God, we're holding 10% of all ETC in existence, right?

The YHack group is. So we flee to Switzerland, and this is the first time I meet Jordi, we find a lawyer in Switzerland to help us out. And we met at the airport. The White Hat Group all fled to Switzerland for legal support. And it's like, oh, hi, Jody. you know. So that's how I met Jordy. And after that, the White Hat Group gave all the ETC back to everyone. And we're still getting, I think we actually still have $8 million sitting in a contract

that it's like, come on, people, just take the money, please. But it'll just sit there. Everyone is, everyone's always like, oh, the White Hat Groups, they're going to steal the money. It's like, we only say, we only like left it like possible to do these things so that we could encourage people to come and get the money before we do something. wild with it. But obviously, guys, we're just going to let it sit in the contract forever. So don't worry about it. You know, the White Hat group was one of the things that came out of the Dow. You know, I know another one was this mini-me token, which was, you know, I remember I heard

about it because it seemed to be like one of the first tokens or first contracts in general that actually implemented some sort of like on-chain upgradeability, which was, you know, that was a cool concept. And like, I remember when I was working at a consistent. census two years ago, like, you know, people were talking about this whole mini-meat token. It's a really cool idea. And then the third one of the third things that came out of this out, like, you know, the ashes of the Dow was, you know, you wanted to start experimenting with governance and like, you know, this going back to this, you know, I think you took back the old DAC acronym from, you know,

like you mentioned from a bit shares gaze, but, you know, you reframed it. So can you tell us a little bit about that? Like, so what was the goal here with experimenting with governance? of this whole DAC concept. Yeah, so just to go back to Minimi, we created the MiniMe contract out of the lessons of the Dow. We wanted upgrade ability. We wanted the ability to actually vote

without locking tokens. And there were a lot of other cool features that the Minimi contract made possible. And we just is like, hey, if you want a governance token, this is it, right? Because otherwise, all those lessons just get lost. And so that was, Mini Me Token was the first Giveeth project. That was a gift to the world just for Dow governance in general.

And we were generously funded when Ether was like $10 to continue on that route. But there wasn't a whole lot to do at first. But we knew that we wanted to start a project around building a platform for decentralized governance experiments. So that instead of like trying to, you know, risk the fate of some project completely on an experimental Dow, you could instead start a charity and use that Dow to decide where to send funds to which projects that support the charity's cause. So that was kind of the idea like, hey, this is a playbox. While you're experimenting with decentralized governance, you can also make the world a better place at the same time.

win-win right also we when the Dow hack happened or and and everything was finalized so I hack group was like hey Dau's kind of have a bad name you know this is a scary place so we wanted to make sure Dows could we started give it the white hack group started to give it so we can make sure that Dows could end up with a good name that they do make the world a better place not just you know making people money and also that we can experiment with decentralized governance because we're not going to get it right for years and years and you know everything that we're doing here is research everything in general in the blockchain space even right now they're research projects and anyone who has any like other

ideas I would love to have a debate but whatever we're doing now is probably not going to be useful 10 years from now and or and we should plan for that so that's why give it the kind of started is like hey this let's let's do our research in a way that helps the world you know and so we ended up building one version they give a DAP using mini me and a couple of other contracts of all contract and a milestone contract and then we also used but then we realized that that was a little bit that didn't really give us the results that we wanted so we made a second version where we kind of integrated a liquid funding we call it liquid

pledging, so you're pledging your donations. And it's kind of like liquid democracy meets fund management. It's a really cool smart contract system and governance system that doesn't require consensus amongst a group, but yet it allows for group funding from individuals so they can just kind of decide, oh yeah, you know, as I want my money to go here, I want my money to go there, I'll delegate authority over my funds to this guy and then he can decide. but oh actually I don't like his decision I can veto take the funds back and send it somewhere else allowing for those kind of movements which I think is just really cool features that I wanted to see in the charitable space that didn't exist at the time this episode of Epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft and the Azure blockchain workbench getting your blockchain from the whiteboard to production can be a big undertaking and something as simple as connecting your blockchain to iot devices or existing ERP systems is a project itself. Well, the folks at Microsoft had you covered. You already know about the Azure blockchain

workbench and how easy it makes bootstrapping your blockchain network pre-configured with all the cloud services you need for your enterprise app. Their new development kit is the IFTTTTT for blockchains. Suppose you want to collect data from someone in remote location via SMS and have that data packaged in a transaction for your HyperLedger Fabric blockchain. The development kit allows you to build this integration in just a few steps in a simple drag-and-drop interface. Here's another great example. Perhaps you're an institution working with Ethereum and rely on CSV files sent by email.

One click in the Devkit and you can parse these files and have the data embedded in transactions. Whatever you're working with, the Devkit can read, transform, and act on the data. To learn more and to build your first application in less than 30 minutes, visit AKA.ms. Escenter and be sure to follow them on Twitter at MSFT blockchain.

We'd like to thank Microsoft and Azure for their supportive epicenter. So moving now to charity organizations, can you describe in your view, what's the landscape of traditional charity organizations and how they work? And talk about some of the issues that you see there with regards to governance and fund allocation

and some of the problems that these organizations face. Yeah, I mean, it's almost taboo to talk bad about charities. I feel it's always a weird spot because you have all these people that are, you know, sacrificing, taking a lower salary so that they can actually contribute and make the world a better place. But then, you know, at the same time, I would argue that they're working in a broken system. That it's unfortunate, but the incentive alignment that happens in the charity space is just, it's broken. people who are trying to make the world a better place have to fight against that system. And so it's a little taboo to talk about, but I just want to make sure that everyone understands

that the people that are in the charity world are doing amazing work, but the system is totally misaligned. So there's a few main points. Number one, the people who contribute value to the system are poorly rewarded. In fact, sometimes they're not rewarded at all, especially. donors right in the normal world when you donate when you invest in a startup you're putting in money and then you reap huge rewards for the value that's created but in the charity world you put in money and you get nothing and that's

that's a huge fail it's a huge fail also just in general you know they're not a they're not really creating communities the the charitable system as it today, the best bet is to start basically the same corporate business entity that a startup would use. But then, you know, these corporate charities, their best, the goal is to grow, grow, grow, find a way to create income streams and revenue streams and get as big as possible, which is great except when you're actually trying to make the world a better place. you're trying to solve a problem. You're not trying to just grow and do the normal business strategies. What do you mean by corporate entity? I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that

sense. Well, you have this classic corporate structure where you have a CEO and shareholders and it's the same structure as a corporation. But wait, you don't have shareholders in a charity. Most charities are some form of nonprofit and NGO, right? Yeah, they have a board of advisors, and it's usually run by their largest donors. So while it may not be the same exact scenario, or at least by words, and it's definitely not the same alignment structure. It is the same situation where you have a bunch of people who put in a bunch of money and try to tell you what you should do.

Whereas I don't think that's really the people with the money are probably the best people to be making decisions on how that charity should be run. It should be coming bottom up. The people on the ground are the ones with the best ideas because they're in it every day. Okay. I understand. Yeah. I mean, I think there's some truth to that in the sense that, of course, money will cause influence in a charity. So if you have a bunch of people who donate.

a lot of money who are part of the board of directors of that charity and they're making decisions that maybe aren't all aligned with the realities on the ground, then in that case, that might, the money might not be allocated in the best, sort of more, most efficient way possible. I think having people on the ground and their experience is beneficial to a charity and to sort of conduct a work of that charity. But what do you think about the absence or non-abstance of experts within charity work that can say, okay, this is the best way to allocate funds based on research, like for example, economists

when it comes to allocating funds to reduce poverty. Is that something that we see a lot in charity world, or is it missing? I think in general it's missing because if you're an expert and you have a lot of value to contribute, you're going to get a lot more value working in the for-profit world. And that's just the, the,

status quo. The experts that come in, they usually work pro bono and maybe they're putting in 10 hours a week out of their kindness of their heart, but they can't put their full focus in because they have a real job that pays them a lot of money. And this is, in the end, this is the biggest problem. This is the systemic issue is that the value being created in the altruistic space isn't accounted for. There's no, the economic models that we use today don't actually say, hey, there's value in helping the less fortunate in society. There's value in protecting a river or any other shared resource that the society happens to obviously derive value from. It's just not in the accounting books. So the people that are experts in how that river should, like, let's take a spring, right?

The experts on the spring, they're the bottling factory that's creating, you know, water for water bottles, for just like plastic water bottles that you can find all over the world. If Coca-Cola has a spring that they want to make sure they can extract as much water from in a sustainable way, then they're going to hire experts. They're going to be able to pay those experts to focus on making sure that spring is going to be able to provide this service for as long as possible. Whereas the community spring that is just out there for everyone to come and check out and drink from, it's going to get degraded over time. No one's going to put time into making sure that we're taking out the right amount of water

and that it doesn't get vandalized or destroyed by something nearby that might be polluting the groundwater. These things aren't taken care of because although that community spring is providing the same value that this other, that Coca-Cola, the spring that Coca-Cola is using, the community spring doesn't have economic value in our economic models. So really the problem is about like, you know, it comes down to how do we incentivize taking care of the comments, right? Where, like, if you allow the spring to be, like, privately owned by a corporation, they have the incentive to, you know, care for it.

But then when there's a community, when there's a community, when there's a conference, owns stuff like the lake or whatever, that's like that's where the problem lies? Yeah, exactly. Well, because then when the private entity comes in, they control the spring. They own the spring and the community no longer has access to it. So that's not really great either. But what we want to do is actually create an economy around that spring, right? Because the bottling factory, Coca-Cola, who owns a spring, they've effectively created an economy. And I would even argue it's an altruistic economy. I mean, they are providing access to clean water all over the world. Bottled water is a magical thing. In 1900s, yeah, even in like, sorry, like in the 18th century,

like that would blow people's mind that you could just have access for a dollar, clean water almost anywhere in the world. This is a feat of modern economy. And Coca-Cola is, is doing God's work, okay? It's amazing to say that, and you wouldn't normally think that, but if you actually look at it from like a really high level, clean water everywhere in the world is magical. But they did it because the current economic models satisfy individual wants and needs very well,

but they don't take care of shared resources at all or qualitative measurements, right? The standard of living for the less fortunate and in general. And so now we need to create an economy around community owned property. So doesn't that make it seem then more that we should be trying to provide more private ownership and like, you know, find stewards of a lot of these public goods? Like so, you know, if there's a like, you know, we should allow corporations to own a lake and own the community lake. And why is that not the solution then? And what are some examples of some common goods that we can't just give over to the stewardship or custodianship of these corporations?

I mean, it is a fine, it is a fine solution. I don't think it's the best solution. I don't think private ownership of everything is the best solution. In general, private ownership leads to a lot of centralization of wealth and a lot of other, you know, issues such as a lack of access to the community. And I think the spring example is a perfect case. Here we are on a crypto podcast. I mean, we have the opportunity with this technology to create new types of economies that actually provide public goods.

And I don't think a lot of people really think of blockchains from this perspective, but that's what's been happening ever since Bitcoin was created. Bitcoin itself is a public good. anyone has access to international banking just by creating a random number, right? If you can create a random number on a device, you have access to international banking. This is a huge good for society. And there's other blockchains that have done crazy things too that are more obvious as a public good, prime coin, cure coin, name coin.

And I could talk about those if you guys want. But I feel like using this technology and creating economies, nonstop like unstoppable economic machines that provide value for these shared resources is a way better way to go than selling the shared resources off to some private company that's just going to extract as much profit as they can. So tell us about Giveth and why you chose to start this project with your team. Basically charity is a low-hanging fruit. It's by far the, the, most, it has the worst incentive alignment out of any system I know of that has any kind of

real use case in this world. There's donors, donate funds, and they lose, but their contributions raise the standard of living for everyone else in society. This is a really sad state, and I believe blockchain technology has this opportunity, has a special use case of realigning incentives. When the Dow collapsed and it was pretty wild, the White Hat group really had to re-address, look at where do we want to practice Dao's? We wanted to keep the Dow mission alive, you know, and charity just seemed like the best opportunity. Number one, it's really low risk.

I don't think the SEC is going to come after anybody who creates a token to help the homeless. I don't think that's going to be their number one target. And then also, it's just an opportunity. It's an opportunity to actually give DAOs a better name. If you're using DAOs to do good work in society, people will believe that decentralized governance might actually have some other impact besides just making investors rich. You know, that's not exciting to me. And it's not exciting to the Whitehack group in general. So the other unknown benefit of really working in the charity space and trying to bring Dow's to charity is the, it's an amazing filter.

The Giveeth community is so, it's just full of like kind-hearted people that want to make the world a better place and aren't, aren't motivated by money. And that filter was like an added bonus that we didn't see coming. So it's been, it's been a wild ride and it's been a lot of fun. I think we chose the right direction. And now that we have actually the Give-Thap in a future complete state, we can start doing these economic experiments and start funding DOWs for charity in unique ways that aligns incentives that people never thought was possible. Okay, very cool.

And so, you know, I remember I kind of like really first learned about Give-th a couple, probably two years ago now. I was on a train with you and Jordi back, you know, in Switzerland, we just came from a talk with the Mirataki. And so you were explaining to me, and back then, really the focus that you guys, if I remember correctly, was really around the transparency of nonprofits. And so, you know, at that time, you were really focused on, like, the claim or thesis was that, like, one of the main issues people have with nonprofits.

is that they don't have a proper view into how their funds are being, where their funds are being spent. And the idea was that somehow a blockchain would contribute to the transparency and that would maybe increase the donations that are coming in. But it seems that, you know, maybe I'm mistaken about this, but that seems to be a little bit less of the focus that you've been focused on lately. And so what kind of maybe led to that shift there? Yeah.

Transparency is definitely number one for us. I mean, traceable donations, I think, are a huge benefit to society. But one of the realizations we had is that you don't actually need a blockchain to do it. We have this amazing DAP, and it uses the blockchain to move money, and it gives people authority over their funds in ways that may not be possible with a normal database, like in a decentralized way. But with a little bit of centralization, it would be okay. Okay, any charity could provide traceable donations to their donors.

Any charity could connect donors to the people who are actually using the funds. But they don't. And, I mean, you know, these large corporate charities, they have so much money. They could do probably a much better job than we can, you know, just as a very small charity living off donations. So the question is, why don't people, why don't these charities actually, want traceable donations. It's because the incentives are misaligned. So yes, the give a Dap is about traceable donations, transparency, accountability, but we basically use what could be replaced by an open database and that gives power to people over their donations and then a simple escrow system.

I mean, it's very rare to see escrow is used in the charity space. And it makes so much sense to me and anyone I've ever talked to, right? You want to build an orphanage. You need a million dollars to make it happen. You don't need a million dollars right away. Maybe you get $100,000 to get started, and there's 900K sitting there once you hit milestones. The give a gap makes that pretty simple and easy,

and it's the default approach. There's reviewers that say whether or not you've completed the milestone and then you go to the next. But you don't need a blockchain for any of this. What you do need a blockchain for is realigning incentives so that everyone who's participating is actually winning, including the underlying cause. And that's what Giveth really brings to the table. The Giveth DAP actually allows people who want to raise funds to actually dip their toes in a risk-free way into the blockchain space. so that people who are experimenting with new types of economies

that actually can provide an underlying good, they can interface with the real world. And that's where the give it DAPs direction kind of went is more about allowing people who are trying to do good work to actually participate in the blockchain space without even having to understand how all this stuff works. So let's maybe give an example of how the give a thap can be used to fund a charity. So let's take like the example of this trash heroes that you alluded to in one of your talks at ETHC in Paris.

So trash heroes is this organization in Thailand. They've got volunteers and they go out to pick up the garbage on the, beaches and stuff like that, right? Like grab all the water bottles and clean up the beach. So if, if trash heroes were to emerge today as as a giveth Dap, you know, let's, let's take the example and walk us through, you know, the inception of that charity on, on the give a thap and maybe like all the way to like trash is eradicated and we don't longer need that DAP anymore.

Can you walk us through that scenario? Yeah. to. So if you go to Thailand right now or actually all over Southeast Asia, there's this altruistic organization called Trash Hero. It's a real organization. They are, they started in Thailand just picking up trash on one beach and they grew and grew as a community movement, but it's completely altruistic. Now, they can stay altruistic. They can go, if they want to participate in the blockchain space and receive donations in ether or die, they can actually, or anyone who can convert whatever crypto token they want into die, they can actually put up

requests for funding just like they would on Indiegogo or Kickstarter or any of those. They could just go to give a Dap, say, hey, I want some, you know, money for this, right? And normal people could just send them donations the old-fashioned way. So it's a very risk-adverse way. You don't have to experiment. It's not like applying for money from a Dow directly. You're just saying, hey, I'm open for donations from anything in the crypto space. Like any other charity would ask for money these days, right?

It's okay. Pledge and you're helping us and you feel good about your pledge and it helps us. Yeah, exactly. And so this is the gateway to go into something a little more experimental. What's really nice about this instead of applying for what most foundations and things requires that you apply to their grant program, and this is a very much more open. Anyone can fund and coordinate overfunding the cleaning of a beach that they care about. But now if we want to kick it up to another notch, DAOs can actually participate.

If you have a DAO with a purpose that's like, hey, I want to clean up the beaches of Thailand. the Dow can't donate to, you know, your legal entity. They can only donate to a smart contract. So they, or without intermediaries at least. So now a Dow with a purpose of cleaning up beaches can fund this project directly. Now the question is, how do we get funds to this Dow? And this is where we start experimenting with the crazy blockchain world. You guys had Simon on a few weeks ago, and he explained token bonding curves and curation markets, and he did a great job.

And I don't want to really dive deep into the technical explanations. If you guys want to learn more about how continuously funded organizations are progressing as a research idea in the blockchain space, I really recommend looking at any of Simon's work and also, a givether, Jeff Emmett, wrote an amazing blog post that is really geared towards like an introductory level explanation of continuously funded organizations called rewriting the story of human collaboration. It's a great blog post, really entry level that just shows how token bonding curves can work. But here, this is where we have a Dow that actually receives funding from an economy.

You can almost think of it as like a programmatic tax, where anyone who is participating in this economic system, there's a way for money to be funneled to that Dow that's doing the good work. And what's really crazy is if you align the incentives properly, it's scalable upon demand. And if you don't mind, I wouldn't mind taking kind of a detour to what was happening in the blockchain space in 2013, 2014. There were back in the day when people were making blockchains instead of just tokens, it was all about aligning incentives. It was all about, hey, what common good are we going to provide to society with this blockchain? And I know that sounds crazy, right? And that's not really how most people were thinking about it. But from a high level, this is what it looks like, right?

Namecoin was the first fork of Bitcoin. The common good it provided was uncensurable domain registration. And this is magical, you know, just like Bitcoin, international banking for all. And now anyone can register a dot-bit domain anywhere in the world whenever they want and no one can stop them. Now, what's really interesting is that this has been going on for almost like seven or eight years. and no one even cares. No one registers.bit domains. If Namecoin was a startup,

if Namecoin was a charity, oh, it would have failed a long time ago, okay? No one uses it. But because it's an economy, an economic machine that's just allowing anyone in the world to register dot bit domains, it continues because it's scalable. It scales based on demand.

Another example is Primecoin. Prime coin, no one is a, another one no one cares about. No one really is like trying to find a list of prime numbers. But guess what? Primecoin made it anyway. They did all of this without university grants, without any support from an investor or an angel investor. Maybe the angels were basically devs that wanted to play with this technology. But now we have a list of 30 plus million prime numbers, right? And this prime numbers are being discovered every day. And this is wild. This doesn't. even, no one even cares.

And the people who are actually finding the prime numbers, they don't care. Right? The people that are speculating on prime coin, they don't care about prime numbers. But yet a common good is being provided and everyone providing that common good is acting in their own best interest

with for-profit modus. And cure coin is the one that really exemplifies this. Because in 2002, way before blockchain, People created this, Stanford researchers created this folding at home project, which allows you, there's another one that's more popular called SETI at Home, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But basically, you can run this program on the background of your computer and altruistically fold proteins for cancer research.

This is folding at home. And so this has been going on for, this is going on since 2002. and in 2014, someone decided to create a cryptocurrency around it. So for 12 years, this was done altruistically. People are folding proteins for cancer research, Alzheimer's research, out of the kindness of their heart. But then cure coin comes in. And they create an economy around that idea, where to mine curecoin, you have to run

their software, which happens to be running folding at home. And folding coin also does this exact same thing. And there's also grid plus coin, which, not grid plus coin, just grid coin. Grid coin that also does this for other at-home projects. But people who are mining Monero or mining other GPU mining software blockchains, they'll look at curecoin, and when the price goes up or the mining power drops, they'll start folding and unfolding proteins for profit. And yet this is an altruistic cause.

They create an economy where when speculators come in and buy curecoin, this actually makes people who are mining cure coin want to put more computing power towards it. So you have this scalable, balanceable economy around an altruistic underpinning. And this is what Giveth is trying to do with the new technology to bring it out of the digital realm and into the physical realm. Right. So essentially, like, you know, it seems what's nice about folding at home and that, you know, prime coin is that we can kind of turn this search for prime numbers and this, you know, folding problem into a sort of proof of work, like, you know, a useful proof of work.

You know, it doesn't solve all of the nice properties you need for like the best proof of work, but, you know, we can have a whole other conversation about that. But, you know, it's something that we can describe using just people. pure digital stuff, right? But then how do we, like, you know, how do we prove the picking up of trash in this Thai beach in a digital way? That's kind of where Giveth's Dap comes in? Exactly. Giveth's Dap is the proof of work from the physical realm to the digital realm, to the blockchain space. So with our transparent, traceable donations, that gives a lot of accountability to what's happening in the real world that's missing in the current charity space,

this can provide the proof of work for actual contributions to a community-led project, whether it's taking care of a spring or even taking care of orphans or anything else in the physical realm. Now, I think it's a stretch to start making people doing altruistic work, like social impact work, just start off with this kind of crazy blockchain proof of work stuff. I think we'll probably end up starting off more with like open source projects and maybe even things in the crypto world that make a little, that were the people who are doing the good work. And even though it's not valued by the economic models we have today, they can understand the system a little bit better. But eventually, once this system gets fine-tuned, we can move it into the real

altruistic proof of work that everyone in Giveth is really excited about. So is the idea that this Dow in the, you know, this trash commons Dow, it basically acts as an Oracle service to like say, oh, look, this guy has been doing a really good job at like, you know, he's been going out to the beaches every weekend he has. It's just like helped him. And so they'll, like mint coins for him. Is that kind of what the goal here is? Yeah. It's a little, it's a little more complex than that. But effectively, yes, it's just like Dash. Dash has this proposal framework where people say, hey, I want to take care of the Dash system. I have this idea. I want to make YouTube videos. I want to do this. I want to do that. And I can apply for

funding and then the the DGBB, the digital governance by the blockchain in the dash ecosystem, the master nodes will vote and they will fund those projects. Now, what we want to do is much more complicated and it takes the lessons of all the decentralized governance that the Giveth crew and the general token engineering and governance experts have been observing and taking all the all the really, you know, the, the the research that's on the forefront of this space, and combining it together in a well-balanced, well-engineered system that can actually provide continuous funding for an underlying common good.

So, like, I just want to say this does exist in society right now. It's called governments. Governments are continuously funded organizations, but they're centralized and they use force to achieve their funding. And so the goal here is to create continuously funded organizations that are voluntary that anyone can participate in, but will still provide the same needs and services that a government often is needed to provide. So that leads us into the next topics. You mentioned Simon, who's been on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. And again, I'm going to reference your excellent talk at ECC, which will be in the show notes, to take us to the next topic, which is bonding curves.

this idea of continuous organizations. So maybe taking again from this idea of trash heroes in that example, explain how continuous organizations are useful for building successful charities. Yeah, perfect. So let's just do a quick recap, right? So someone comes in with an idea to clean a beach. They make a proposal on the give it daft. There's a DAO that has money that is then funding that proposal on the give it debt.

Now, when they actually fund that proposal, this Dow is part of an economy, an economy that's based on a token. So it's actually a two token system. There's the reserve currency, which I expect to be using X-Dai, but we'll see. When it's built, we'll see what's out there. And then X-Di is just like Dai. It's $1 per token. So this Dow will send X-Dai, a stable coin, to the give-eth Dap. And the give-th-dap is smart enough that when it pays out the milestone,

it actually will send the X-Di to a token bonding curve and mint tokens from the bonding curve and give that to the recipient of who's cleaning the beach. And what's really nice here is that when a lot of, of people are asking for, you know, money, they need that money to be a stable value. They don't need, they're not trying to be speculators. So we need to give the people who are doing good work a stable value. And what, when we're converting it using a token bonding curve and giving them tokens, they get that value, they get if it's for a thousand dollars, right? They'll get a thousand

worth of value right there but in tokens. And if they need to convert that to a stable currency, they just push another button, it goes back in the bonding curve, and they get exactly the amount of money that they would expect. The benefit here, though, is if they want to keep those tokens, they are now part of the governance of that Dow. And we want the people that are doing the good work to be part of that governance. And so now let's get into where that token bonding curve comes in,

and how it creates the continuous funding for this down. A bonding curve is basically a smart contract that mince and burns tokens based off of how much money it has in it. Often people talk about the supply of the token as the actual deterministic thing that says how much the price is, but also the reserve, the amount of money in that smart contract, can be used as well.

And so I like to talk about it based off of how much money is in the smart contract. And when there's very little money in that smart contract, the tokens are cheap. And when there's a lot of money in that smart contract, the tokens are more expensive. And if you do this, you can actually create a tax that funds this Dow by saying, let's say that a token is worth $1. So someone sends $100 into the token bonding curve and they get 100 tokens. Then if someone else sends 100 tokens in, they should get $100 back, right? But we can actually align incentives in such a way where when people exit the economy, when people decide to sell their tokens, they have to pay a tax.

So if they are burning their tokens in the token bonding curve, 100 tokens, then they actually only get $9,000. five die and five die five dollars worth of value will go into the Dow that then uses those funds to do good work in whatever underlying cause you're working you're working with so this this economy it has aligned incentives because whenever anyone is taking a profit they're also donating to charity effectively if i can maybe put this into some context you know what this sounds sounds very similar to me. You know, correct me if I'm wrong here. But this reminds me quite a bit of a game called FOMO 3D that gained quite a bit of notoriety in the Ethereum community a couple months ago now.

And so how that game worked was it was this like really interesting continuous pyramid scheme, really. And what would happen is that you would go ahead and buy shares or they called them key. keys in this game in this FOMO 3D game and when you buy keys half the money that you pay with eth and half of the ETH that you pay with or whatever the distribution was half goes to the previous shareholders and then the other half goes into this price pool that became used to pay you know they had this whole game with a countdown timer and stuff and you know a fun little thing I suggest people go freed about it. Very interesting.

And so, you know, it kind of created this pyramid scheme where what you wanted to do was buy these keys, buy these shares, and kind of get other people to also start playing the game because, you know, then they'll buy shares. And when they buy shares, you get more money. And then there's the whole game that's going on on the other side that's also bringing in more users. And so this seems very similar, except the difference here is that the half that's going towards this pool, the price pool is instead going to fund this open source or not open source, public goods commons. And that's really like the base, what's providing incentives to this entire system is that like,

you know, because this commons is being funded, that's what's bringing the, you know, what's keeping this. That's like the main base of this entire pyramid scheme engine. That's instead of this like speculative game. Yeah. So it's really interesting. When Ponzi schemes came into the space, I kind of had this revelation or like this weird mind-bending issue is that the general economy, the economic system that we live in, uses the same idea. Like if you speculate on stocks, your goal is to buy a stock when it's low, right, and hope that other. people come in and raise the value of the stock. So like if I buy Amazon when it's low, I hope that people will come in after me and then they'll raise the price and I can sell a stock

in the company. Now, the reason that's not a Ponzi scheme is because there is an actual Amazon company and they are providing goods and services for people and they're using investor funding to actually make that a reality. But also the other thing here is that once a company, does an IPO and those shares of the company are out into the wild, after that IPO event, the company no longer benefits from people speculating on their stock anymore, right? Now, but here what's happening with the bonding curve scheme, because some of the money is going back to the treasury of the nonprofit fund, this actually has, there's no like one IPO moment where like the nonprofit is selling all of its shares right now.

Instead, it's just like continuous thing where as speculation continues to happen, the nonprofit continues to get more funds for development. Exactly. The, the, what's really amazing with the ability to take cryptocurrencies and use them to align incentives properly is you can kind of do some jiu-jitsu, you know, like all the things that you think are. supposed to make the system worse, right? Speculators, and volatility, you can take those and actually make them into a good thing.

So, like, the more volatile, the tokens prices, the more taxes end up being paid. The more donations end up going to this doubt because there's a 5% difference between buying and selling. And so if you actually have the secondary market on Binance, there'll be arbitrage bots that are looking at the volatuation. on the market and just like constantly, if they can make even just a few dollars, they will pay thousands of dollars worth of fees to the charity, to the charitable Dow just to make a few bucks and to stabilize the price of the token. And people working in their own best interest, trying to make a profit, actually fuels the good work that the community, the economy is doing.

Another benefit that I see coming out of this is back to what we're talking about the altruistic donations and how there is no incentives for it. I kind of disagree. There is a bit of an incentive for altruistic donations where there's the social rep you get, right? And if you make a large donation, you can, you know, you'll get a building named after you or something, right? You'll have your plaque on somewhere. but that really only, you know, incentivizes really large donations, but it kind of leaves the small guy out of the picture a little bit, right? Like, you know, I don't have a million dollars to go donate,

but, you know, maybe I have my, you know, once a month, I like set aside $100 to donate to an organization. But, you know, I don't earn any social rep from donating $100, right? And so this seems to basically open up the donation space for, more than just the big guy, right? Would you say that's also true? Absolutely. What's really cool about this system and the way we're doing our governance model is it

actually does incentivize small donations. So like the governance model that we use is called conviction voting. And the amount of voting power each project needs to pass is dependent on how much money it's asking for. So let's say you have a thousand dollar request to clear. clean of beach in Thailand. If the voting power behind the trash hero commons is, you know, enough for $900 of donation, that's effectively being pledged to this milestone on Giveth that can still receive $100 of donation to cap it off from an individual. So you're effectively

creating this, you have this big whale of a donor that says, hey, if someone donates $100 to this milestone, $900 will come instantly in. And then this allows people who don't want to play in the blockchain space to see, oh, hey, like, I can get 9x matching by throwing $100 in here. And then when they do it, boom, they instantly get to see that money come in. And the other thing is that all the stuff that happens for donations, all the social rep is still there. There's a lot of people working really hard on NFTs so that you can give social badges. I was just at a hackathon where a bird chain, a bunch of Berlin hackers, actually won a hackathon by creating social badges that represents people doing good work. And on Giveth, we had a project that was doing

Christmas cards for Venezuela. So that anytime someone bought a Christmas card, an NFT, and sent it somebody, all of the money that was raised would go to a transparent donation towards Venezuela on the give it doubt. And so we can recreate all this stuff. You can still put your name on a house or have a list of, you know, the top contributors to even the commons by and, but then at the same time, we're aligning economic incentives. That brings up an interesting point, I think, which is at a higher level of abstraction, how should we allocate funds more generally to common? So, you know, should we be moving more towards a model

where people just give money into an organization and then through governance, the governance figures out, well, maybe money should be allocated to trash heroes or right now money should be allocated to this community in a remote place where people are very need, And one thing that came up recently was this fire in Paris at the North Dram Cathedral. And then a lot of people started giving money to the organization that takes donations for monuments in France. And a lot of billionaires started giving money.

But then at the same time, you had other people saying, oh, well, you know, this money could be used for something much better. You know, all these hundreds of millions of euros, I think, that were donated, it could be used to feed the needy. So if we had governance systems, now I'm not saying that we shouldn't, we shouldn't, you know, fix Notre Dame. It's a nearly thousand-year-old monument and cultural heritage. But it kind of begs the question of, okay, maybe charitable organizations themselves should be subject to governance so that amongst those charitable donations and all these causes, we should be putting money towards things that actually matter and having experts in there, also economists, et cetera, that are weighing in on those decisions and on that governance model, I think would be something

that, like, you know, bring a lot more value, you know, generally to, to, to the space. This is exactly what excites me the most about the commons. Is this a way, this ability to coordinate effectively amongst various charitable organizations? When you have a free market, you know, people can decide, hey, like, is there going to be a big need for this iPhone? You know, is there going to be a big need for bottled water? You know, what about, you know, people creating fax machines? You know, if you have a company creating fax machines, you're going to be asking for investment

and no one's going to give you money because there isn't a big value for it, right? But then all of a sudden, one of the problems in the economy is when you do create something that has like a short-term value, you get an undue response in the market, right? And this happens a lot in the charity space, like you're saying with notary. If this, if you put this in a token bonding curve in a robust ecosystem where people who start donating all over the world to help Notre Dame, they're going to end up raising the price of the token. So they're going to get fewer tokens than they would if they continue to donate to, let's say, ending

homelessness in Paris, right? Ending homelessness in Paris relative to Notre Dame is actually going to, you know, to have a, or probably be a better buy as a speculator. So now you have speculators that can come in and mediate this overabundance of resources that might go to Notre Dame. Of course, Notre Dame should get a lot more resources than it would have before, right? In fact, if you were somebody who was supporting Notre Dame before this fire, you would make insane profits, you know?

And it's too bad there weren't more people supporting Notre Dame before this fire. fire because maybe the fire would have been prevented if it had a larger base of support. But then when it does have this huge fire, lots of people start coming in. The people that were supporting Notre Dame before all of this, they end up making a profit. And they can sell their profits and start supporting ending homelessness in Paris, which is all of a sudden being forgotten about because of this big fire. And so now we can have like a robust altruistic economy. And, and we, where people, speculators, gain profits by saying, oh, yeah, this is the project that really needs the money.

Yeah, it seems that this essentially turns into a TCR of bonding curve. So, like, you know, it turns into, like, you know, which one, which of these bonding curves you want to put your money into and whatnot. One of the other things, though, questions that I have, though, here is, like, when you bring economic incentives into this, you know, financial incentives, into this system, what if that cause sometimes could cause some sort of, you know, more perverse behaviors? So, for example, let's say, you know, there's the trash hero commons, uh, DAC. And then there's another DAC that's like, you know, garbage, heroes, Carmen, there's, you know,

it's working on the exact same problem. And now they both have extreme economic incentives to, like, go out and essentially shill their DAC instead of the other DAC. And like, you know, we see this happening in the crypto space, right? Like most of the projects that we're building are like, you know, public open source goods. But because they have so many financial incentives tied to them, you suddenly get like, you know, the slightest change between competitors, like, like, like, you know, two different versions of a project, slightest change. And then you add economic incentives into there.

and then you get this like insane tribalism where like people are just like, you know, instead of focusing on developing technolger out there, shilling their token instead of the other. And so how do we make sure that these DACs that were meant to like fund these public goods don't just devolve into such tribalism like that? Well, this is this is the magic. Like I actually think that crypto tribalism is really interesting as an interesting result of this system because, yes,

on the speculating side, right? You're going to have these investors that want to shill their token and blah, blah, blah. But think about the value on the other side of things, the coordination aspect. If you look at Bitcoin Lightning Network, for example, there's a whole bunch of Bitcoin maximalists that are creating competing organizations

that actually are incentivized because of Bitcoin maximalism to actually coordinate effectively on bringing Lightning Network forward as a whole. right? Because they all have Bitcoin, so they're all effectively, um, uh, have aligned, have this one alignment of incentives. Now, what if we could create like, uh, you know, save the rainforest maximalism? So that all the nonprofits that are working towards saving the rainforest now can

coordinate effectively and be open about what their projects are and can work with each other to standardize how they're going to, uh, coordinate effectively, because they all have this token. That of this token that aligns them to act together. Now, of course, you have this other tribalism, like you mentioned, right, where there's Ethereum and then there's Bitcoin and then it's like, oh, which one's better, which one's worse. But, like, I feel like that's just static on Twitter.

It's not nearly as powerful as the coordination that actually brings everyone together to push those two projects forward, which ends up pushing cryptocurrencies forward as a result. But what happens if there's not one rainforest save the rainforest coin, but there's two competing save the rainforest coins, right? And now the, you know, the DAC holders of each of these two race, they're the rainforest coin. They're much more interested in going out and like shilling their DAC rather than like actually going and working on saving the rainforest. Yeah, we need multiple Save the Rainforest tokens. We need multiple Save the Rainforest commons because they keep each other. at bay. They keep each other working competitively in a positive way. Just like we have multiple

crypto tokens, right? If there was just Bitcoin, maybe we would be a little bit lazier. You know, Bitcoin wouldn't be hot to trot to get Lightning Network out so fast because Ethereum's chomping at its bit, you know, at taking this market. So now Ethereum and Bitcoin are effectively competing against each other, but the real competitors, the banks. It's not actually Bitcoin or Now, maybe you go to crypto Twitter and you see all the people like yelling at your Bitcoin's better. Ethereum's better. Eos, man. It's the future of real currency.

No, finance coin. No. But guess what? The real issue isn't which coin is better. The real issue is they're all better than the banks. And this competition is super healthy at advancing the real issue, which is, you know, bringing international banking to everyone and decentralization as a whole. That makes sense. And so, you know, one other question I had is, you know, I used to live in this house in Berkeley that was like part of the applied rationality community and, you know,

very closely tied to this like global movement called effective altruism, which is like, you know, this global movement that's really about how do we, you know, apply utilitarianism and like, you know, optimize for altruism in the world. And it's a really interesting movement, you know, and they have like hundred, if not thousands of people working on this full time, how to optimize charities for like maximizing good in the world. And so have you ever like run any of these ideas by any of them and like get any of their thoughts on this stuff? Honestly, all of this stuff is so early days. It's more of a technical issue than than a realistic one. Whatever we produce starting out is probably not going to work. I'm just going to be. I'm just going

to be real with you. The goal here is to produce a system modeling after the successes of Prime Coin and Curecoin and these crypto economies that have provided underlying goods before and just see if we can do that in the real world. And our real goal is to build this in a way that we can iterate and really effectively. So one of the big issues in the cryptocurrency space right now is the lack of legitimacy and for good reason from the rest of the engineering world. When you look at what happens in cryptocurrency, when someone creates a new token, they write a white paper, and then they build a prototype on Rinkaby, and then they launch. And that's just not how things work in the engineering space. If you're going to do robust engineering, you need to

create a design, simulate that design. Like actually say what that design does. in math and then like run it into a computer system and see if the design is actually going to work and provide the output that you expect. And you run thousands of simulations and then see, oh yeah, okay, this is going to work. And then you build the prototype. And then the prototype, oh, you had to change some things to make it work. So then you go back to the simulations. You change what you had to change and make sure that it still is producing what you needed.

And then you build the real thing. This is called design validation, and we don't do it. And I used to build power plants. I was a chemical engineer, right? We didn't strike ground on anything until everything went into a simulation. And now there's this amazing organization called Block Science that Giveth is teaming up with to do the design for this complex system. And we're going to have complete simulations on how this works.

And then we're going to build a prototype. And we're going to go back. So we're going to do that whole process and do actual robust token engineering and then build this system. And then once the system's up and we can actually explain it to people about how it works and we can show them, hey, this is an example of it working for some high-tech cryptocurrency focused project. Then we can be like, hey, we'd like to use this system for some effective altruism thing.

and that's when I want to get their feedback in. But for now, this is a highly technical project. And just to avoid scope, creep, it's just best to keep it simple, launch something that has been thoroughly tested and also simulated so that we can quickly iterate. And so I'm not really looking for charitable input at this point because it's a research project.

You know, it's like if I was trying to cure cancer, with some kind of experimental medication, I wouldn't go to cancer patients and ask what they think about the method of, you know, should we inject it? Should we use smells? You know, what? I would, first, I got to do all the research and actually get something built. And then I can actually explain what we have to someone normal and show them what it does. And hopefully they can actually use it for making the world a better place. So as a final question, tell us where I give it to going what's the roadmap and also how can people find you and get involved in this project yeah well uh honestly the this is a pretty this is probably uh one of the first times i've

really gone into depth about how this project works thank you guys for randomly asking me on epicenter to talk about this uh our roadmap is a little loose right now uh so far all of the work that has been done has been completely out of the kindness of everyone's heart we have about 50 or so people in the small community called the Common Stack. Our goal is to build a reference implementation for this project. And no one's been paid a dime to do any work. So first, we need to actually start probably raising money or doing something along those lines. And then we can, and we do have a general roadmap for doing designs and this sort of thing. Why not issue a bonding curve or give it itself? Well, this is the issue, right?

there are no bonding curves that are really live besides FOMO 3D. So we need to do this. It would be really experimental and it takes a lot of R&D to issue a bonding curve around these things. But that is effectively what we want to do. So we want to raise some funds and create a white list of people that donate to our project. And then those people will be the experts that hatch a bonding curve. This is something I didn't really talk about. But this system of the commons, the people who initiate a bonding curve, it's really best if they're experts in the topic of that bonding curve because they're going to end up with the most governance tokens because the way the bonding curves work.

If you buy in early, you get a lot more tokens than if you buy in later. And so those experts, they're going to be the ones making the decisions. And if they make bad decisions, then the whole economy will fail because effectively, the way the Commons is structured, the speculators are speculating on how good the decision makers are gonna do so that they can raise funds from external donors that normally are just donating

and not getting anything in return. Here, if they donate to the economy, they're effectively investing and they receive a token in return, right? So what we're looking to do is actually raise funds only from token engineers and governance experts in the crypto space. So that's going to be, and then we'll end up with a white list that says,

hey, you know, this is a list of people who are experts in the common stack, in this crazy structure that we're building. And they would end up being on the white list for every other project that's created off of this reference implementation because they're experts in the system itself. And then someone would want to add people who are experts in what that system is doing on top of that. So that's kind of our structure. It is kind of like creating a bonding curve for raising this system. But we, you know, we're not interested in creating a token ourselves.

You know, all the static that comes around with the legal issues, Giveth isn't even a legal entity. It makes things really difficult. We've been a non, we've been a blockchain based entity for, you know, almost three years now. And I don't want to change that. So we're going to, we're going to work on this this whole system we we will probably raise money starting really soon we just ended up having i'm in south africa and i was talking with simon a lot about this project he is uh on board and he's excited to help us help us and i want to get more social credit and and like social validation and external validation from people without get before we get money and say this this design this system, this idea has legs. And then we'll start collecting funds and then we'll do real

robust designs. Hopefully by the end of the summer we'll have like actual designs that are simulated in this CADCAD software. And then after that we can actually start asking people to build it like really professional builders. I hope to build on Oregon so that the whole system can be easily replicated and changed. And then after that, we will have a reference implementation that anyone can just take and launch whatever comments they desire. Thanks again for coming on the show, Griff. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

And thanks for telling us all about Giveth and the wonderful work you guys are doing. Yeah, thank you guys for letting me on. Thanks for letting me rant. I couldn't talk about this for days and days. Thanks, guys. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever

you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter, so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released. If you want to interact with us, the guest or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter. And please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps people find the show, and we're always happy to read them. So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week.