# Why Ethereum needs a Collective of Incubators

- Channel: [ETHTokyo](https://streameth.org/ethtokyo)
- Date: 2025-09-22
- Duration: 31:12
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/68d1132c19a669634ef50c17

## Transcript

I hope you enjoy all the sessions, and I hope you stay tuned in. All right, the third session is... Okay, before diving into the first session, morning sessions are always tiring, always crazy, so let's do like a breathing exercise first, all right? Um, this is like... Inhale. Exhale. One more time, inhale. Exhale. All right, thank you very much. So, let's get started diving into the first session of today. First session is... A wide experience needs a clinical educator. Speakers are Yuda Suzuki, Ingi Kim, and Adrian Lee. Everybody, let's give a round of applause, a warm round of applause for all the speakers. Thank you. APPLAUSE Okay. Okay. Yeah, so let's get started. Thank you for coming again. It's a super early morning here. And also, you know, this month is a bit of a good temperature. Honestly, this month was so heavy. So I thought this is a good time to go into, you know, get hot, so I'm Yuda. Hi, I'm co-founder of Fractal Ventures. I would do whatever I can for East Tokyo as a co-organizer. And so, first, would you like to say thank you for everyone who comes to East Tokyo again? Yeah. How many persons did you meet last year in East Tokyo? Oh, amazing. How many persons are first time in Japan this time? Okay, amazing. Do you like Japan?  Oh, okay. Thank you. Yeah, so, okay, let's get started. So, in the panel, in the talk, we'd like to discuss about our model of the incubation style.  So, you know, the model of E3M for ecosystem forecast, okay, incubation model. So, could you introduce first? Okay, so maybe you, our audience, have to understand, like, you know, what is your background and what is your motivation for E3M ecosystem? Yeah. So, hi, everyone. My name is Yuda Yu. I am the co-founder of success team at E3M Foundation. I've been with the E3M Foundation for almost three years now. And previously, I've been working professionally with the E3M ecosystem since, I guess, eight years now. I love that. And I've been interested in E3M since the beginning. And what we want to do is, this foundation is something that's quite new. It's an engineering initiative, and we really just want to be able to help support founders everywhere and make sure that they're able to access the resources that are available to them. So, we're very happy to be here to work with practice ventures and E3M here to kind of support ecosystems everywhere. Hi, I'm Nick, founder of Narrative and Coexist. We built the talent and education platform in Korea over the 10 years. We trained about 10,000 developers and connected them with other companies. So, alongside building, we also invested in over 30 projects, including SOE, E3M Protocol, Syndicate, and many others. So, we are very interested in building and investing and supporting founders globally. So, starting from an educational background, now we are more focusing on supporting founders to scale their projects. Thanks. Okay, thanks so much. And also, for all of our attendees, please come to this area. If you want to relax, it's okay. You can lie down there. So, anyway, when we start talking about ecosystem or incubation or acceleration, maybe there's a lot of things, right? I think there are two types of steps that we can easily separate in terms of growth or more start-from-growth phase. The first step is a more spark phase, like a hackathon. Spark means the idea has come. I'd like to create this idea, submit this idea to this hackathon. So, how are you guys feeling if your hackathon works in the market? Or if you think current hackathon doesn't work that well in the market, especially for protocol builders, what is the program? What do you think? Well, I think hackathons are... Well, first of all, it's very true that there are obviously many phases to startups. And internally, we actually have five dimensions of different things. There's not only the idea, right? But, like, size of the team, how much traction you have, how much funding that you've done so far. But the idea really is the basis of a lot of this. And a lot of those ideas do come from hackathons. Now, I think each hackathon is very different, of course. Some hackathons might tend to attract a little bit more of what we call faculty mentors. These are people who might just hop from hackathon to hackathon and they are really good at figuring out what the business is like so they can win a lot of money. And if they're not interested in building a company, building a long-term project at all, right? So I think it's important for hackathon organizers to kind of realize what kind of incentives there are if what we want to see is our actual long-term ecosystem project. But there are also a lot of good examples of projects that come from hackathons as well. So it's a balancing act. And I think there are different types of hackathons out there. We have to really not only look at the hackathons, but look at the specific people in the hackathons. What are their motivations? How realistic? And what chance they have for what those ideas are. But it is also very true and very important to have that space for people to have that, like I said, the spark of the idea. Because a lot of times maybe they're too busy with their full-time job or they're a student. So this at least gives them like two to three days to think about new ideas. And I think that is also very important in and of itself. Yeah, I think the hackathon is a good starting point. But there is a huge gap between the hackathon project and the real fundable startups. So I think getting more hackathons is not enough in the ecosystem building. So I think the structural support, like incubators or some other investors' support would be beneficial, especially like the mentorship, business development, open market strategy support, et cetera, would be more beneficial for projects after the hackathon. So I think we are now focusing more on after the hackathon project building. So I think a hackathon can bring more leaders and spark creativity. So in general, it's a good starting point. But I think it's not enough to build up your product for your user option. Okay, so I'm completely agree with you. I don't want to take a moderate position or a much moderate position on this topic. I just wanted to discuss with you. So seriously, I'm always thinking about this point. If a hacker has more bounty opportunity or something, it's not a bad thing. He can show a skill set through his hackathon, and he just can prove that he has a skill, that he could do it. So this is a very good thing as a first step. But also, we have to think about what is the actual next step for them. You know what I mean? I asked so many hackers after finishing my hackathon around East Tokyo, and all the other hackathons as well. They can easily just say, I will apply to the next hackathon. Oh, okay. They are not an actual bounty hunter or something. But they don't know what type of protocol should I build. So especially for building serious protocol in one protocol in long term, spending my own journey, my own career, this is too hard to decide. So I just wanted to discuss about this point. The bridging from hackathon to, as Indy said, a bounty hunting enabled level of this project. What else is the point that we are missing? I think that's a really good point. They might not be bounty hunters, but they didn't think that far about what to do next. So they are going to do what they are comfortable with, which if they already won a hackathon, they are going to win another hackathon. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think perhaps, maybe one of the issues is that the prizes are actually just too much money. There's not a lot of motivation for people to think deeply about what they want to do long term. Maybe join a startup, do their own startup and things like that. If there are so many hackathons, if they pay so much, it just seems like a very logical next choice and I don't blame anyone for that. It's very rational to do that. But like a lot of hackathons traditionally, like Game Jam for example, if you have a $300 prize, people go crazy about that. In terms of the bridging aspect, maybe what we need to do is move some money from the hackathon side to maybe the steam stage. That would actually encourage people to think more about how do we create investable long term projects rather than there are so many hackathons, let's just hit up all of them. I actually think it would be quite interesting if there were some kind of hackathon organizers that capped the prizes for a lot of the sponsors. That would be interesting. Of course, a lot of hackathons are also for-profit entities, so I guess they're interested in that. But maybe if a fund, like a steam stage fund for example, or a PC fund wants to run a hackathon, then I would actually encourage them to lower the prize amount, but then give more bridging support. This is very great. Encourage them to have a more mature product and a long term plan. Yeah, I totally agree with this. I saw that some of the ecosystem now starting to recognize the hackathon approach is not enough to find an ecosystem project. So we are now focusing on incubating and investing in a project instead of just giving some free grants or free prize over the hackathon. So I think between the gap, the huge gap between the fundable project and hackathon project is more achievable through the incentive alignment investment approach for the ecosystem. So I think incubators or investors can bridge the gap in these issues. We can provide more support like the business and economics and business development and any other support for the founders to thrive. So I think that's helpful. Yeah, so there... I'm always... Thank you for answering. Also, I have one idea. Sorry, it's not an idea. I have one idea. There is a co-operative funding. It's really cool. Co-operative funding is using Bitcoin, right? So the mechanism of co-operative funding is that there is a pool and small borders. Small borders, small domains. Domains with individual domains. Domains with super small money. And the pool will move and allocate for all the actions. So I'd like to see if the record is aligned with the money into the one smart contract and record all of the record small money, similar small money as like a donator is an ecosystem player like us. We can send my own record, $1,000 or something to the domain to any other project if we find a very good project to just hack us up or any other event. And the record pool with the portal to invest with them or something. I don't think this is not a this is a legal thing or how we can protect the legal movement. But also kind of more crypto-native idea to follow pool money with portal to each of the ecosystem player's action or something. So what it means if we can find very good portals in the Japan market or something we can only the thing to break out we can introduce the name to you guys and share on Telegram. And if the funds are very easy to invest in the project, this is good. But also kind of the situation is like, oh, it's too early. We need to wait for the correction. This is good. But also again, how they can get a correction without money. Also again, it's a skin and egg problem normally. If money, if project has money, like maybe project start to create more own community or community building this is too hard. So the yeah, I just wanted to point again, even the question about using kind of more innovative or interactive business model to ecosystem. So that or any other ideas also, you know, I didn't speak about what is the ether reactor because I don't want to speak, but also maybe we can take, we can create more ether-aligned, day-by-day name or something. At least. I don't know who guys have a keep having motivation for long-term taxes on ether reactor. Just investment to be done. We don't care about it. Even the new A1, new something, oh, this is cool. I can invest. And I sell a token. And I sold a token and it's not appropriate. But see, this is a job normally. But, you know, the record, as an ecosystem player, even if investment to the record, they have to carefully about what type of affections to this investment they can create. So what do you think of this point as well? So that if you invest to record, you know, ecosystem entry protocols, what type of things are you carefully normally? So the question is, what type of investment? Yeah, if you invest to a new protocol, which is super ether line protocol, can you invest to a super RL protocol? If the protocol is not profitable right now, can you start the investment to this protocol? Yeah, so when we review the project, as an investor and as a fund manager, we have to manage the risk and we have to make a profit. But usually when we review the project, we don't just think about the profit immediately. Because token price can go up and down. But in the long term, how we can make a real reduction, we are having attracting users and hurting users and retaining users will be more beneficial in the long term product. So I think we as an investor, there are many new approaches in that ecosystem level, friendly level. So as you mentioned, the contract funding could apply for Bitcoin as a real premium use case for that kind of funding method. I have another interesting thought is premiums is loose investment. So if you deposit some amount of the ecosystem, the fund to ecosystem, they can make a yield using LaFay or some other protocol. And then the yield can be invested into the ecosystem supporting projects. So investors, investors, users, doesn't have to go to the principal, but through this protocol, you can support the innovative or very early stage, very risky, but ecosystem supporting projects can get some funding. So that's the loose investment way I was interested in recently. Cool. Okay. Yeah, so I think this is a very cool approach to do. And also, we'd like to realize this model honestly. If RIDO started, like RIDO mentioned or something, through this or the money comes from saving yield or something, this is very cool, right? In that case, maybe they can have super aggressive risk, especially for super early stage of protocol. So they don't need to worry about money will not come back or not. Before moving to the actually each reactor I just wanted to ask Adrian what actually type of support your team can do and your team could do your team review for founder. Yeah, so with the Fabric Success Team at the Ethereum Foundation we're working on several different things. I think number one is that we have a webpage that we just launched last week. It's still pretty early days, but you can go to ethereum.org slash founders you can take a look at there. It's still pretty it's not really filled out yet to be honest, but I think we're going to add more and more resources to it. A lot of it is talking about how we can you know, giving people access to maybe like the directory of different grant programs. Those could be like Elixir grant programs or other things like Bitcoin for example. Also things like partnerships and integrations. If you're a project that's looking to for example, you want to go to something on top of Uniswap and you want an introduction to someone on that team, then that's something that we can help with as well. There are a couple of things that people always look for when they're talking about the founders and startups. Number one is funding. A lot of that is of course done by investors, VCs, accelerators, but also the grant programs I mentioned. Number two is channel boosting. Like asking us to tweet about them and things like that. Maybe co-branding, maybe co-hosting the side events at conference. Those are the things that we are also doing as well. I think the next one we're going to do is actually going to be in Singapore around the same time. That's token 2049. And then thirdly, we do also do like more bespoke, like one-to-one help. If we have the bandwidth on each of us, there's only three of us on the team right now, but if we have the bandwidth and we happen to know a little bit about your project or your vertical, we can not only introduce you to people, we can maybe give some feedback on your pitch, on your product, all those sorts of things. And there's a link on that site, 2b0.org slash founders, where you can sign up for past mentorship. Now we can't promise that we can get on a call with every single person that has one because I guess there's only three of us. But if your idea is something interesting and compelling and we think we have the resources to help, we're more than happy to do so. Yeah, this is amazing. So maybe some of the founders always ask for that type of offer. Not only EFs are responsible for this action, but also all of the founders, they are having lots of problems, and they're looking for very good mentors. A mentor means some type of different angle of idea that someone can provide to the founder. It's really, really easy. Yeah, so this is super amazing support. Yeah, please check it out. Isn't this all slash founders? Please jump on it. Yeah, so this is amazing. As I'm wrapping up this session, I'd like to start with a real-life announcement of what is actually meaning of this lecture. This lecture, maybe you don't know what is this lecture until now. So this is time to unveil this lecture. So this lecture is a DAO for protocol and protocol founders, which is a collective incubator model and for running your incubation stuff as part of a DAO. So we designed this DAO. We are co-founders or co-studies with a really good team. So today, we will announce this lecture will be from today. And also, in global communities, we already have this lecture. So the model is very simple. Back then, we have used 1% allocation offer to pass up information programs. So through our programs, we offer to all of incubator founders, please allocate 1% of future token if you reach to CCE. I don't know how many percentage of founders will reach to this level, but we have a heart. We are believing these type of challenges. So if they will give up something, they don't care about it. So the more important thing is to increase more challenger as a protocol founder who have a heart, who have a motivation to build actual open-source-based protocol and contribute to history of ecosystem directly. So we'd like to do this model in DAO. So we are onboarding multiple regional or ether communities, ether incubators globally, and onboarding them as like a design master piece of thing, and we will start DAO model. If you have a motivation, if you have a comment, please say something. Yeah. Normally, incubators in different countries, they are not working closely. They are not collaborating with each other, other incubators. So they are working very kind of way, but I think this way is very interesting. It's very effective alignment way to collaborate with each incubator outside of their own local community. So from day one, their incubator project can get support globally outside of our network, and also we can get some incentive alignment using the token treasury in each reactor. So I think this kind of structure I want to have in the future. So this kind of decentralized incubator support for your own ecosystem could be more beneficial than a total incubator approach. Also, not only for reactors specifically, how about this decentralized incubation collective model in the market for each reactor? Yeah, so I think what's really interesting here is a lot of traditionally maybe accelerators or incubators are kind of competing for a lot of good projects, right? But what I really like, you know, you told me about this idea I think a few weeks ago already. I thought what was really interesting is you're creating a network of incubators and accelerators that are all equalized, and you're able to share resources and help each other, and there's an incentive alignment component to that, which I'm not too... the details I'm not too familiar with, but I think it's just a really good thing for people to work together and not work together. Competition can be a good thing, but I think specifically in terms of ease alignment, if you can have a network of ease-aligning accelerators and incubators, I think that can only result in more aligned products coming to life, right? So, as a part of any effort there is to, you know, unite a bunch of different accelerators and incubators together that are ease-aligned so that we can all help each other, and you know, I think it's a good thing. Yeah, thank you so much. And also here, I can say, I can explain a lot of other ongoing increase for each reactor as a co-founding member. There are, you know, there are a lot of teams from Korea and the Sushi Blockchain Hub from Vietnam, or they are behind our East Vietnam team, so and the East Sydney team are from Australia, or there are Napoli is from Italy, and there is Isabelle Vare from Serbia, and also Ethan from Panama, and there is Ethan Sinclair de Mayo which is a Mexican community, so they will join these reactors from the beginning of day one. So we would like to create a more ease-aligned incubation of a decentralized model run by Dow, and also like, you know, maybe this is a really, really massive power which can provide a really good challenge for new founders, new protocol founders, and that if you don't, if you couldn't find any good ideas for real-life protocols, so you have to knock on the door to the each reactor ongoing community. And also through this each reactor community we can create a little more ideas inside of each reactor, and share ideas and protocols with what we are missing right now, in markets, and to the developers or founders. So we are getting, we are getting future of E3M ecosystem, high-speed growth. So, you know, so like, even the incubation, so like, we would like to create a more collective model, more international model, more, you know, beyond the border model, like through this each reactor. So please check it out, the each reactor.xyz, and they are, like, deforming, and you can easily do, like, a sit-in form, and then jump down into our second group as well. So let's start the discussion together. Yeah, this is our final session, so there, you know, if you have any comments, like, you know, for new builders, new founders, like, you know, please say something at the last point. I think this announcement's great, I think the panel has been great, it's been, you know, we didn't say too much, to be honest, but, like, I think, you know, anything that we can do I hope this encourages people to, you know, work on more ethereum-based projects, work with ethereum-based accelerators, incubators, and DAOs as well. I think it's just a very positive movement. Yeah, I think, if you want to visit something useful for the ecosystem, yeah, we'd love to work with you guys, and we'd love to fund your project, so please reach out to NERC, each reactor recommender, and we'd love to work with you guys. Thank you. Thank you so much.   applause applause applause applause