Do you really know your web3 users?

[Music] Austin kibble Rahul rumala and Romina [Applause] buo thank you so much everyone please go ahead and thank you everyone for staying here all this session okay check can you guys hear me okay sa C Bangkok Welcome to our talk or panel uh super excited to be here thank you for uh thank you to ethereum Foundation Devcon for having us first of all so we are going to take the next 45 minutes to uh talk about some some of the topics that we feel super passionate about which is data privacy user privacy just users and product in general so with that uh I just want to introduce myself my name is Rahul uh I've been in crypto for a while I'm at currently VP at safe uh leading product engineering and uh today we are essentially with these three talented individuals which I will let them introduce themselves so first uh I hand it off to Romina yeah hi Romina bad is my name I'm founder of capital we are an onchain risk and investment management firm um um yeah I've been in the space since 2017 and mostly building on the capital market and institutional side all right hi everyone I'm Austin uh designer at Dune um we have another designer in the audience here at Dune uh thank you for joining um been in the space for a while been designing uh in the space since around 2020 um and hanging out as a participant before that so and hi um I'm Alice I'm a data analyst at safe I work with the product team to help them understand their users build features that respond to user needs and evaluate the impact of new features that we launch um and I've been in this space for about a couple years and before that I was working um for the UK government with policy designers and also product designers to do exactly the same thing building for users and citizens so are you all ready to talk about users and data and privacy and all that should bang let's go let's go let's go all right so firstly I just want to set some context right um uh so product Discovery we call this a process you know to understand users problems and using that knowledge to build uh the product so in the world of web 3 where things like anonymity and privacy Prevail the question is that how can teams identify user problems user segments and collect the right data so to understand their behaviors so as we I mean we heard this a lot today as we aim to uh onboard the next billion uh web3 users so the question really becomes how should we balance building user Centric products in a privacy Centric ecosystem and with this panel we hope to accomplish touching on some of those uh points so to set the first question uh I want to set another context here it's been uh 10 years uh since uh Devcon zero which started in uh qub Berlin uh right where Romina and I are from for example uh lot has changed uh lot of new products lot of new problems lot of new users and uh opportunities as well and uh so it's it's super nice to see how things have changed and put that into context right so kind of like let's have a little bit of an ice breaker uh just to kind of get the discussions going right uh so this is a question for all of you all uh what type of a crypto user are you and what is your current relationship with privacy okay I can start so I think I come from more like from the defi side um also for my personal uses so I'm not so much um using the social aspect of uh the projects uh that have been built but I for example organize my wallets like I have one hot wallet that is basically my avatar or it's connected to my Twitter handle. e and uh this is basically where I hold just like some assets so I can pay with Dy or Stables just like I always have like a 100 or2 200 years and some stable coins have some nfts and maybe also some um additional eth for for gas fees um so this is the the one that I want to use for non-sensitive interactions it's also public right like people that know my Twitter name they can look it up so I'm aware about that so for um my business activities I then have a signer just to sign transactions in the companies for example with the multi setup so it always has like a signature deficit um it manages a lot of transactions they are sensitive um but there's there are no assets held on this um it's also nice for me to keep my tax accounting overhead low because I can basically do my tax filings just like with one C3 download and then it's more convenient for me and then for all the other assets or my portfolio composition and I have like a dedicated e wallet or I have a wallet on another chain and I yeah basically have a little Excel list to keep keep an overview of uh my wallets that are also segregated and they are also funded sometimes from accounts that are not directly connected to my other to address so there is like my personal privacy approach but it's not a technical solution all right so I think that there's different buckets uh in the space I mean you have your privacy purist maybe your wallet Wanderers who are willing to just connect willy-nilly um and then maybe in the midd middle uh utility Seekers I think I'm a utility Seeker so if I see that I can get some clear value from something I'm like happy to to connect and share and in general just in general uh you know I think um I'm I'm Pro transparency um but also when it comes to kind of financial activity I guess I was brought up not to really talk about money so it's strange to initiate a digital conversation with your like uh I guess like Financial history uh so maybe uh yeah what Romina mentions kind of resonates on that front um but uh but yeah I think what really inspired me to get into the space was ownership in the end um I saw that creative people could uh to have could have ownership you could have more people on cap tables actually owning parts of projects and businesses so that's what inspired me to get into the space but I think there has to be that value exchange so I'd say I'm a a utility Seeker I'm willing to uh that's kind of my take on privacy I'm happy to to commit information if I feel if I understand the value exchange there so that that's quite well put I'd say I'm a utility Seeker on that point um as a crypto user I'm probably one of your inactive users uh I'm one that puts money in but never takes money out or doesn't actually really engage with all the products that we have out there just because I still feel like the learning curve is too big to invest and I don't have the patience so I put money in I don't take it out um I don't really do transactions um from a privacy point of view my personal privacy I feel like I've not really thought about I feel like I was born in the internet age and I don't really care how people use my data I just say that's the world we live in and I've I've got to that's the trade-off I make for the convenience that I get but as a data analyst especially coming from government I care very much about how the company that I work with leverages the data of our users so I'm very privacy focused when it comes to our users um not so much my data yeah that's already super interesting because we have like very different personas of how we use and what type of user you are so I think it's kind of like a excellent stage for the next question which I want to ask Romina uh as someone who's been in the industry for uh quite quite a long time how do you feel like the users of our industry has changed over the years and how has this affected uh the the industry in general yeah so at the beginning there was obviously many infrastructure um or um tech for managing our interactions missing so at the beginning there was safe wasn't around yet right there was multi6 Solutions have just started to be built so uh my first wallet was uh my ether wallet um and um yeah it was very cumbersome you had to basically write down every every step of how you would interact or to to keep an overview so do you X um has been um massively upgraded I think we actually also sometimes have have better ux for certain aspects when we think about our websites or you know like the the when we connect our wallets all that part I find this great but um yeah so we saw the shift from a rather developer focused ux or also the design Styles so some projects you still see that they use Font Styles like you would have in a coding terminal or just like they also design their products how a terminal is structured for example but you see that less and less and projects sometimes uh pivot a bit there um ux designs or the flows tailored to their users when they got learned more about them over the course of the time but some projects are also kind of dogmatic and stick to a rather cumbersome ux uh one that was um keeping quite attached uh to their terrible um '90s ux was cury at the beginning um I guess many of you remember basically looked like Windows uh 95 um yeah but then there were for example nft mint and cream experiences where you could like with a mini computer set like the features of the nft or the Avatar you wanted to M so you could basically set the metadata function and then the metadata was then giving you for example a feature card of the Avatar or the Persona that you have been minted and that was amazing so there have been some great Solutions pioneered now we just need them to be adopted in the big apps or um yeah chains that we are using yeah so I think that's that's interesting and uh also like I remember uh the last time uh I was in Devcon Prague for example I was building my first company and I was talking to the users there you know like just asking how should we build this and uh one of the feedbacks I have received is uh that uh if you're building in crypto you should be building for crypto users first so let that sink in right like that was the a very maximalist belief back maybe in 2016 2017 I wouldn't say it's probably like widespread but it was a very strong belief so maybe like Alice tin you all have been in the industry maybe for 3 four years I would say as a user how does that perspective make you all feel like how did you all experience the same or was it still the same when you entered and has that changed yeah sure um I would totally agree with this I think if you're building for crypto and you want to gain user adoption then you've got to build things that are built on say account abstraction but without using that term you know if you're if you're doing a account abstraction the right way the truth is your user won't know that it's built on account abstraction they won't even know that it's built on web 3 they might not even know there's digital assets powering it and we're seeing this with things like poly Market or worldcoin those are the real apps that are gaining traction and that are actually on boarding users today um but without being you wouldn't they wouldn't call themselves crypto users or web3 users necessarily and it's just un blocking a lot of use cases that you don't see any anywhere else yeah to follow up on that um I think at the beginning so I've been a participant in the space I guess for maybe seven years something like that and then just designing for the past three or four um so I've seen a little bit of the evolution not like super OG but I think at first it was the secret club and the language that we use I I appreciate Romina talking about like even the design and the aesthetic um uh but the language that we used both the visual language and the written language um was kind of exclusive like we wanted it to be this secret handshake Club I I think that's actually fine early on so when you heard this comment I think uh it might have been that might have been fine for the time you know you you were solving super hard problems um around like decentralization and privacy and cryptography and now a lot of that is table stakes and it's time to to grow and to like communicate not only internally but like externally um and the good news I I mean I have a lot of critiques maybe we're not doing this enough um but we are seeing like real use cases like my in-law family in Argentina um I mean they're all over like stable coins and it's very common practice I just had um uh a friend from Argentina like put put a down payment on a house uh using you know crypto um and they're like how you know like uh current like Exchange locations you know because you need to put all the money up front because you don't have like sophisticated financing options a lot of times so it's you know I think that we are like solving very at first it was very abstract but now I think we're solving very core like human problems so stability for example like why do people want stable coins well like Argentina experienced over 200% inflation you can't plan for the future you can't save you can't you know make plans for your family and so and it's not about making money it's just like keeping money right and so I think that's why some of the stuff we're making is really taking off and um it's a testament to some of these secret handshakes early on you know like some of this like secret club stuff like they you know solving really difficult problems and now I think we can have more Nuance takes on privacy for example with zero knowledge proofs and um you know but I think it is time to to develop like a a more I guess I guess like a just a I just just to talk to more people and um that is one thing that I haven't been doing for that long so I can't take credit for the design but I like that I feel like they they're trying to speak to more people um and there's some other really great projects out there too if I can connect to what you just said you mentioned um the the users in countries like Argentina for example in stable coin interactions um so here when we think about yeah should you cater this dogmatism about yeah should you cater to crypto native users first and then yeah they there you have like these certain ux designs that are maybe a bit crypto Anarchist inspired and it was it's actually intentional right um and those approaches like cater to Crypton native maybe first was true for projects like safe right for example safe has grown and has adopted by now we have like swap um Solutions natively integrated the user doesn't even have to know that um he has to look it up on the web on Google for example if he wants to trade on cwap he will get it selected or in an interface nicely presented and safe um but but there are also use cases like when we want to cater to these people in Emerging Markets where some solutions didn't work and now CeeLo for example has um great traction with um catering crypto users and um these are basically telephone or mobile phone users that get a crypto wallet spun up um connected to their telep phone that they have or their mobile device um and they're not even aware that they're using the blockchain chain um so there's this partnership mini pay together with Oprah and I think these are great designs so it's a very different approach than catering to crypto native users first and then learn and adopt so depending on what your use case is your approach could look very different so knowing your user well or like where your solution has the high impact I think should um yeah give you the orientation on which approach you follow I thought the quote said the opposite I thought you said if you want to build for crypto you should not build for crypto users which is what what I believe is what we should do um that's true so I think it's about knowing your users but it's also about knowing your potential users right because if we just rehash what do we know about our web three users today and what are they doing and how are they interacting on chain we're missing all the other aspect and then you know not even thinking about about what are the users that are not currently on chain doing and what is the purpose for bringing them on chain so so that's an interesting segue right like uh knowing uh the users and knowing what the users want like if I can throw in this very age old adage by uh apparently by Henry Ford you know if I asked my customers what they want they would have asked for Faster Horses right uh so I think in we're in this uh industry where the user is a wallet wallet is almost an identity and that identity does not have like something like an email or a persona for example so I think when building for this user what H how can we as Builders effectively collect data or what patterns we can observe to actually uh solve problems like what are the actual problems rather than shipping out features left and right right and I think I would start with Austin here kind of like cuz you spend a lot of time of your day building talking to users and building for users so how how do you go about it then yeah just to start I think the Ford Foundation can't confirm this quote uh but I think they said something like that's something like he would have said uh so we can all make a tcid agreement that said it um and I think in this case the key is um to to try to find the subtext you know when someone tells you they're having a problem or they want a product or a feature request um in this case case it would be like they want to go faster right um people are experts in their problems and and the challenges they face but not necessarily in how to solve them um and so uh yeah I I think that it's uncovering uh the fundamental human need um and there aren't actually that many um you know as I mentioned earlier I think sometimes people want stability um they want their time back they want money they want rewards of the tribe so you know social affirmation from the people around them um they might enjoy the reward of the hunt you know um like for example I know like the analyst on duner I think enjoy the hunt I think they want to find that insight and there's also an element of uh self-mastery you know like let's see what I can create um but it's really there I don't think there are that many fundamental human needs so I think it's uh trying to be clear um you know not talk about the features uh necessarily that we're that we're shipping all the time and we could as designers I like I could get better at this and I most everyone could get better at this just like tying this to like a really core fundamental need I think we don't because it sounds too simple um but uh but I think sometimes there's a sophistication in simple um yeah there's a bunch of different things you could do so one thing with the data is always to marry quantitative with qualitative so I do a lot of the Quant stuff I've done qual stuff in the past but we've got some lovely people at safe who do it very well uh but it's under understanding how people are using your tool from the data but then going and asking them and there's a lot of techniques you can use you know why you ask five times why so you say you need this why do you need it and then you ask that five times and you'll realize that the fifth answer is so completely different to what they said initially because people tend to think I want this and they tend to think about the feature that they want rather than the problem they're trying to solve with that feature and you as the engineer as the dev you're better place to understand understand kind of how to technically answer that need um that someone without the context of how your product is built can um but I face the same thing with data you know I'm surrounded by people who say I want this metric and if you ask them why do you want this metric it's to measure an outcome and I realized that the metric they actually want doesn't quite match the outcome it's about well if you want to measure that outcome I suggest we track this or that metric and it's always coming back to as an expert it's about being able to realize you're the expert in the room and um trying to understand from your users what they really need and I have to say like in web 3 we're still such a small space that we can go out to users users want our products to grow they're they've adopted our products and they want to keep them you know evolving and we should leverage that relationship that we have that in web two it's really hard to do you know here here people want to help you out you know and they want to see have a better experience using your product going forward so let's leverage that as well yeah please yeah to that point I mean we I I I completely agree I think a lot of times in in the research space there's this battle between uh the qualitative feedback people and the quantitative feedback people um either they're wired that way or that's where their skill set is um but I think that they tell different parts of the story um so you know you have I think the quantitative is really good at telling you what's happening um and you know observing actual Behavior because a lot of times people don't tell you um or they're not even aware of their their actual Behavior but then you can follow that up with you know conversations or observing the space and this doesn't always have to be like formal long form interviews um I think we do a pretty good job right now just uh by you know I'm trying to do this more uh engage on Twitter or in telegram groups and get it's it's not just one ation it's kind of a relationship and you can get that kind of like ambient signal and then see is there any discrepancy between that and like the actual Behavior or the data and maybe there's like something interesting there like something that's worth worth exploring um so yeah yeah I think what you described um how you approach like um pulling data and getting like an overview of different um crypto interactions is what we can already track about them on chain but there are also some parts of of the user um flow or flow of funds that we might not see yet so from when we look at the capital markets industry it's very um common that for very big trades when we think about ETFs or large funds when a rebalancing happens or someone basically dissolves a position those trades are not made like in the public market um but because they have the potential to move the market so they are then fractionalized and traded away in for example dark pools where there's like an OTC so an offchain matching about like um where the the buy and the sell side agree on a price and then it gets basically cleared and traded and settled and so on so um those type of in more institutional use cases and they are still done in the centralized exchange context um because here we have rather a logic like we know them from stock markets and bond markets and so on so there are some data points that yeah we don't see yet so it's really important to yeah know the user and the ultimate goal where he wants to but sometimes our technology also has advantages where the user doesn't know what feature he wants because he doesn't really know that this is a problem that's already solvable and you have to Pioneer the technology so this is where we still have some frictions and it makes sense to pay attention have like user interviews often and not only do the data analytics so I have a question on the you mentioned like uh use case of uh rebalancing portfolios right so if I remember correctly this is like there are programmable uh Solutions out there that'll automate rebalancing of portfolios right so essentially these are I guess you can call them Bots you know and when you look at like from a data angle when you look at AC ity onchain uh transactional activity are we seeing essentially Bots as real users are we an industry where Bots are legitimate users it depends my my answer is always it depends it depends on what you're trying to measure right so I read a stat the other day I think Chad GPT gave me that stat but 50% of internet activity is bots so I think it's no lower in crypto it's probably higher um if they're airdrop farmers and you're trying to measure real adoption of your chain and they're just farming for your Chain's airdrop then you probably don't want to see them as real users but if they're active traders who are actively using your D5 protocol and are making 60% of the volume I'd say they probably are active users they're generating the volume that you're getting fees from or that you're you know they are generating real activity they are powered by humans at the end of the day who are using your protocol actively in comparison to another dii protocol to to make money could could you want to yeah maybe connecting to what you said with the Bots and that they are probably also a higher amount in our industry and when we think about air trop farming also hamster like maybe some of you saw the presentation earlier ton I mean like the technical approach to it is really powerful I think and abstracting gas fees or have payment Master accounts like has a great potential for um more the average users but in the trading space for example um here we have also like some very granular um differences when we for example look at the amount of accounts right um ton showed us these accounts numbers but or wallet numbers that have been spin up um in telegram but actually like I use this um to to air to farm or hamster the air drop or I gave it to my daughter when she had like too much energy um but then after 3 days we forgot about it and since then it's like a d account um so I think that's still like part of that um but there are also some bot or trading activity that has like very different logic um and where it's powerful for example like in from the trading side um and I think the financial side is still like one of the most um relevant when we think think about the blockchain like the impact that blockchain can have for the users uh that don't have access yet so yeah I can also talk more and more but I want don't want to take up more space the question is really how what what's the quality of that user whether it's a human or bot it doesn't really matter what's what's the quality and what's the kind of long-term quality of of that user you mentioned I mean it's it's interesting actually it's kind of going to the topic what I wanted to also highlight which is uh definition of a active user in web 3 where you know identity is so fragmented in our space uh we use accounts like uh almost like avatars uh right so so what is what is uh the the current definition of a an active user uh and I'm kind of curious how from a quantitative side how you look at it and from a qualitative side how Austin would probably look at it and as a user perhaps you know how Romina would have that perspective of categorization your opening a can of warms um I don't know who was at dun con yesterday but I think every other talk was talking about how it's very difficult to measure active users how this measure is explored Etc I think again it depends on your project so we're not just measuring things we're trying to understand measure outcomes to measure the success of a particular product of a particular feature so an active user can mean very different things for different protocols you know so safe started off for example as a self custody multi-i solution it's the safest smart contract out there to save your to keep your funds the way we could have measured active users four or five years ago was how many users are depositing funds storing value in saves you know now we're trying to get with the world evolving and smart accounts becoming uh more prominent we're try trying to bring activity led by smart accounts and not just EA so what's important to us is how many users are actually using those funds that they deposited on safe so while back so an active user that could have been just a user depositing fund now becomes an user that is actually using those funds and trans transacting volume right so it really depends on your product and you have to think about what definition makes sense in in that context yeah I also have like a bunch of user groups in mind or how I break them down so I think when we start with the crypto natives we would have the Wales or we would have the dents that ape we would have the crypto curious that um take the time and get involved but it's not like they're doing a lot or have like a lot of funds that they are gambling around with and then we have like the for example the emerg market user that does uh that uses um it for remittance or also for um a wealth creating product um so here just like stable coin adoption or whatever so yes these are probably also single wallets or here we we can trace like wallet interactions but when we um think about like Capital markets then a wallet is not a user so I would be careful to always for to generalize that a wall wallet is always equivalent to a user because we have sub account Logics right where like accounts execute certain strategies or it's a wall or whatever and the user is not the wallet but it's like on a very different aggregation level um and yeah I think like when we think about in the numbers of for example the speed of transaction right like which infrastru structure or um route are they taking through like the trades it's very different for example high frequency trading would would also need to use very different combinations of chain or would have also um cross chain or multi-chain complexities um they are much easier um for like let's say investors value investors that hold positions and have sometimes um like a trade and here it's yeah more about abstracting probably like the general Key Management the chain management and yeah so I see like very different angles a lot of what you you actually shared as a user uh these tend to be like offchain uh interactions or workflows this is actually some can be on chain as well but like I guess a lot of I just want on chain examples I try to give yeah but did they like uh or not financial institutions I didn't um explicitly describe that because they also have wallets and need certain user functionalities and here we have a big impact for for safe uh for example uh there's a lot of offchain activity of like collecting approving signatures uh which which which uh means that the users are actually interacting with your app uh and there is just one simple use case right and when we spoke about quantitative data qualitative data a lot of the uh industry reports tend to focus or overly focus on like onchain activity as like does a work flows yeah in organizations where like um wallets are already used so I think like they're so safe is one approach right just like a multi-c approach and there it already has like the permission management but then there's also other wallets um or yeah basically signature tools like fire blocks right we have like MPC and privacy technology here also security um technology that helps to um abstract uh Key Management but also allows for like building an interface and then you have like different permissions for depending on which user or what they can see you know that they don't see all the data or not or you can have randomizers over certain wallets so that like if an exchange in the category of a financial institution for example that um people that send funds to a wallet that is owned by a centralized exchange they wouldn't be able to trace like all the other wallets of a centralized exchange right so yeah and I think uh I want to like get some of uh Austin's uh perspective so I just want to shift Focus uh a little bit um just compared to web 2 right like we're talking about offchain onchain like what are some like tradeoffs that you feel like we make in web 3 that differ uh from web 2 in terms of like General practices oh man I had a really good answer to the last question and you'll have to come to my next panel um but uh uh so some trade-offs um I think as I mentioned earlier we've been um we've been optimizing for like solving very fundamental problems around like decentralization um and autonomy and you know like I said I think those are table Stakes now um and we have to start thinking about maybe until we until we really uh improve the kind of web 3 experience till exceeds the web two experience we have to to think about um how we can use those moments so for example like uh you know how can we alter our language to speak to people more clearly how can we communicate you know we talked about are you a privacy purist or um or kind of you know a data a wallet Wanderer or more of a utility Seeker I think uh copy is actually really important like to communicate the message I think a lot of times we put tons of information in the documentation um or in the t's and C's and uh this this is something a lot of times teams don't have copywriters and it's something that I think a lot of designers reluctantly do um but it's worth taking the time and this is a pain point you know for me uh to really communicate clearly the The Exchange like what are you getting and what are you giving um especially if you want to onboard more people um I think that's super important and then just things like you know fix you know transa like uh transactions taking a lot of time um you know these sorts of things like until we fix that we have to think about those as opportunities to you know educate or entertain or engage um so that there are lots of little moments like that that are slightly different in web 3 but ideally we just we just solved that yeah and and we we can we can move on to you know creating Next Level experiences and we're not trying to like fill these moments with uh with fixes um I think I just want to like as we're nearing probably like we got like eight minutes left and I wanted to kind of shift Focus is maybe like the future outlook of our industry uh so the question to all of you all uh preferably is looking ahead like how can the the web three industry onboard like a diverse user base without compromising user privacy are there emerging tools or practices Frameworks that you feel like you're excited about yeah maybe I can um connect to one of the examples I gave earlier that was around signature signature management so Solutions like fire blocks um MPC technology or um CK kyc um like Mina protocol or a few other projects are working on um yeah basically verifying that you're like for example allowed you're on the allowed list to use a certain um service without sharing your private data that can be like yes from exams from the financial world but it could also be related to Health Data and so on where it's really sensitive data that should not get access um to other people so with MPC you would for example expose that data um but uh you would not um um expose that data you would conceal that data but for example MPCs uh you would always have like um um yeah part of the secret would always be held by the um NPC technology provider um but fhe for example fully homomorphic encryption uh yeah is basically yeah where you can see or the data and also um yeah verify it in a in a bit more complex technical way I I'd probably challenge this a little bit I I don't think the way to get towards privacy is to give a third party exactly access that's why you have to choose different types of privacy Technologies depending on the case that's what I was trying to to to highlight here um and I think like there's there's this part of what type of data is interacted and what is the right approach to secure privacy um and it could be for example we don't want to interact with um criminals or to have exposure to T funds or that for example our insurances would know like um what we have genetic um yeah how you say like more likelihood that we get like a certain um deathly um uh disease but there's also more like the surveillance St type of data that many people have in mind so um yeah yeah I think we operate in a little bit of a tricky place because we started well blockchain ethos kind of started as privacy preserving um that quickly went away when you know uh you had um all the these tools that are coming in where you can follow the history of all the different wallets and what they do on chain and how they connect to each other and you've seen you know um authorities get using that data to to ban certain activity or to ban certain wallets I'm not saying that's a bad thing I'm just saying the truth is everything's on chain everything is available and tools like Dune are making that data even more digestible um so we have to think about I think we're at Crossroads we have to think about how we use data and how because the truth is companies organizations are always want going to want to know more about their users because they want to grow because they want to maximize profits because whatever reason it is they are going to want to know more and they're going to leverage this onchain data is it okay is it okay that we're able to track a whole transaction history and base our product on this is it okay that we're able to connect a wallet to an identity because someone's doxed it or put that information on chain online sorry um and is it also you know what what kind of product tracking are we putting in place that's not on chain that's like proprietary data and we need to think about how we do that as well um are we always gdpr compliant you know are we when we match the data we collect offchain to some data that we might collect onchain are we doing it in a way that is um privacy preserving for our users and most importantly are our users totally aware of what you know they're they're signing in the tnc's it's what you were saying earlier um and and what they're giving away for for the usability of of the product I think that would be relevant in permission setups right but if you have permission less setups maybe like um yeah being compliant to a current already outdated gdpr um directive is maybe maybe not like what you should orientate um yourself about so let think about a second example that would be um the uh transfer rules for financial institutions where basically for every crypto transactions and we don't have that in the Fiat system a financial institution would have to store like the or collect the data of the sender the recipients their identification the source of funds or whatsoever it's like like a very poor requirement and technologies that they um have been um adopting where we already have like really impactful Solutions in the crypto space that could protect also users um that haven't been anticipated yet or Technologies in gdpr and um yeah awesome let's see so I think that web 2 has and the internet in general has proven that people are not that concerned about their PR privacy um For Better or Worse that but I do think counter to that uh we're given a lot of data and a lot of information um sometimes it feels like uh you know it can be a blessing or a curse I think sometimes we have a hard time finding the signal in that data um which can be a real challenge something we're working on um but I think it's not so I don't think we need to make decisions for people I just think we need to communicate clearly you know what is it that you're giving what is it that you're getting um for example you know like uh I'm not transactional when it comes to my friends or my family or my community but if I'm engaging with you know a government if I'm paying taxes or if I'm you know getting a subscription with a company like I want to know like what am I giving and what am I getting and I think we just we be as clear as possible about that and the design and the product and let people make decisions for themselves and obviously there will be a parallel you know government uh conversation I assume someone's handling uh you know compliance uh that's you know they usually tell us so yeah so I I want to have uh one last round of like a lightning round of questions so if you had a magic W and you could ask for any feature as a user in web 3 what would that be okay connecting to my most recent painful experience I would like to have like um an account that um abstract the gas fees and allows me for multi-chain interactions when I for example want to do a multi-chain um briding of funds and trades or yeah um having pool assets from different chains for example something from the poka environment where this is not uh where it's even more painful than ethereum watch it uh so at the moment um we're working on uh integrating AI more into kind of the data analyst workflow at Dune and uh unexpectedly I found that really powerful personally um I'm relatively new to the space you know trying to learn SQL um but being able to kind of have this conversation uh it's really like an education you can see the div on the on the left and the right um and so I think I think more of that um uh right now we had this kind of past year of um you know an explosion of AI but like using it uh like intelligently like where people already are I think is uh could be a lot of fun could be really useful um probably wishful thinking but I like one place where I can interact with all crypto web 3 stuff like all my balances in one place being able to use all my funds and and one place that I trust and I I can self custody my funds in a secure way I I agree as well I think as we mature as a user and Industry I think we converge to having Simplicity uh essentially um with that we are a minute over time that concludes our panel uh thank you to Romina Austin and Alice uh thanks for sharing all the information really thanks everyone thanks we have Q&A I think yeah that was an that was an amazing panel thank you everyone please don't forget to scan the QR code so you can write your questions uh in the in the app so we can follow up with with some questions for uh the panel here so please we have we are going to have a minute to have that so please because we ran out of microphones so we need to do it from from here so please please go ahead we have plenty of time for questions so please go ahead with a QR code it's see awkward silence uh no I think there are no questions people have already left and theidea next ones are waiting for do do we have one question is it yeah there is a question maybe we can pass microphone that's more user friendly it has to be through technology okay maybe we have to go to that person with mhone you can come ask your question on on stage you want to yell out your question thanks for okay thank you so um I want to ask about that uh U you state that um sometime we uh when we talk to user um we should Define the thing that user does not know what he really want for so how to track uh the thing that uh uh the user does not really know about uh when you develop a product and uh I have another question uh that is that true that um the first step when you uh develop your product is to uh uh to ask your customer or we need to find uh some prior step for maybe for example to uh uh analyzing the market or something something like that so that's own of my uh two question I I think the the first question summary if correct me if I'm wrong it's more about like how do we know what the user actually know uh says what they want versus what they actually need right how do we get to the the need verus the rather than what they are asking asking for essentially if I'm corre if if it's yeah yeah the the unhelpful answer is it depends but I think if if you have to pick like a particular Playbook um you know start with a hypothesis or a particular question that you want to answer um dig into the quantitative data if you have it and even if you haven't started a project yet you know it's a lot of data onchain like you can probably go out there and find some signal um and then uh try to understand what's happening and then follow up you know with maybe build something and get some feedback or if you feel like you really need to discover you know you can go you can follow up and go talk to people and and try to follow answer that question essentially but you you might have some um no that's a good good point I I maybe just adding on this if you are actually talking to a user if they are making a feature request then that's probably a signal that that's already too narrow and too precise like try to understand why do they need that feature and then you might agree that that feature is indeed what responds to their need or you might disagree and think that another feature or a different the feature built in a slightly different way might respond to their need better yeah yeah maybe to make it more um yeah clear with a specific example so um this multi-chain um feature um multichain trading right like I had to write for every step of my trade it was just actually just wanted to leave a position it was Stables versus like a certain token and for every little step of onchain interaction I had to write a support request but my actual go goal was to just like Swap usdc and a token from a different chain and it had like 10 steps involved that I couldn't navigate through because there was no help text also on on that website yeah I think it's just nailing down on that is uh getting to the root cause and not focusing on the symptom is like why are they trying to do something and uh you know really drill them to the point that they actually disclose the problem they're trying to solve not the feature that they're trying to use essentially uh I didn't quite catch your second question but perhaps we can uh catch uh after and maybe discuss that all right there's one for you Austin we have we have one question we have someone with the microphone wait waiting and after your question we'll go with the questions here in the screen uh well actually my uh it's not that I had a question and I lost the momentum but I had a comment about the pause uh between you asking us for a question and silence so I scann this code it asked me to uh enter some wallet I click the button it asked me to do something I'm like no I'm not that interested in this one so uh yeah and uh actually I have answer to the question that was asked because I I'm always triggered as a person responsible for a product I'm always triggered with the quote from Henry Ford about if I asked people uh what they need they will tell me uh they need a faster horse uh the answer to this one is simple you do not ask people what they want you ask people what problems they have what what they do on daily basis and then it's your job to figure out the way to for them uh to solve their problems and then you present some prototype to them if it sticks you did your job well so yeah thank you okay thank you thank you thank you so we have three questions here so to what extent will AI impact the role of designers in the future oh Hot Topic um I mean I'm personally excited about it I mean we're we're on on this ride uh so like you might as well enjoy the ride um and you know anecdotally i' I've um I've seen it be really powerful like there's a ton of things that we're doing as designers which is really um tedious and and you know Annoying um and and I think in the short term um you know like if it's integrated into workflows intelligently um I haven't seen this in design yet uh very effectively you know figma launched a bunch of AI features recently and it hasn't really been sticky in my workflow like maybe I need to be more aggressive about you know changing my habits just like learning shortcuts you kind of have to brute force your way into like new habits when it comes to something you do you know 10 hours a day um but yeah so far it's it's a playground uh I see it as an opportunity um I haven't aside from you know the classic just chat chat GPD a conversation partner to to explore topics and ideas um actually that's been really powerful just to be like hey I need an icon for this like give me 10 ideas you know like because a lot of times you have to create choices before you make choices as a designer but unfortunately often it's just you staring at your screen um and so to have like that brainstorming partner at least at the moment I mean that's been the main way it's affecting my workflow for now um in a positive way and yeah I'd say like it's happening we're long for the ride I I'm I'm generally optimistic about it awesome we have time for one more question from what is written here I'm trying to choose the right one and we have one more here okay sorry uh I was trying to put a new line and it actually posted the question uh uh my question is like when you are trying to develop a B2B application and other uh uh the party the business is not working in a web three space uh how what is the best way to onboard such uh business users so maybe I can give an example where um the solution would basically combine two different chains um so for example friend of mine has developed um AI agents for uh web to users or you know like from that World um and basically the approach was to combine um a near based approach so where it's basically abstracting a bit Orit more designed for web 2 users in mind and then basically there was like a bridge in or basically interactions with ethereum or evm compatibility so um navigating ethereum was actually not so relevant everything that this B2 be web 2 user was um experiences was experiencing was pretty much like the same ux as you would have in the web 2 logic so there are many solutions to different problems awesome thank you so much please give a great Applause to this panel today appreciate it