DeFiDay - Funding the next generation - Index Coop, Uniswap, Cyber Capital & Consensys

foreign [Music] guys thanks ever so much for coming today thanks for being here um so the format of this is going to be the same as before there's the slido we've got actually 50 minutes for this panel so we're going to take it easy for the first half an hour or so um but then yeah this really is for you guys to ask questions about funding in the ecosystem so please participate and please ask questions so to kick it off I'm wondering if all of you could give a very quick introduction about yourselves um and yeah maybe we can start here with Francesco sure sure I'm feeling this that connect is never finishing huh I never like since last week and this week but yeah um happy to be here guys Francisco at consensus that's my my main hat and I'm also non-operational for a small early stage Venture fund for sub-Saharan Africa we started four or five years ago so I'm a little bit on the both side very very let's say developer ecosystem oriented but in the same time it's always looking for for a new let's say funding opportunities and and you know uh activate the the ecosystem thank you hi um I'm YJ I'm part of uni Swap Grants program so where grants program funded by uni swap Community treasury to provide grants and help to builders or just Community users who want to expand and work on the universal ecosystem as a whole trying to push for public goods funding in the diva ecosystem yeah hi my name is Andrew I work at index Corp uh decentralized asset manager and structured product provider I'll probably be talking on this panel more from what it's like from the inside of what it's like to be funded but we do so have a grants program as well so yeah great to be here thanks hi I'm Justin I manage a centralized fund it's technically a mutual fund and and I'm primarily a researcher so I'm really uh focused on on trying to understand cryptocurrency cool thanks I like the variety and it's not all about the funders it's also about who receives the money in that regard as well because there's lots of ins and outs of that process [Music] golf um the first question is there's grants there's ieos we had icos there's liquidity bootstrapping Venture investing all different ways of funding in this ecosystem what are the most important fundings that your sorry the most important funding trends that you're seeing right now I want to take it out oh sure we'll go through I'll um I'll start with an opening statement here um I think that um the most important thing I think in cryptocurrency when it relates to funding is actually a lot of the is around Dows icos and crowdfunding and uh grants attached to Dows and I think it's also very important to separate different sorts of funding when it comes to VC funding I don't believe that um you know Dao should be combined with VCS because it it creates an incentive for in seeking Behavior which can then render the Dow itself uncompetitive uh in comparison yeah I can definitely agree on that and I want to say exactly what you say basically like he's a mix of different sources smart money versus let's say scaling money but um yeah at the end of the day I think you need also like to have good mentors and uh and and investors sometimes it's very difficult to get on on a decentralized identity like they allow funding or something like that but uh but I think it's a mix right and I think which we're just progressing in a way that uh you know where we're getting there but we need to mix up and not think about hey uh you know like getting funding or grants from a dow that you know no one really support me apart the money um yeah so it's it's a mix yeah um I'm biased so I'm gonna say you know just grants funding for public goods in general so and that there's there's a lot of money obviously in crypto in the last I don't know months and years and I think we are in a unique position where where we should encourage and push for community and protocols and a lot of big treasuries to to provide and push for this type of open open source uh accessible decentralized you know public goods funding by grants and other mechanisms to keep coins they are all fun and the likes yeah yeah just a touch on the point of VCS I mean we did a VC round ourselves um understand it can can be controversial in the ecosystem it can be controversial within those as well for some of the reasons you just pointed out but in many senses I think they're probably a necessary evil in in some parts but they also do provide benefits as well and I think it's just that education um kind of broadly in the ecosystem as well um to internal contributors around the pros and the cons that they bring because we would not be able to do some of the things that we do without that kind of long-term sustainable funding so there's a time and a place for I think I think it really does defend on depend on the specifics like I'm not saying all VC funding is bad I just don't believe that the economics should be mixed with Dao so to speak so I'm not sure what the specifics are of of index Co-op but if if you have say a red hat model in a for-profit company which then exists say alongside um something like a dow which has its own funding mechanisms and grants and and then I think that's fine but I think the problem arises when VCS might attempt to carry out in seeking on the protocol itself in one way or another to collect for your revenues and I think that's in conflict with the uh you know the the type of ideology of wanting to have a decentralized uh and more Equitable world I think is what we're all trying to build here as well yeah I just want to say something because to add on this like uh I see um I mean obviously it depends on the use case but depends also on the stage of the funding because if you're going like pre-seed or seed but super early I think like the the ecosystem is moving through more um let's say ecosystem events like you know you're getting grants even through the ethercaton like there you you get you know actually after the three four days you can you're actually able to to get funding to just Kickstart uh stuff off so I think like it's moving a lot where really the builders are and directly through the source that's for early stage obviously for grow like you need you need definitely like that kind of Amanda Capital yeah well I'm interested in hearing this and hearing your thoughts on obviously there's a topic of smart money right and you say VCS can provide a lot of value then from your perspective uh why why Jay before I forget this uh in terms of Grants like do you consider that also smart money like in a sense that you're also providing value or is it literally you're just giving out the cash is providing value in the sense that um we want to provide funding to help aspiring Builders or projects to bootstrap their their whole project um you know pre-seed seed we we try not to use those words right because we're not looking for a financial return on such funding it's more to just push along the whole ecosystem to make sure that we can get these centralized public goods out there right so so we try not to say okay if I fund you I want you to be you know the only one out there and then you can start monetizing and make money and give it back to the treasury right where we're not looking for that so it's kind of a different incentive or or objective I guess compared to VC funding so and we can't just like VC funding we can possibly fund everything and then they all turn out to be successful right there will be failures there will be people who cannot continue with the project or someone else just trumps them and which is fine but at least we make sure that we are betting and funding horses that have the the the line incentives or values as us which is to make sure that you continue to be decentralized to be open source to be accessible uh to avoid render seeking Behavior as you say where you're not bringing anything into the whole ecosystem other than money because to be honest right now like we don't lack money in the ecosystem if you ask me if anything we have too much money flying around so the the important thing for myself personally is making sure that you steer and help people and Builders and newcomers realize that no you don't need to like take crazy short Runway with crazy metrics from VC just to build value into the ecosystem you can as you say go to hackathons meet people you know do some hacks the output can be okay but then you meet people people you know that there are Avenues of funding like grants from various sources that can help you you know make a make a start you know we still have to pay our bills shortly so so you don't have to go oh yeah I'm going to like get VC funding and then you know six months later I need to go around seed a b c blah blah blah blah blah it's never ending you know you can always start with okay I spent some of my time working on something that I'm passionate about for this protocol for this ecosystem and then I get a grant to scale it a little bit and after that we'll see how it goes but at least at any point in time in your work you know that you are true to like the decentralized ethos of blockchain and if you decide actually I'm sick of it I'm out you have open source stuff you documented your work someone else can pick it up and continue so that to me is the is the key there for for grant funding yeah thanks a lot for sharing I just want to say that I don't know it's maybe it's a fun fact but I feel like it's um you know this kind of early stage capital or any any grants like in in the ecosystem events are mostly done not like through the best pitch or the best like things happening but it's actually like the best team that did like this MVP earlier and the most of the time all the people know each other by the ecosystem you know you're a bunch of like consensus folks they build this protocol boom like it's interesting they build something cool in this hackathon let's let's fund them right so it's less the pitch that counts but but I know it's just a fan fact I don't know if you agree with that or you have something else I think if it's a good project I agree with that but yeah I've also seen the opposite as well so yeah and you you can't you can't always know right I mean by definition you don't know whether it's going to be a good project so so for me I struggle to see like how how we collectively decide oh yeah that's a good project our family like I mean you can apply like an analysis and an evaluation to predict and character evaluations to predict the quality of the team and look at their previous track record you know based on that you can evaluate the likelihood of success on whatever you're funding but it takes time and resources sorry Jim and I was just going to add as well from an internal perspective when we go for uh fundraising we don't just accept anybody's money so it's incumbent on those raising as well as on those funding to not just concentrate solely on the money so we ask VCS what are you going to add we don't just and we try to partner with as many um you know VCS that have a good track record and things like that when we went for our funding round um so we don't just kind of just take whatever we can get we set a limit we try to make sure it's over subscribed and then we kind of pair it down to say okay we want to work with these people we don't want to work with these what else are they going to bring apart from apart from money yeah don't forget due diligence works both ways um and James on that note like are there any particular things that you look for when you're raising funding or yeah questions very I'm looking for specifics if you have any on things where they've been like massive red lights or things that have you've investors have said to you where you're like okay that's why I want you guys on my cap table or our Cup Table uh luckily for us and when we went through it and we had um interest from from bigger names so we had like the 1kx's the Galaxy digital Sequoia those kind of names come through and when you have that it's kind of easier because there's kind of you know the 20th person wanting to gain on the round momentum kind of say yes sorry no like we're already full um but you know we we do due diligence you know just beyond the headline name and we ask what other projects are you working with what can you bring here what is it about us that makes you want to invest um so yeah we invest time and effort into the relationship for sure um and that usually kind of yeah cuts through um some of the yeah cool thanks for sharing I'm wondering if you guys also have any suggestions as also investors and Grant givers that you you know that you want to hear that you're how to say it like your if a project asks you those sorts of questions it shows like hey you know these guys are serious I don't know I'm a big fan of like infrastructure like your zero questions so if if a Founder really know his product and it's not just you know business developer kind of like consultant I think that's definitely like uh cool so I don't know like very let's say the product questions I think that's definitely a good to know and in my experience I think it's more the the person giving out the investment asking the questions uh but I agree yeah for for us this you know we are kind of strange in the sense that I think Grand funding is we we try and market and let people know that there's this Avenue as a source of initial funding but we don't go out and actively Chase for projects to fund right it's difficult to to take that balance I think so it's somewhat reactive in the sense that it will be teams of people coming and applying for the grants so so you would maybe can assume or guess that they feel that this grants uh is value aligned with them right of what they are trying to do and of course they need to fit into the scope of the grant so for us like uni Swap Grants program it has to be related to Unison ecosystem or amm or Dax as a whole and I guess for like ethereum Foundation you'll be have to be you know ethereum public goods get coin inside almost anything goes as long as you can show that you have Community Support so so the due diligence front about okay what the ask us for what we asked them you know in in discussion we'll talk about it but uh at least so far we haven't had a situation where people apply we award Grant and they're like no I don't want it right we haven't had that you know so I wonder why if I may I'd like to highlight uh an advantage as well of grant funding that I think is not often appreciated and I think I think what we've seen in cryptocurrency over many years is we have run into problems of conflicts of interest and perverted incentives and sometimes developers don't necessarily do what's best for the protocol so to speak now what I think is very interesting when the funding itself comes from the Dao or it comes from the blockchain then that becomes an independent or actually no not an independent source of funding it becomes a source of funding that comes from the blockchain itself and therefore represents those interests and I think a problem that we've often run into is that a particular project or a particular protocol might be perverted by outside funding you know if developers are working for very little money they're very vulnerable to someone coming along and saying here's a few million and I want to see these changes now if you have a strong ground program or self-funding mechanism as I like to call it that actually helps protect against that from occurring and actually allows a blockchain to be more Sovereign be more independent and for it not to be captured over the long run and I think that's a very important aspect to that I think is often overlooked when it comes to grant funding cool thanks um so the next question I had was uh rug pulls are a plague on this ecosystem as many of us have either heard of or experienced um like ultimately funding for them is important because it kind of gets them going right but they're as they're a plague what do you think about potential solutions to kind of reduce the amount of these types of events happening in the ecosystem be that nfts or D5 or just generally crypto tokens in general due diligence and yeah I think yeah I really do mean that I think uh we have seen some VCS come through who just don't do any due diligence and it's like really you're just gonna give away like hundreds of thousands of dollars without asking any questions or kind of not really showing any interest is it is unreal um and yeah it goes both ways for retail as well obviously yaping into any any project or whatever just yeah do your own research yeah for the love of God people please do your own research like really like I mean the pretty much all rug pools that I've seen you should have seen it coming I mean really stop stop investing in pon's economics stop stop investing in obviously greedy exploitative people I mean if you really do your research and you really investigate these people and you really try to figure it out in most cases it's actually rather obvious and and I would like to like Echo your point as well some of the stuff that VCS are investing in like it's utterly ridiculous I wouldn't touch you with a 10-foot pole myself some of this stuff and they're getting hundreds of movies and funding so yeah please do your own research because it will make cryptocurrency just a much better place to be and it's really up to all of us here to to Really you know be more responsible in terms of what we give our support to if it's too good to be true it probably is no I just want to say not just for output rice you know it's also for like the house when you're participating to the house there are new doubts coming like I think like the tools the tools for for retails for actually checking and doing these due diligence are often like underestimated for example like you know difa Lama for for for for the house like how actually the governance really is working I think like the diligence in doubt people just look at the mission and they're they're not checking out actually how does it work how is the governance how is the voting system and I think we should have for retails more tools to uh to make actually easier the the diligence on on top of those things because right now even for for layer tools right you have like you know the TV else everybody's just checking tbls but I don't know actually from how many accounts is coming you know these kind of things how is the density of those cbls these kind of things I think tooling for retails need to be like upper up the the speed in terms of like educating retails to make a better decision so that don't know yeah I think for me looking at it from a Grant's perspective it's it's just to do with as I mentioned before I think sometimes there's too much money coming in right and everyone's chasing chasing like a big hit really quickly the time Horizon is really short right people see that oh yeah suddenly there's like billions here billions there I want to get in I don't want to miss out I'm just going to like ape into everything including what you're telling me like VC is doing similar thing on a grander scale right which is crazy so I think it's a cultural thing I feel like as a defy ecosystem as blockchain and cryptocurrency we need to put in place the structure in infrastructure to encourage kind of uh we keep saying this like long-term thinking long-term thinking you know but it needs to be value aligned long-term thinking so that people know that actually start thinking about why you are in this space like if you are just in here to make a quick Buck then yeah there'll always be Rock pools trap 5 D5 doesn't matter there will always be people out there to scam you and if you're looking for for the quick money you will eventually get scammed in my mind or break the law and get arrested or something or get killed with a hammer but you know so that's why I think I think from Grant's funding perspective like the main way that I think we can help to avoid or prevent drug poses to is to fund this type of um cultural work where where people and Builders and users and Community know that actually you know this is why I want to be in this space I want to encourage um an actual value add actual decentralized trustless consensus in the financial world and I'm not looking for a quick Buck but I do need to pay my bills so I find out you know sustainable open source decentralized way to fund myself right then hopefully that cultural view will will filter out to users and newcomers and everyone stop thinking that okay I'm just going to ape into everything and then one of them will make it big so well I wanted to ask on top of that like okay that's the vision right right how can we make that practical so when it comes to accelerating Dow Grant programs having more of it are there any kind of practical things that you want to see happen and maybe you can start and the others can add on um I think I mentioned like maybe two questions ago that I think right now it's quite a different landscape so that there are a lot of well many protocols and and treasuries and and places where there's a lot of money locked in right I think we as the community need to push for the discourse to encourage people to start doing more public goods funding right and that could be by doing subcommities sub grants um uh yeah different ways of delegating that funding ethereum Foundation does that unit swap we try to do that in Grants program so we started you know Community analytics subcommitty to push for Community data analytics commentary pieces um you know dashboards just to give people access to that data and information to do your own research type thing right so at the end of the day we are limited by human resource I think so so we want to bring more people on board in terms of users and Builders right but we need to be able to do that in a in a sustainable way and uh avoid too many you know malicious actors let's say so so my my kind of wishes would be that we could push for this now delegated funding um kind of peer-to-peer you can stay kind of a non or pseudonymous but show your your commitment to the cause and then people know that okay you are someone who's passionate about this and you're very aligned and then we can try and figure out how to get sub grants or sub companies out there to continue to grow this to accelerate it you know because there's no point for us to just throw money everywhere yeah just like VCS let's say you know I can't just be going okay you get Grand you get Grand everyone gets a grand that's that's not helpful even though that metric might be very big it's not going to bring value in terms of acceleration so Justin um yeah just just to add a little bit as well to what we're discussing um earlier I think I think it is very difficult I think for people especially if you're not you know running a grants program or you're managing a fund and you have a research team it is very difficult for like your average retail investor to invest in cryptocurrency I mean it's arguably more difficult than investing in the stock market which is also very difficult so I think this is also partially why you know companies like mine and and projects like index Co-op exist is because it allows you to Outsource that decision making to The Experts and then obviously you have the Dilemma how do you know who the experts are and I'm afraid still some due diligence has required there but um this I think is a bit of a universal problem that's not just unique to cryptocurrency either and I think it depends on the size of the protocol as well so obviously unisop is a completely kind of different based in the ecosystem with really completely different Treasury and like we're just starting to look into a grants models now and we'll have like a dedicated uh personal or team um to get kind of like run the grants program um but at the moment it won't be for sort of like the public goods we're not at that size and that scale has to kind of you know attempt to try and get a positive return on investment for us and before we uh yeah hopefully one day we get to the same size and we can invest back into the ecosystem does anyone here use endoscorp we have some hands nice and it's the DPI right the the depot has the flagship one there yeah yeah that was the OG cool well another question I have um kind of also going down this route is and I guess which we've spoken about it but I really want to focus on the value of the investee or the grant Giver so post funding how can we have that post-funding value but also keep the ecosystem funding kind of democratized and you mentioned kind of the the delegation maybe of funding but I think what I'm trying to get at is you know where really is the value add of a funder I can talk to the kind of the democratizing of uh basically allowing anybody else to kind of invest in our protocol as well is that we do set aside um some of the funds and some of the um Revenue as well um to put back onto a decks in the form of a LP position so we do have practical home liquidity nice um it's not like really our business model it's the short-term kind of temporary fix to do protocol owned liquidity and but yeah there are pools out there so people can invest and then we also one of our VCS is also a professional Market maker um and yeah they provide liquidity for our token as well so that sounds like real value-add yeah exactly I think there's also a big difference between different types of investors so most of the projects that we're invested in some of the founders might not even know we're invested in it because we're just investing in the underlying token because we believe in what direction they're heading and you might have like large VC investors who might want to actively participate in a project and help make connection actions and all of these things so it really depends on what kind of investor you're dealing with I would like to also maybe talk a little bit about the retail investor as well I think what's interesting about tokens and cryptocurrency and funding is that people you'll get a lot of loyalty from people when they hold your token and I think that in itself is also a very powerful marketing tool and that's part of the phenomena of cryptocurrency that we've seen is that people might get a token they might make an investment and now they're part of your marketing team as well and and this is where we get these these armies of people on Twitter promoting X Y or Z and I think it's because there's a lot of loyalty attached and arguably also a lot of tunnel vision attached when people end up investing in a particular token and I think it's important to keep that in mind uh both for the positive aspects and the negative aspects and especially as a Founder to also be responsible and not to abuse that psychology or emotions of people too much because that's when you might cross the line in in my view so I I feel like that there's as we were talking about a kind of added value for both the the team being funded and the people providing the funding and I find it interesting that you mentioned just now that there will be from your perspective right as a as a investment fund there will be projects that you invest in and the team wouldn't even know you invested right so I'm just wondering where do you see the the added value the non-monetary added value there because we some of us were already saying that there might be too much money in the space already so so teams like you know index Club they might be looking for VC investors or investors in general that bring added non-monetary value to it so as an investment fund where do you see yourself then in terms of bringing that value where was the value coming from well the fund I manage is rather unique in that sense because we're not a VC uh we really do long-term investment based on fundamental analysis so we really do do value investing and in that sense where I feel we're adding value because we're doing deep research because we're doing doing very deep due diligence you know we're able to allocate our capital in a very efficient way and in that way we're actually supporting you know the the cryptocurrency market as a whole as well in in my view because I think how we allocate our capital on the market is how we don't end up with scam projects in the top ten and I think that's also an important role to play from the early funding stage where a lot of VCS would get in and then have a Target to get out basically I like to say that what we do is win VCS some VCS might get in on the pre-pre-presale and then they might sell on retail if the project has Merit we'll be there to pick up the pieces and I think that's still a valuable part of the ecosystem of how cryptocurrencies progress to publish any of the research that you do yes we do actually yes some of it have been pretty focused on doing um some public critiques recently of other layer ones I would love to check it out yeah yeah I don't know I just want to say you know it's like raising a fund right you have 80 90 percent of like smart money and then you take the FI at the end so I just want to say that's that's uh that's important to have you know good advisor to include the the community to include like in every decision anything is going much more related to like you know product feedback the roadmap is defined by the community Through voting um but yeah no we just want to say you know did I think you you need to have this kind of scaly money but at the beginning you need to have much more the the support of mentors and experts and uh you know that's why we're so attached to the ecosystem because it's really making uh making your product uh grow at the beginning that's what what developers said the start need to have so I appreciate a lot you know like uh unit Swap and git coin grants anyway right yeah no I think I think that's that's the thing like the non-monetary value add there uh from Grants and public goods funding is is also from the the the support side as you say you know um having people to to connect budding teams to uh or maybe like in a previous session to talk about security right all this getting slots time slots advice on security and auditing you know so so all these are the connections that I think Public Funding and grants program can potentially help with you know so so um yeah I think that there is there is more value out there in that sense yeah that's that's perfect I'm I'm going to start asking some of the audience questions because you literally just said something that's very relevant so one question is with with Rising costs of audits and shortages of developers also came up earlier will it not become super expensive to fund the next generation of web 3 how does this impact innovation because it's completely right like yeah I think it is yeah it's going to be expensive but that's always going to be an Arbitrage right like if that's really expensive hopefully that will bring um Talent into the space to work in developers I think there's probably a slew of kind of want to be developers out there like Fast tracking their uh solidity learning curve and all the rest of it and the same with um Auditors as well so I will just say more audits are probably a good thing overall that's clear I think from my end um saying like that there's a lack of developers so sure like demand is high Supply is low developers might be asking you for a lot of money to do the same thing that they were going to do six months ago so from a Grant's perspective I think because we we provide non-dilutive funding right we're not looking to you know get a location from you we're actually looking for Value alignment and like make sure that what you are building uh can help overall grow the ecosystem so I feel like in that sense we are perhaps less disadvantage in that sense we won't be in a bidding war let's say you know if you feel like actually you would much rather get a crapload more money from a VC to do it closed Source then you know we were never going to fund you anyway right so but the the challenge for us would then become how do we Market ground funding and you know public goods being a good thing to make sure that people who are not currently in crypto or web free or D5 see a way of coming in and then still be value aligned enough to think that I'm not in here just to make money in six months and then get out I'm actually in here for the Long Haul we our challenge is to try and you know Market that and push that message out I guess so so yeah that's my view on that yeah franchise going and also speak something about it yeah I I just want to say um I don't know if you look at my colleague at the diligence those guys are crazy right they have 12 to 24 months like uh like for getting for getting due diligence on their smart contract for getting audited I just want to say yeah there is a shortage I think also like it might be might be good in a sense that you know there is much more let's say competition between projects um I don't know I'm just following a lot the the the the Builder wave right when when you hear really feed those are really honest and concrete feedback you say hey harass developer building on Luna oh that's really different that's why we're paying thousand bucks an hour this developer right or you're going to other ecosystem and I think I don't know it just matter where we're following following the Builder and uh and uh yeah so it's It's Tricky the situation I agree but uh shortage shortage is not bad right if you think about like even on the.com on the.com Bubble how many web developers were out there there could be the web website a bunch of people were like Consulting and then they were like yeah company build it out of that and yeah but now it's different now we have much more like say founding and grants possibilities that's why I think that's much more important the retail side like not only like having audit audited companies by by private company but also sharing these audits with retails because I don't think still there is enough instruments for retails to make let's say educated decision from the technical perspective right because it's already difficult to you know to to audit in smart contract like you want to have like a yes or no and and this yeah so it's you know it's so you're saying that you wish that there was the retail users would be reading the auditing contracts just maybe I misunderstanding I don't know I'm just saying like the the community in the I think in this industry and we are moving more forward I think on that sense the community has more power and influence to the product the company and and what you want to build in terms of product roadmap funding that's why also the grants are amazing right because you don't need to go to uh through centralized entities but you also can spin up you still need may you know you still need like VCS right don't get me wrong I still think there is a big difference between like investing in a company and investing in a token right um but but I still feel the community need to be more much more educated and it's not because they don't do their research maybe it's a little bit part of it but it's also because the tooling is still underdeveloped you know how many postmortem reports do we do we get on like those Rock pool right it's very it's still very difficult to get those things I don't know I would like I would like I mean you have rec.com these kind of things right but they're not official yeah so you mentioned one thing which I want to ask is yeah we're in a bubble you've talked about being too much money in the space like very quickly can you all answer are we or are we not in a bubble right now it's personal opinions not representative of their organization we have always been in a bubble when it comes to cryptocurrency I think that all major technological innovation if you look at this historically as well comes with a bubble because it's shaking up Society it's shaking up the way we do things and uh there's excessive exuberance involved in in such Evolution and evolution so yes I think we're in a bubble but that's not a bad thing are still a line from The Big Short uh and say you don't know if it's a bubble or not that's what makes it a bubble yeah true I feel like it's it's a bubble in the sense that um there's a lot of concentrated money in very short-term stuff right but in the grander scheme of things if you long look at a long enough Horizon I think we we need to divert money and funding into things that build value right so so I think similar to or related to all the rock pools that we were talking about majority of our audits let's say majority of it is because like money Rush has seen so quickly there's no chance for anyone to discover anything and then until an exploit happen or Rock pool happens right so so if you build it such that you are not looking to just suddenly go 3 billion in tvl then you know when you get to a million or two maybe if there's exploit people already exploited it right so so I think you know in that sense when things go from zero to three billion like that then then yeah that's above all but if you look at public goods that are or open open uh blockchain technology that are slowly building up then to me that's that's actually still too slow when compared to the whole world right what does me um so I want to say from the speculatory perspective I think yes we are in a bubble but um from the developer's perspective I think we're we're just we're not right we're just keep building the ecosystem is flourishing like every east events them going like much more devs web to devs are approaching the ecosystem and I think like I'm I'm super optimistic about it I'm less interested on the on the speculative side but I think also bubble is also helpful in terms of bringing Mass adoption and trying to get more grammas out there they know that we're not working only for Bitcoin but also for other projects right yeah my question is does it matter if we're in a bubble like we're all here right it's okay um and so exposed you are I guess uh so the next question is what percentage of investment should be allocated to bringing in new end users to blockchain ecosystems I guess their respective blockchain ecosystems to use the wonderful Solutions being created so elegant thank you can I have the question again what percentage of Investments should be allocated to bringing in new end users I think it depends on what stage the project is at but I think the other uh panelists actually have more experience with this specifically than I do I'll go for you no I just want to say I mean from the metamask perspective right there is a huge investment on on for example a metamask learn so the end user education because we understand there is a big let's say developer need you know to work with snaps API flask this kind of like tooling for developers but there is a huge need for for end user education so I think I don't want to say percentage but it's a big is a big chunk that not a lot of projects are actually I think doing from the user perspective they're really building you know developer education content and less user education content you know I feel like a lot of projects are are suspending I don't know the percentage but like on just pure marketing right nothing to do with the usability Improvement of protocol or products um so several grants perspective obviously we wouldn't do marketing like not that much right unless there is a very Niche or specialized place where we think that we need to encourage more diversity of um newly onboarded users but overall the investment I think should be on improving the usability of your protocol or like just the user friendliness of the community and and ecosystem so that when people do come in from a non-crypto world they are coming in because because of the usability and actual value add instead of or because I saw an advertisement on the side of a you know billboard so but I have no idea what percentage I mean we we as a grants program don't set Targets on or I have to spend 30 percent on marketing or usability or whatever it's like it's somewhat reactive in a sense we try and push for rfps or encourage um this course and discussions on that but no fixed percentage from our end yeah yeah we we do do marketing and uh yeah we we kind of uh very rough ballpark figures kind of around 30 which is typical for like a fintech startup and but we're always looking for ways to obviously hack that back or you can put a logo on a Formula One car which seems really common in 2022 slightly expensive I would just like to add uh add add one thing to this I what I'd like to see at least is that I want to see a project actually develop their technology first I think that should be prioritized first as they need to build the product they need to build the technology before they um do a lot of marketing and I think once the project is built once there's really something there that's ready for people to use then I want to see that money being put into marketing and into adoption I mean that's what this is all about in the at the end after all yeah that's fair um I have one question that's directed to uyj and someone really made a point of calling themselves Anon for this one there's a discussion about analyzing investment thesis thesis but uni swap started from a grant from an unknown developer with no experience how do we keep funding that future public goods so I mean it's it's from it's from EF Grand right without without you have Grant uh making that bad or taking that risk I guess on behalf of the whole ethereum ecosystem then you know had it I guess Hayden might not have worked on uni swap V1 and we wouldn't have uni swap V2 which is also open source and Fork to I don't know how many different Forks which you know maybe not all of them but I'm sure some of them bring at a value and as every step of the way if the licensing and the fact that it's open source and accessible and well documented that that culture continues then and yeah we should keep encouraging that right so kind of I guess recently there's also like alternative ways that are being experimented on doing these type of public use funding right optimism doing retroactive public goods funding which is in you know first round experimental stages and we as a grants program currently are not looking to do retroactive public goods we are still looking to fund future stuff right so I think I think at the start when I was saying that I hope that we as a as a community as an ecosystem can keep pushing for that that will help encourage more you know hidden atoms let's say to come in and and experiment and and take a risk and uh without losing too much money on you know their own but then uh build stuff that other people that can can then fork and build upon I think that's that's the important thing yeah um I'd like to just take a moment uh because I believe we're in during the near end of the panel I just want to take a moment just to acknowledge how beautiful I think all of this is that we're able to create these alternative funding sources that remember think about it ethereum itself was funded from an Ico right all of this comes from people getting together in in in this Freedom loving way and cooperating together and building these amazing and these useful things and I think at the end of the day I think that's much of the ethereum and the cryptocurrency ethos is I think part of that and also to acknowledge that you know people sometimes talk badly of the Ico boom but they forget that the majority of the D5 Blue Chips today actually come from that Ico boom that was when all of these things were funded and built and I think today we're seeing that continue in the form of grants in the form of new projects and I think this is absolutely critical for the space to move forward and and empowering and we're actually empowering each other in the process as we believe even each other and we believe in this Vision that we're pursuing and I think that's just this beautiful thing [Applause] you could have really saved that for the really end in three minutes that was beautiful um yeah so the last question um which is to all of you is can you share kind of what is one exciting problem in the space or blockchain challenge that hasn't been addressed yet that you guys want to fund scalability I would add specifically I want to see more effort being done on sharding layer one uh scaling there was an event on scaling last week I don't know if you went I don't know yeah I don't know I'm I'm excited about aggregators you know like retail aggregators for data like adjune or or Nance and there are more let's say open source so and of course like layer application top of layer layers like you know play to earn I don't know pretty to earn only on different layers or different different sort of things so I'm excited about this yeah and I feel like I'm beating the same drum over and over again but like I'm I'm excited about looking forward to people exploring and researching new ways of um pushing for public goods funding right um the retroactive public goods funding maybe your work maybe everyone I have no idea right and then because a lot of it actually comes from Community treasury setting up grants and for that then there's the governance side of things so so that's something that uh I myself am very interested in I would like to see more people doing research and experimentation on different governance models for dials or for for treasury right so yeah I'd like to just just agree with your point because you know I manage a fund that's profit motivated so generally public goods is not something that we're able to invest in so I'm glad that these Grant programs exist and that again through this type of blockchain funding that we are able to fund these things you know for the betterment of the whole ecosystem so I'm just glad that's that's the thing and and that exists thank you and I can get you a room if you want thanks ever so much everyone thanks so much for the panelists for all of you please give one big round of applause thank you guys thank you [Music]