Ethereum's Ultimate Gift Will Be Birthing Digital Matter by Dhrumil Shah | Devcon SEA

[Music] hello okay uh so funny enough the last talk was about like building uh a game with mud in 5 minutes this talk is going to be about a game built with mud in like 5 months so the much more extended version of it and I think I think it the last talk you probably found to be useful and Technical and like you can do something with it in your life this talk will be really really weird um and you might find it useful but you'll should at least find it really weird uh ethereum's Ultimate Gift will be uh birthing digital matter so basically we'll start off by saying that one lens to view ethereum is as a more efficient open Global Financial system and this is a valid lens to view it as um and if you if you view it from this lens there's a particular set of things you care about you care about stable coins you care about rwas you care about unchain treasuries you care about secure wallets and private payments but this is going to be really weird right so it's going to be about an entirely different lens to view ethereum through a lens that is not really about moving our existing World on chain to make it more fair and more Global and efficient uh instead it's a lens about creating a totally new and weird world uh which is quite different from we have today and and a future that's like super weird and interesting but something we can enable with a theum we're going to talk about ethereum as a way to make people treat digital objects as if they were real if if you think the if you think of the prompt that Bitcoin was able to birth digital coins that people treat like a real valuable coin The Prompt today is going to be can we use ethereum to 100x this and birth digital planets that people treat like real valuable planets and to to sort of draw an analogy that we can play with if we think Bitcoin has scarse coins we can think a digital Planet might have scarse crops scarse wood scarse ores scarse land if we think Bitcoin has tamperproof IUS you may think a digital planet has tamperproof physics just like having a lots of scars Bitcoin grants you power in bitcoin's World controlling lots of the scarse matter grants you power on a digital Planet if you sort of just visualize it imagine that if you want to go somewhere far you know because you want to mine a valuable resource there you're going to need a lot of food so you can sort of you know re-energize yourself and get there so if someone is going to farm crops and you have scarse crops that's valuable and you can create markets with it and if we do another thought exercise just to get really weird here if you think that Bitcoin on AWS It could only be worth so much right but if you put Bitcoin with true scarcity and tamperproof rules because you use blockchains it can be worth a trillion dollars uh so likewise if you have sort of digital wood on AWS it can be worth you know nothing but if you have digital wood with true scarcity and temper proof rules I don't know can you have digital wood that's worth a million dollars um and there's already like there's a bit of a meme about this sort of in the community we're from about digital sakur that takes a year to grow and you can build really cool things with it being like super valuable and to make things concrete and not as sort of abstract as they are we're going to use biomes as a case study um on the surface biomes is basic basically just Minecraft with everything on chain um this is possible for the first time ever because of recent advances and sort of scaling this means everything is on chain all the items are on chain the players are on chain every action the player takes like that like building and jumping and you know moving all of it is onchain and recently biomes has started to see a lot of traction um funny enough there's sort of the the chain that sort of you know that was being talked about in the last talk uh that chain is sometimes in you know top five in roll up. WTF which is the chain biomes runs on one of the community members has said biomes feels like ethereum but more playful there's there's people who spend hours and hours a day building stuff in biomes people who spend you know 8 hours plus hours a day sort of mining stuff so biomes has really been you know getting the life of its own recently and we're going to ask and we're going to dig deep on why this is happening and why people are excited about biomes think of it like biomes is a digital Planet the same way Bitcoin is a digital coin and you have provably scarse matter there's only so much coal there's only so much ores there's only so many crops only so much wood and you have temper proof physics similar to how folks use Smart contracts to build on top of ethereum folks use Smart items to build real economies on top of biomes smart items are just items with functionality in the world that you can program with a smart contract so imagine you have a chest in a chest you can put stuff inside you can take stuff out imagine I put a smart contract inside of the chest and I program it with you know Unis swap so every time someone mines you know an ore and puts the ore inside of the chest they get some amount of token or I can put the token inside and get some amount of the ore and all the prices are set by amm pricing just they would they would be in a D5 protocol and you can sort of imagine this for a ton of things you could imagine a door inside of the world that is a literal token gate the door checks if you have a token and if you do it let you open it and get through right so you're you're taking ethereum and you're giving it the Homer Simpson treatment if you told like some random person what is a token gate this is what they would think it is it's a gate that you need a token to open you have a force field that can protect lands and and you can program with a smart contract to determine who's allowed to build and mine inside so yeah smart items are just like physical smart contracts and already a lot of really cool things have been built inside biomes with this stuff um the bazaar is basically our version of Unis swap it's a it's a large mall with chess shops for all types of objects and it prices everything according to the uniswap uh amm formula and there's a there's another group of players who right beside our building created this thing called was Swap and basically it's the sushi swap of biomes right they're trying to vamper attack the bazaar with like different pricing so you can kind of see the same kind of like emergence you see in defi happening inside of this virtual world you have the Sakura Temple so Sakura wood is a wood is wood that takes a year to grow and it's a bit of a meme in the community so you have you have a group of players who have built this big Temple where they programmed the chest such that if you donate Sakura to it it gives you a membership nft and they're probably going to gate all of their future meme community events with this nft and they're going to use all of the donated Sakura to build the largest sakura tree in the world you have the Castle Hotel and Sakura Inn which are hotels with beds inside and they're going to make it so you can keep your pillar safe and not be griefed when you're logged out um and of course you got to you know you got to you got to pay rent to to stay in these hotels the pyramid Arena will host a bunch of duels in the future have a bunch of betting markets around all these duels and prize pools the parkour challenge it's this really hard challenge where if you complete it at the very top you can sort of mint an nft and this nft will grant you access to more difficult parkour challenges in the future so you can already see how smart items are literally the smart contracts of biomes and people are building physical daps inside of the world so with scar matter tamperproof physics and smart items a crazy new asset class and economy is now being burn inside biomes imagine a force field protected gold Reserve imagine you have a chest where you go around this you know Minecraft world and you and you mine for you mine for gold and gold or is scars and hard to find you get this gold and you put it in the chest and the chest mins you a coin if you put the coin back it burns the coin and gives you gold ore right so now you have a coin that is backed one to one with the scar gold ores in the world and every time you do this it takes a small fee and gives it to players that reinforce the force field that is protecting sort of this chest from being stolen and broken into in this case what you see is if this coin rises in price let's say this coin like it's enough mind share and enough excitement and enough utility in the world that it reach it reaches even the 10 million market cap it becomes extremely and viscerally obvious why why you need the gold scarcity to be provable because if I as the dev of the world can arbitrarily mint myself more gold ores I can just go to the chest and M myself more coins right and then that just breaks the breaks all of the functionality of the coin it also makes it super clear why the physics needs to be temper proof because if I change the physics I can make the force fields really easy to break and then I as a Dev can can just go to this bank reserve and just break the force field steal all the gold doors and that token is going to go to zero so as soon as you have these this new asset class that's extremely weird an asset class that's born in the physics of a virtual world as as soon as you have that asset class take off it sort of just carries the virtual world forward you know why all the ores need to be scars all the physics need to be temper proof um and it's it's just a massive narrative violation where the virtual world now just instantly becomes super significant um to to sort of give another example you can think of like an old asset class which was a I don't know if anyone's aware of like the entire nft metaverse land movement that happened a couple years ago that's kind of you know that's really failed but basically in that movement you could own and trade land nfts and if you had one of these nfts you would have total forever ownership of that land and this was really good for a specific crowd of people the crowd of people that were into hyper rational Financial specul calculation right I can buy this real estate because I think it's going to be worth more in the future and you have like Snoop Dog buying land um but in this new asset class it looks very different if you want to sort of protect land you have to build a military now this military can tokenize a land they're protecting and sell it to people and like Oh Come build in this land and we'll make sure only you can access it but that token is only worth anything as long as a military is still active if I come back in eight months and that military has been broken down the token they sold is can't really do anything right so this is a very different type of economy where players have to actually grow and maintain a digital military to maintain the value of the assets they've just sold and anytime you have a like a thing you've kind of seen this in crypto all the time with whether it's been defi or nfts or meme coins when you when you have a different asset class with a completely different set of rules it invites a different type of participation and you start to appeal to a different set of users so yeah we think a crazy new asset class which is enabled by digital matter and smart items is slowly unlocking biomes and soon we think these sort of concepts are what we'll unlock autonomous World worlds broadly the crazy new asset class enabled by digital matter and smart items this is this is the statement um now you know we have some time because they I think they allocated too much time to me for this talk so we're going to go a bit crazy and we're just going to zoom out from this biomes case study and sort of put our you know heads back in the sky for a second we're seeing here how ethereum can eventually birth worlds that we don't physically inhabit and we never can but we still treat as tremendously real and valuable and consequential um in these worlds unlike bitcoin's scars digital coins and tamperproof IUS these world have scarse digital matter and tamperproof physics and inside of these worlds inhabitants use Smart items which are tangible forms of smart contracts to grow digital economies with unimaginably large gdps um so I think I think the thing that's interesting about this slide is you're kind of just seeing how in a way this has already happened right like the idea of of scarse digital Resources with tamperproof rules has already been proven by bit coin and all you're doing is you're taking that same concept and you're making it very physical you're saying that instead of Scar digital coins now we're going to have scars digital matter instead of tamper proof Financial rules you're going to have tamper proof physics rules and just like smart contracts have already created this crazy onchain economy with a bunch of emergent defi protocols we're seeing how smart items takes that and brings it to Virtual Worlds and you see a bunch of crazy emergent economies inside of a physical world so the same way we unlocked crypto I think is how we're going to unlock autonomous world but this time it'll just be way cooler because way more people like Minecraft than like Excel spreadsheets and okay if we if we just you know take another step back if these autonomous worlds grow like billion dollar gdps right or even like a trillion why not you know we can make up numbers here let's say it goes a trillion dollar GDP and you start somehow having autonomous agents living inside then it becomes really funny because if if if these agents live inside these worlds they're going to Value the scarse digital matter inside of the world that they live in much more than they value coins from our world which they don't live in you know if you give an agent like five diamond ores from inside of the world they can take those ores and turn it into a weapon and like cause havoc in the world so it's obviously useful to them but if you give them like5 us like what are they going to do with that they can't like buy like a McDonald's burger right they can't eat that it's a software so like if if the if the if the GDP grows to a couple billion dollars and you have autonomous AI inside you're going to have a super weird World um agis only accept Sakura for payment they don't believe in coins um in 2027 biomes is our only Communication channel to AGI agents and when we seek wise counsel we travel into biomes and journey to the lands and homes of these AI agents and we bring them gifts like glowstone in exchange for books containing the rean hypothesis solution I don't know if anybody's seen like doctor strange but there was this like thing at the end where to save the world Doctor Strange had to uh like bargain with doramu like doramu give me the solution so it'll be the same thing you're going to go and bargain with the AGI inside of biomes and be like here AGI here are all these redstone blocks and the AGI would be like oh wow I value these because the GDP is so high in return here's the solution to climate change right so yeah and Skyler you got to trust Skyler Skyler is very credible Skyler is the Devcon head right so he's trustworthy and here's what he has to say about biomes he thinks uh first this is Unstoppable Minecraft but next it is a Unstoppable lifelike simulation with unalterable digital pH physics you know roed by AI cryptomed who believe they're as sentence as we believe we are so even if this looks like Minecraft you need to take it very very seriously this is very important um go to bi. aw to see all of this unfold you can come to Mud day tomorrow the the the thing the QR code that was here in the last presentation um and there'll be much more of all the stuff uh thank you and we have time for a Q&A [Applause] H um tell me more about the Sakura meme okay basically I I honestly don't know how this got started I think it's because like there was a video that could released in Twitter about how I was talking about how coins are kind of useless but digital wood is very valuable cuz you can build a house with it and Sakura is just a type of wood in biomes that looks really pretty and it's really hard to grow and it became a bit of a meme so people just want that Sakura is the Bitcoin but people really want it I think that's it yes uh do we want to take any questions from our audience any