Practical Pluralism ♻️🌱 | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] McMillan and I are both the founders of a quadratic quadratic funding protocols or in founded CLR fund I founded Bitcoin we've been friends before we were founders of that project and we were talking about how inspired we were of the ethos of client diversity that has come out of Prismatic labs and other teams at the base layer and how that anyway so we were talking about what it would mean to have practical pluralism at the public goods funding layer of the stack and so I've assembled some of the top founders of public goods funders in this space to talk about practical pluralism so I'll hand it off to you Orin so I'm just going to read a quick excerpt from the article that we wrote or the essay that we wrote it's up on this QR code if you want to go and check it out later because I won't read the whole thing because we don't have time but here we go so pluralism itself is a primitive for anti-fragile resilient and regenerative systems as an ecosystem ethereum has done a great job of fostering diversity in its Mining and validating clients uh similarly we should insist on pluralism across the full stack of web3 Technologies and culture so this includes discrete products like wallets RPC nodes Dow tooling Public Funding mechanisms amm stable coins developer tooling as well as the intangible influencers like the people groups communities and opinions which participate in and hold sway over our ecosystem so we we're all here today because we believe in client diversity we believe in pluralism as a primitive and we want to join we want you guys to join us in kind of extending this ethos of client diversity and pluralism to other layers of our Collective stack so by having pluralism as a core value in each kind of vertical we make it more likely that the space tends towards capture resistance and not fragility participants should be able to choose or to use or not use any of a number of options for any given need and so by having pluralism at the kind of Beating Heart of each Niche we ensure the space is anti-fragile if there's a major bug discovered in one system the resulting cascading harm can only go so far because there's always another alternative system to pick up the slack so for web 3 to truly Express itself diversity and pluralism must be a core value I mean I hand it off to Griff to say a little piece on this as well yeah and I think we need to make sure that we're watching for opportunities for pluralism I'm really worried I want to make two points I'm really worried number one about etherscan I think it's the hidden centralization that we don't it's Matthew Tom and The Ether scan team are amazing and they do great work but that is the biggest Honey Pot in our industry and we don't even think about it if you can hack etherscan and say you sent a million dollars somewhere you sent a million dollars somewhere we we really need to make sure that we're funding Alternatives like block Scout and I'm really worried about block Scouts since gnosis just added gnosis scan an etherscan on that chain and now where's block Scout gonna go we really need to think about blockchain explorers I also just want to say uh pluralism goes if we have this infrastructure at our base layer we can extend pluralism to the world we have monopolistic governments telling us what to do all the time and demanding Monopoly over public goods and if we could instead change it so that we have competing organizations that are trying to meet the demand of society to satisfy our public goods and needs we'll have a much better world and this will only work on top of a practical plurality based layer hey um so I'm Carl I'm contributing to the optimism Collective a layer two and we had practical pluralism in two spots one inside of our protocol we started out building a monolith but it was rigid hard to contribute to and Bug prone we needed a multi-client ecosystem in our ecosystem so we took a step back we split it up broke it into modules and then now we're actually building towards this multicline ecosystem and have multiple clients for Layer Two so that's practical pluralism at work allowing us to scale our protocol and this is just amazing an amazing moment of practical pluralism on stage here today we spent so much time focusing on Brands but I am a believer that there is something which is forward progress and that is why information and open source is so incredible because you can actually make forward progress for an ecosystem it's not about you getting forward it's about moving the ecosystem forward as a whole so that's it that was great hi everyone I'm PM antinico founder and CEO of open Collective we are not a web 3 project so sorry about that but what we do is we fund a lot of Open Source projects we currently support 3 000 open source projects we do project directed funding and the way we do it is by creating an umbrella organization that allows them to access funding from companies and individuals and foundations that otherwise they wouldn't be able to access and so our approach to pluralism is really by enabling any open source project out there to be able to receive funding they don't need to be big they don't need to be fancy they just need to be an open Collective and in the past four years we've distributed 30 million dollars sorry in public directed funding so that's what we do great okay my name is Abby I'm the head of community and governance at radical we build decentralized collaboration tools for developers building decentralized Technologies if you see me talk I love free and open software I am a Foss fanatic and I believe that practical pluralism that's a tongue twister can save the internet the internet is being captured by anti-competitive forces that sensor and capture and continue to extract and if we don't build against this by investing in technical plurality giving people the ability to exit infrastructure to freely act on their protocols and their infrastructure instead of relying on platforms to keep their experience if you can do that if we can be more plural in the way that we build together if by ownership distributions um radical and Bitcoin just did an awesome public goods Alliance we did a token swap if you can embed pluralism in your ownership that's another way of securing resilience and then finally if you can build pluralism in your participants in the people in your network by building super diverse multi-stakeholder governance you can build practical pluralism across the stack and build a better internet for everybody that's what I think is great I think that was one minute right hey everyone my name is Trent Van Epps it's in first it's an honor to be with these people so many of whom I respect I'm a member of the protocol Guild which is rebalancing the incentives to contribute to the core protocol making sure we have people maintaining this infrastructure that the entire ecosystem depends on and that the people that are working on it are properly compensated and motivated to continue doing this work for many many decades to come and I would like to point everybody to a great talk yesterday from Josh Stark of the EF he included many of the organizations represented here on this slide uh I encourage you to go check it out it's about the EF generally but um uh he he references or Compares uh organizations fundraising for public goods as ethereum's civil society and it's a really apt analogy because um we don't have a government in ethereum we have the private sector which is people that are you know building tools and applications for people to use maybe profit motivated but we desperately need to maintain the civil society that is making sure that the publicans of ethereum are maintained and that people can get the resources to build them belonging to the Future um so I'd encourage you to check out that talk and imagine uh this this group of people here as you know the Vanguard of civil society and ethereum and it's something that we need to make sure is uh encouraged to we should be able to contribute to the Civil Society as well um while having these organizations building alongside each other um yeah go check out that talk alrighty I'll bring it home uh so all right Kevin owaki founder of get coin repent for building a centralized monolith in the beginning and I'm really glad to be seeing get coin move towards a decentralized modular infrastructure and I think that that modular infrastructure is going to enable get coin to be more plural in the future and I would love to I'm not in control of the Dow in any way but as an outsider I would love to see a future in which we build on top of the modules that CLR fund has pioneered that giveth has pioneered retroactive public goods funding at optimism open Collective has been an inspiration for me from the start radical same thing and I'm really proud of what protocol Guild is doing with public goods funding for the client developers in the ethereum ecosystem I really hope to see uh to give another talk on practical pluralism in a couple years and invite we're going to figure out how to put 20 Founders up on stage of public goods projects in 2025 and I think that we want to eat our own dog food and be practically plural with the public goods funding infrastructure of the ecosystem and this is a challenge to the rest of the ecosystem whether you're building nft marketplaces dexes or any other piece of infrastructure to embrace modularity and pluralism from the start and uh I'm so inspired by you thank you for joining this panel and please join me in a round of applause for our panelists all right right on time there we go thanks everyone see you in the in the lobby