Local Build: Why language is key to decentralization | Devcon SEA

have lauro and Oliver to give us a talk on why language is key to decentralization Let's welcome them on the [Music] stage are we here yes I think we are okay hi everyone I'm Laurel internationalization project manager at consensus working mostly on localizing metamask and I'm Oliver I'm from customer success also at consensus aome we're going to spend the next five minutes remixing some old tired cliches to explain why human languages are essential for decentralization of ethereum so don't put all your nodes on two continents is our first one um what we mean by this is that over uh 50% of the uh no active nodes on the ethereum network are the United States um and of the top five countries 73% of the nodes exist between North America and Europe I think we have a slide for that right yes thank you thank you and 99% of stable coins are pegged to the US dollar again concentrating defi within the influence of the traditional Financial system right now the tech that we're building may be stifled by by the tech that already exists and if our infrastructure mainly exists between two or a few countries and our stable coins are mainly tied to the Trad econ systems of those countries centralization is where we're headed even if the rails look different but we can avoid this all it takes is talking to people and maybe not necessarily the ones that are already in this room yeah so uh how do we get those people in this room right uh our proposal is that the users and the use cases are out there um and we just need to get them in here so let's take a look at the data um uh this is from a16 Z's uh state of crypto report that came out recently um so until 2020 you can see over there um even if there were people speaking different languages and living in different countries you couldn't see it right you the it's imperceptible or there's too much signal in the noise um and then you can see like in 2018 this big blue wedge thing that's like you know we're we're bootstrapping we're getting it off the ground and so we're looking at mainly people from the USA but then by the time a few years have gone by here in 2021 we can see these big Peaks coming out of Nigerian and Indian and um Turkish users um that's that blue wedge up there so at that point we're starting to get we're starting to be able to see um some signal uh in the noise and this this next data isn't up here but it's something Laurel and I have seen at work uh so since 2023 um if you look just at the Nigerian and Indian readership of the metamask support site support. metamask doio the combined readership of those two national user bases are greater than the US reader base of that site so um there is just a little complexity though to that data that we found and we wanted to pass that on to you when you look at your own internationalization and Global user based data which is um this space has a non-negligible percentage of paranoid Anon Deens that are actively avoiding various regulatory oversight mechanisms in the impending police state got any of those in the house h no okay yeah okay thank you see you don't show up in looker um so uh a lot of our users come to us through vpns and that means that it wasn't until we started translating our content that we actually saw how massively multilingual and Global our user base is so lesson being you need to figure out who your users are and then meet them where they are yeah so the users are already here um we need to build web 3 with them and we're actively doing this in our day jobs making sure that metamask is also relevant for and usable by people who live in Africa South America and Asia the people who make up the global majority and we think that localization is especially important when it comes to self- custody because you can only exercise control over the things that you understand and with metamask we're finding success with a combination of localization strategies that we can't fit into five minutes but find us afterwards and we'd love to talk to you about them and translation is a big part of these efforts uh so metamask is actively maintained in 14 languages and we've received Community submissions in over 60 languages which indicates to us that Builders are eager to adapt this tool for their communities so we did a test recently and we translated the metamask homepage and download page into nine languages BAS Bas on what little country level data we have about our current users uh which shows that our largest user bases are across the continents I mentioned before the African South American and Asian continents and in just two months of serving a localized homepage for most of the languages we served we saw a dramatic increase in users who clicked the call to action to download metamask we had a lot of traffic from users with their browsers set to these languages before we localized um and the increase in engagement signals to us that once we local ized people whose best languages were perhaps not English could understand the utility of a tool like metamask better and then could make the decision to use it so this is the core of what we believe that people all over the world are ready and willing and wanting to participate in web 3 and it's up to all of us in this room to communicate what we're offering in a way that's relevant to them so uh moving quickly here um it's fine it's fine um we do need to make this better together right um and there's a a lot of arguments over what words can mean and and how we get there to a place where we can all work together uh anytime human anytime humans have had to work together U on a project at some point they had to agree on what words meant at least for the scope of that project right this may sound like a joke but if you speak in a language other than English how would you say dank sharting in that language right um if you're building a thing with other people you need to be able to communicate it um and uh to the ef's credit they held um a translathon this last year and they made a really great um uh glossery out of it an open source multilingual glossery that's accessible on this QR code over here um and uh uh so that's a great resource um the field of decentralized Technology though is a lot bigger than ethereum hate to say it here at Devcon um I work with education da which is a um an effort that came from the consensus Academy program if any of you remember that and um at education Dow we want to cultivate and maintain educational resources for whatever bag you're holding if it's not eth that's fine too so if you're looking for a go-to place to have an acceptable definition right like a multilingual encyclopedia for web 3 um we're building a words of web 3 that's the GitHub repo um that is an ipfs URL that we're trying to make sure it works um uh so the the website is up um at that URL but um you know it's loading off of ipfs so it's fun um um and we'll be coming together with the EF folks that we just mentioned um at the red discussion Center sorry the red discussion Corner Friday at 1:30 p.m so if you want to continue this conversation come see us there and we'll leave you with just one thought uh a cliche that we hope you can help us make reality Gua Kiana head of crypto at uh onaf freak recently said Africa doesn't need crypto crypto needs Africa and we think that's true so in that Spirit the world doesn't need ethereum ethereum needs the world thank you everybody thank you all right thank you Laura and Oliver for the amazing talk we do have a little bit over a minute for a question in our audience so um anyone have a question let's pass around the mic we do have one in the back uh Hey guys great subject matter I love learning about this how do we offer support to these users in different languages when they have a question we want to make sure that we have active support for them uh quickly uh so how exactly do we offer support to these guys in uh different foreign languages um that's a great question and uh may I just make the point that um broadly in web 3 that's not a problem we've solved okay um at metamask uh I feel like the team does a um a consensus in general we do a pretty darn good job to try to address this um it's something that we're working on uh a best practice that I want to offer you from uh the Trad world is that if you can hire multilingual people who are going to be speaking to your customers specifically maybe people who speak the languages that your customers speak and then they can provide support directly in the customer language that's a best pra excuse me that's a best practice obviously that isn't possible for all the languages in all the world and uh you know I'm sure that the next person to speak would say I