Infrastructure for Consumer Growth Panel

Transcript

0:08 Really cool kind of stuff built out on that, but it was mostly the cost of work. So, but to your question about the challenges with, you know, with decentralized identities, like, well, you know, it's like, why, if there are no applications serving the benefits that the technologies we're working on exist, then it's very difficult to try to think about about how we can get people actually, you know, thinking about it and using it more. So our challenge is like outside of, you know, outside of like the three major business models that I think actually exist in our larger category of like crypto and blockchain, which is, you know, it's like BTC and asset plays like trading, exchanges.

1:01 The second is like DeFi to some extent, which is serving the first. and the third is like infrastructural. Third is kind of interesting because we're starting to think about infrastructural and serving like node running and stuff like that. It's also kind of like serving the first. So DAU outside of speculative or MAU even outside of speculative stuff like just doesn't exist. So, you know, it just doesn't exist like significant DAU. And what we I think need to really, really be aimed for for it is how do we find a way to build applications or think of applications that people are going to actually use that don't have a specific orientation towards speculation because you

1:51 don't see, like the rest of Web 2 is not speculation oriented, like we are for better or for worse, right? I'm not saying it's bad, but we exist in this speculatively oriented type of space and we We have to really just search for like what that DAO is. I don't necessarily have the answer. I don't think we have like that. I mean right now we've got a bunch of account signups, other projects that are utilizing decentralized SIP, like a lot of account signups, right? But in terms of actually using it, we've got to really stretch our brains and consider what is interesting. We have ideas around on-chain points. We have ideas around, you know, making inroads with brands so that

2:36 that they can have a richer data point, like in a non-grippy way, a richer experience with customers and users than just retargeted metadata, you know, so like that's, that's where we're part of that, that's the challenges too. Sorry for the rant. No, I think that's a great point, and you know, it kind of also brings me to a lot of steps, you're building something that is, you know, kind of outside of this financial kind of speculative category, to kind of share a little bit more about what No-Plan Labs building, what's your kind of like mental kind of models as well for approaching this or approaching like this DAO problem of dealing with users over team users?

3:16 So gamification, right? And also creating like a social layer around it. I feel very grateful for having the privilege to be a part of Kernel. And I go back to that because Kernel itself was very, very much interactive, but it also encouraged you to just like ask ask questions amongst your peers. There is no like, don't question. And also it was very philosophical in many ways. And I think in that, it really inspired me to like want to be a part of something bigger than myself in a time where like, we were very isolated post COVID. And I think many of us are more inherently similar

4:01 and we are different. So I think that also kind of taps into the idea that we kind of like want to be the hero in the story because we are the main character of our own story. So what we're trying to do is create these sort of hero stories where you are a guardian and you are the guardian of your sovereignty. And in that you have the ability to choose what you want to represent in this space. So every single choice, like what is the first token you buy, to what is the first interaction you have with maybe like a DAO or a wallet, etc.

4:38 Like that all kind of gets tallied, but in that it's like a journey and you're telling that story as you're progressing through the space. What about the question? Well, yeah, I think you kind of explained it a lot about how you guys are approaching consumer growth in many ways, like the mental models. So why I feel like a part of all of this is that the part of the building of all these protocols is for leaders such as staff to really build up and build up communities and culture and all those things. because I think the most important thing is that we kind of begin to provide what us recently told the third spaces and essentially these are like online spaces where people would actually come together and congregate and begin to actually contribute and demonstrate value.

5:33 So I am an African who lives in Trinidad and Tobago and somehow because of the open age of Work 3 I work for a large group. That could only happen inside of Web3 because I was given an opportunity to actually demonstrate the value that I could actually put there and the reputation of that kind of snowballed into me getting offered this particular position and working there for the past few years but like if you're looking at the place that like what blockchain kind of represents and like consumer adoption and where all of that is just looking at culture and if I'm going to ask I wonder what

6:13 The category of people over the past 20-30 years have been able to build a global culture that cuts across music, where it's now the largest genre, fashion, everybody's wearing sneakers, everybody's doing one of those things. A lot of it is global South culture, a lot of it is black culture, and we don't see that effectively represented our chain now. And so that to me is what represents the next frontier and the next evolution of where this goes through, where blockchain ends up And the fees and all of these communities could actually go for mass adoption because if you switch on your radio now It's probably going to be something as Hip-Hop or Afrobeat or something like that, so if you're looking at what the dominant culture in the world is right now and what everybody has been doing for the past 100 years, it's predominantly black culture and so I'm really looking forward to seeing creators step forward in that particular space and really begin to build avenues and platforms for just very unique

7:34 I want to see black expressions and the beauty of this is that they could actually be global and it's fundamentally global and so as we could now begin to see things like Afrobeats coming out of Nigeria and Ghana and all of those things and everybody's doing all of those tip-top taxes, it sounds, I can't tell the difference between something that sounds like that's all and what's Afrobeats and all of these things and so I want to see a lot more of that in the future in terms of Looking at the quality expressions, the fact that the Bluetooth NFT is like a monkey is ridiculous. We could actually express our online identities and our expression in a very brand new and fresh and innovative way.

8:24 And that still stands true for global self-cultures across the world. So if you look at India, if you look at Blacktown, the real next venture of black consumer adoption for me, when I'm looking at blockchain, is bringing some of those cultures onto it. Amazing. So beautiful to that. And then what are you guys looking forward to in this era of consumer crypto as you are building, you know, full stack kind of protocol experience or building more for the consumer kind of layer? And how do you hope that these movements can kind of also mobilize, you know, in areas like the Caribbean? I think, I'm mostly like, for this next phase, I'm just, like I said before, I'm excited to see if we can find ways to get people to use apps that, you know, or applications that don't have this completely obvious, native, speculative association.

9:35 I'm not throwing the baby out of the bathwater. I think it helps to grow communities and ecosystems if we can think about kind of like a speculative impulse behind it sometimes. But we need to just use it effectively, use it as something that might be in the background. I think we need to think about how, for us, I am most I am most interested in how we connect brands with data sovereign users. That's like my biggest, that's our end game. And by brands I use that term somewhat loosely, but brands could be platforms too, right, or ecosystems, or communities, or DAOs, or whatever, or it could be Sony, or it could be like Mr. Muffler.

10:31 I don't necessarily care, I just want to have better connections between brands and data software users. And I think that once we put people, once the situation exists that people are more able to leverage their data on their own behalf, we're going to see some interesting things happen. So you referenced those menstruation apps. You know, like I'm also thinking about 23andMe as an example of that too, right? So, you know, they, 50% of their revenue, like these are active business models, you know, 50% of the revenue is actually selling your data to pharmaceutical companies. So, yeah, is it conceivable that like a future exists where we have like 23andMe that you, that, you know,

11:24 you sink in with your decentralized identifier and the CKVM magic happening and no one can see it, yeah, and I think, yeah, and then you could potentially form a data trust with other people who are also in, you've uploaded your genetic data in some type of secure way and, you know, could that exist in the future? Hell yeah, why not? And it probably should. And then there's also, so there's actual real business models today that exist. that if we utilize the technologies that we have that are intuitive and growing but they're basically there, then yeah, man, we can do stuff like that. I can upload my genome and I'm going to let you at this pharmaceutical company access it in some secure way for a price. And how much is that worth? I don't know. But there are some interesting metrics associated with this that you might be curious.

12:27 to hear, like anywhere from like your lifetime value of your genome, you know, accessed by research and there's another thing that's interesting about this is that if you have genetic like like genetic problems, it's actually better because you make more money, which is an interesting thing because you're more interested in understanding those things. But anyway, it's up to $20,000, like some people are worth $50,000 for the estimations, so that's not significant, that's a lot of money for anyone and it wouldn't be just served to the point about culture in different markets in different parts of the world, like a genome that is in Botswana is worth the same amount as a genome.

13:16 Switzerland, right? So, these are interesting. That's one thing that just came to mind as we were kind of discussing all of that. And Steph, what are you kind of excited about? Thanks for asking. I think I'm most excited for us to figure out a bridge from IRL to tech. Specifically, I love nature, I love being in nature, and I think that what's happening in blockchain is kind of like a reflection to what's happening in the real world, like we're this organism that is slowly evolving and growing, so I'm really excited for more people to start thinking that way, so how can we reflect what's happening in our environment, how nature is constantly evolving and growing, and have it also be represented in the protocol level, or even in

14:11 and DAOs as they're evolving because yes, it's great to think about everything as a function like if this happens and that but with that comes a lot of evolution and we have to evolve and have many more evolutions often in order to keep growing. So I think through that we can inspire more critical thinking amongst each other especially with AI coming into the mix as well. Not everything's real. And so I hope that we can do more of that as well as is create a culture that is more intentional amongst each other and our communities so that we create an ecosystem that is accessible and inclusive amongst our peers.

14:52 Yeah, for me I guess the thing that, in addition to what I said, it would be just looking at the panhandle, which dictionary put this out, the word of the year of 2023 was authenticity. and authenticity will loosen an inventory provenance and blockchain stands at a particularly unique intersection in terms of being able to provide authenticity in a world where you really can't tell what is real and I'm really excited to see what that would bring even when we see like the exclusion of AI and our load let's say there are some Development which is building, like, who they need, especially in the governments, right?

15:54 But seeing a lot more systems and applications being actually put in place to provide authenticity to our digital experiences of community. Well, thank you so much. I know that we are running a little late, so I'm going to open for five minutes of questions, and then of course you can head out to the panel. My first question is, you had mentioned about daily active, monthly active users. I want to know, and this is for everybody, kind of like your thoughts on what would constitute sort of like a quality daily active or monthly active user, like what that potentially looks like as we're thinking about building apps for our consumers.

16:45 I'll start. It would be someone using whatever you're building on a daily basis, that's simplest definition. What you're building could be a protocol, so that could be a developer that's utilizing the protocol. At the consumer level, they're more likely to be utilizing an application. And so I'm actually, and we're actually kind of a little bit focused on both. We need to be thinking about the latter because, you know, like what are the builders building on your protocol for, right, like if, you know, we have a lot of developers building on, have had and still have a lot of developers building on Ethereum, other L1s, other L2s, this time has gone on, like they're building for

17:38 the application of crypto as, in a general sense, as a speculative type of situation. We should probably be relatively honest about that. So I, you know, like our thrust and I think many others that are working in the field of decentralized identity is like, how do we take that to the next level, right? Like, how do we go beyond speculation? And so the answer to that question is already here. It's already within the applications that we're using, but we're going to be using them in a way that is completely different at its foundation and base than we've been using them today. That's like the hope, right? There's a lot of people talking about Web3 and all the money investment and all the people working on projects because that's the hope.

18:33 the same as the hope of the Ethereum founding team that they would, you know, disrupt, or Bitcoin that they'd disrupt finance, well we want to disrupt, we want to disrupt this really unfair model that we've, you know, kind of find ourselves in where we're not, not only are we not getting the full sort of value, value capture of our identities because we are the product, we're also like being forced into these weird ass situations where our private information is exposed, or not even weird information, like really effed up situations, like getting prosecuted or whatever in a southeastern state because you're on some random menstruation app. So the answer is that. And there's a lot of work to do in terms of finding a way to

19:25 get people to use some of this stuff. And we're kind of, I think, more at the developer level I don't know, I feel like we've been in this kind of like area for a couple years and I'm not sure if we're necessarily getting traction so we need to start thinking about other ideas. For me, I think I want to go straight to like, and we have been going straight to like brand, like company innovation departments and saying like, trying to tell them like, what would it mean for you if you had, if you're users instead of just having a user account, but also have a decentralized identifier associated with their user account and then, you know, they could, there would be some way to leverage that information in a richer way, right? Like not just filling out a female, like age, sex, which, whatever it could be, like maybe there's a whole bunch of information that's already like preloaded as part of the data that you can leverage.

20:25 I know you asked what would measure a daily active user, but I feel like the developers in the room you always think about that fun number of acquisition, how many people are using the app. But I would actually argue that user feedback is really important, so in order to get that daily active user up, it's really important to interact with your user. So, yeah, you can talk to your innovation teams internally and try to figure out how do we get our numbers up. but talk to your audience to figure out what it is that they want to do and interact with because that's where you're going to realize like where the problems are like what's blocking them to get from like just creating an account and like not come back again like why aren't they coming back did you email them did you ask them why and that's like the main thing if that's what you're worried about like daily active users which most of us are investors care about this number a lot so it's important but also defining like what are

21:23 are like the different steps necessary for someone to interact with an application or a game that you have, is it just the login that you care about, like okay you're measuring maybe the wallet login if that's maybe the main thing that you're trying to create, but maybe it's a quest, maybe it's then going onto your platform or website and then onto your discord, etc. So defining like what those milestones are I think is extremely important and then once you have that defined then measuring around that and and figuring out like what's stumping people when they don't get there.

22:00 Okay, so it's a very interesting question and maybe that's what I have in mind, but one of the most interesting things for me stepping into crypto is how it was vastly different from what you do, right? So I was a two-time failure of two-founder. I went through all of the board, everything they actually tell you, active users, customer acquisition costs, all of those things. I could write books. I read an release when it came up. That's how committed I was to that whole thing. The thing with blockchain development, and I guess because in this year I'm actively looking towards funding, is that blockchain offers a vastly different set of tools and primitives

22:50 that allow humanity to express itself in vastly different ways. So in this context, I'm not just a software developer. I have to understand aim theory. I have to understand policy. I have to understand compliance. I have to understand all of these things. Why is this important? Because as you're resigning your protocol, all of these things actually matter. The most significant thing that happened to me, for me at the end of last year, was glass. Blast was a layer 2, but not, right? We thought it was absolute nonsense because it was just like a really, really well esteemed marketing campaign with a multisip, right? To be clear, Polygon has raised $450,000, right? Blast's TBL in its multisip is $674,000,000.

23:50 So, why this is particularly significant, and if you are clued in as a free founder, you have to, you have to redesign your incentives. Because, it's not that the users are not there. There's 674 million reasons why you're thinking they're new users is wrong. Again, Electric Capital Report came out last week and there were 22,000 developers. Period. 22,000. So how do you design your protocol? If you're building for developers and all those things, there's 22,000. And your particular protocol is competing against everybody else. So, if you're looking at your protocol design, Glass is very instructive in terms of looking at the fact that, well, I could actually find a middle ground in terms of aligning incentives with the people who have 674 million to spare to speculate on this, while also achieving and pushing towards the core objective of what I feel I'm supposed to be building inside of this space.

25:09 And if you find that intersection, you find a fraction of the 674 million that allows you to build and your startup survives and you will actually build out your vision while still ensuring that you know you're able to actually be around because I've seen founders a year later that they're no longer around and the beauty of the EVM and what it kind of represents is that for the first time we have globally shared state. We have a globally shared state that all of humanity could actually rally around and with that there's the financial incentives on all of those things but it's a novel application and in building your particular protocol you have to design for the best and the lowest of humanity.

25:58 Thank you, everyone. We're out of time, but I know that that question and the answers are probably going to prompt a lot more follow-up questions and dive a bit deeper, especially if you are building a protocol or you're building an application. I think all of those things are extremely relevant because it's not an isolated case. It's all connected layers put together. So we'll be taking a little bit of a break, around 10 minutes, and then we will have our next panel. We have Stefan and we have Stacy Flitt from KPMG, Tori from Our Security, and Simone from Smith, Bean & Co. talking about crypto safety and how you design consumer applications for that, for your consumers to ensure that they are safe as you scale securely.

26:56 Thank you very much.