 Hey, everyone. Happy to see a few of you brave enough to stand through the typhoon, and also able to get up so early in the morning. So let me see if this is working. Yep, click around. So before we begin, I have a question. How many of you have heard of Akasha before? Wow, so almost everyone. And how many of you have actually played with the app, like an alpha or a beta? OK, so almost half, which is thank you for taking the time to actually play with the app, and so on. It was a learning experience for us. For those of you that haven't heard of Akasha before, it's kind of an old project in the ecosystems of the sea. We unveiled it on May 3rd, World Press Freedom Day 2016. And the original intention was to have this experiment trying to combine Ethereum and IPFS to create a decentralized social network, which has some really nice features like being censorship resistance and decentralized. But in January this year, we started this series of posts called Metamorphosis. And there has been this change in also our understanding of what can we do with these technologies when we put them together, and also what are the possibilities. Because it's still early days, and we are kind of still, I think, scratching the surface of what can be done with this tour kit. But since the beginning, something hasn't changed. And that is one of the, because 2016, that was when the whole ICO craze began. It was like, when ICO was one of the most frequently asked questions. And we tried to make it clear to people that the main reason we are trying to do this is to figure out if this idea is viable, what are the limits, and understand what are the possibilities. So the main message remains the same. As always, keep your coins. We want change. And behind the initiative and the project, there is the Akasha Foundation, a nonprofit organization incorporated in Switzerland, which described itself as a nonprofit born at the intersection of blockchain and collective intelligence. And in the process of these three years, since we announced, we released three fully functional Ethereum dApps, the alpha desktop app, the beta desktop app, and the web beta app, which has the IPFS completely, a PFS part completely rewritten. So the browsers are actually communicating peer-to-peer to another. We didn't do any of that gateway decentralized thing. But speaking of blockchain, and this being an Ethereum event, what is Ethereum? And this is an easy question. But if you'd ask around here, 10 people, let's say, you'd probably get 10 slightly different definitions, or sometimes completely differing. But for the purpose of this presentation, let's say that we are in the shoes of someone new, to blockchain, or at least Ethereum. So they Google something, and boom, they reach this Ethereum.org page. Nice. Is the GIF, this is looking beautiful. I was like, what is this Ethereum thing? It looks nice. So then when you read, it's like, aha. So it's a global open source platform for decentralized applications. So it's like, this is kind of like an app store of sorts. So you have these apps. So it's like, I'm curious. I want to try this. So then if you click, for example, Use, you're greeted by this list of applications. And usually, I think, as a user, when you click Use, it's something that you actually experience. It's not so much read. And for a new potential user that is trying to figure out what is Ethereum and what does this mean in his life and how it impacts, let's say it's a bit overwhelming, to say the least. And when it comes to the root problem of this, is that user experience is sometimes an afterthought, especially when we work on our projects and we are focused too much on the actual technology. And it's like, damn, that transaction. It's like, ah, that library isn't working. And then in the months after development, it's like, yes, that works. But the general experience is not that great. And we actually conducted user research in the community. And for those brave enough, those users that, from the beginning, they clicked. They went through the list. They're now onboarding and so on. The general feeling is that it's something very hard to use, cumbersome. And many times, they're discouraged. It's like, man, this is too hard for me. Or this is simply not for me. And in our user research, we try to reach out to a number of meetup organizers, meetup participants, and members from the community. So Ethereum, not the fans. Those that are passionate enough to go through some pain to get that Ethereum magic. But one quote from this research is particularly like insightful. And that quote sounds like, dApps are like toys and games no one is having fun playing with. So it's like, ah, right in the feeling. It's not something you want to hear, but it's something real. And another interesting insight here is that Ethereum, this magical thing hard to describe, this unicorn in the cyberspace, for a normal user, they associate Ethereum with whatever app is that touchpoint. So it's like, every Ethereum app and service, in a way, in the world is kind of like an ambassador for the Ethereum ecosystem, right? So it's like, if someone tries an Ethereum app and it's like, man, that onboarding and it's too hard, that's gonna be the idea associated. And I know what you're thinking, some of you, is like, but tokens is like, there is an economic incentive, that carrot, and it's like, yes, you go through the pain because there's some kind of reward at the end of the journey. But our research, and by the way, you can find this research on the akasha.org blog, if you're interested, is like, actually the reality looks like this. It's like, yay, token drops, but people are not that, how to say, enthusiastic because the experience is not great. So it's not something you do to enjoy, it's something that you do to maybe get that token and then set it on an exchange. So the question is, how can we improve this Ethereum experience, so to say? And I think the first step towards that is to understand that Ethereum is more than just a blockchain. So it's more than just a technology and like in the previous presentation, we had this sociological aspect, it's also this social thing. And this is a quote from Vitalik, where he kind of captures this idea that money is a fundamentally social thing in a much deeper way than, say, encrypted peer-to-peer two-party communication. And I extend this to say that Ethereum is also this social thing and programmable money is fundamentally a social thing. And this will be something that we should keep in mind. And to exemplify this, this is a gore visualization of the GitHub commits from the Ethereum repos. It's sped up a bit, so you can see the date there above. But the main idea is that Ethereum is not just this static abstract idea somewhere, it's actually a living social organism that is formed from this network of people making these contributions and this whole idea codified and entering our reality as lines of code is more than just technology, right? It's also this network of people. And our journey with Akasha between 2016 and 2018 consisted mainly in or we focused our efforts on building these apps. So it's like if Ethereum is this decentralized app platform, let's say like decentralized app store, we try to put one of these apps in that decentralized app store and the functionality of that app would be a social network running on Ethereum. But since then, like our endometamorphosis, I referenced in the beginning, is that our understanding of what can we do to maximize the impact that we can and what's the greatest thing that we can achieve considering that we are just a handful of people is to actually build a framework. So even though it's not a very accurate comparison, it helps maybe to imagine the new Akasha reloaded as kind of like a WordPress for social networks where people and communities in general can deploy their own customized purposeful social networks for feeling whatever needs they have as a community. So this is how we reached 2019 realizing that from building a social app on Ethereum, Ethereum is the social network. Even in this room, you guys here at Hock, we are forming a social network, right? So in the beginning of the slide, we had the title of unifying the Ethereum ecosystem. I was like, what? That sounds like, hmm, I don't know what to say about that. Probably. And you know, this is particularly interesting because in the ecosystem, we have this debate even among ourselves, like as a community of people that kind of get what Ethereum is. Like, man, Ethereum is this decentralized finance platform. Na, na, na, Ethereum is an Ethereum work computer. Na, na, na, and you have like this debate within. So it's like, it's everything and more, right? And sometimes it's hard to see that bigger picture. So with that framework that I mentioned, Akasha word framework, what we decided to do is to have like a first use case that we'll be able to show why this is awesome and why Ethereum being the social network is something amazing and how all these scientists that are saying like, man, the elephant is a snake or it's a rope and so on, decentralized finance or work computer, they're all right. And you know, the idea is, and part of the user experience challenge is to make it user-friendly enough. And this is like a preview of the alpha that we're building, the first social network being Ethereum world. And the idea is just as you have on Twitter the ability to embed the GIF, or a GIF depends on what side you are. It's the idea that you have this ability to post something and your followers, your social graph get notified of what you post. But you can also embed in that social post GIF, which is fun. And what if we take that idea and that ease of use, but this time make it for something useful. And in this case, embedding actual dApps that you can interact with. So in here we have the example of how you would be able to add an app. And in this case, we have Aragon. So it's like, let's say we want to create a vote and this is a proposal, and then boom, we just confirmed. So now it's inside your post. And now you click publish, bam. You just made an Ethereum interaction. You know blockchain. So the Ethereum experience, I think it's improving in this way and it's making it through, let's say an interface that people are already familiar with. So it's not, the learning curve is a bit, let's say less steep and less intimidating because it's something familiar, at least to begin with. And to exemplify this, there are a couple of other examples and this can go also for creating bounties, boom. Then you have created a bounty. Similarly, if we have something like Agura prediction market, you can create a bet using blockchain, confirm, boom. You have your prediction marketing embedded in your post and so on and so forth. And something else that's interesting is that when we're taking consideration this social aspect of Ethereum, the social discovery of what are the apps that are cool and what are useful should be also taken in consideration. And now what's like the state of the art of finding apps? It's something like state of dApps or some websites that usually have a list and then you have to go and click and so on. Not necessarily ideal. But like between ourselves is like we know each other and follow each other. This is like, man, I need to create or I need this particular functionality. What's the best app? And then you can just ask this, right? You just ask. And then people in their comments because they can embed these apps, you actually get answers that you have. For example, in this case, Gitcoin or at Bounties and so on and so forth. So actually the library of apps that will be integrated, well, is that the word? I hope, grows with each integration and the functionalities and the possibilities in this Ethereum world grow with each integration. So that's pretty cool, right? And something else that's interesting is like when you are seeing an app, you know, when you use Telegram, someone sends you a sticker and is like, whoa, okay, that's a cool sticker. And then you just add it to your own stickers. I think something similar when it comes to Ethereum apps is useful. So it's like when someone publishes, for example, a prediction market bet or someone creates a bounty with a particular app, make it easy. You like that functionality, I think that's useful for you. Bam, you have it in your collection. Next time you want to publish something, you have it at your fingertips. Less intimidating, more accessible. So the keywords here are accessibility, ease of use and adoption. So, and this is something we're still wrapping our head around. Things get super interesting when you have the idea of threading. So multiple posts and when you can embed in each of these posts an app, that's kind of interesting because you can create flows. So it helps to imagine maybe something like you're creating an Aragon DAO, maybe the next post would be linked to this with the proposal, the next thing with the bounty and the next thing with an NFT collectible for the people that participate in the DAO or in the proposal. So the possibilities are kind of cool looking ahead. And taking a couple of steps back, currently, this is the biggest kind of home of the Ethereum community, right? The Reddit, and I know this is the old skin, I simply don't like the new one. Maybe you do. But the idea is that there are like 400, over 400,000 people using Reddit and when it comes to Reddit and Ethereum as in Ethereum being the platform of applications and so on, it's not really well suited. And I think together in this approach on how we can create this Ethereum world for the Ethereum community and dedicated to actually release this synergy because these apps can talk to each other and can be combined in new ways and they can be shared, they can be socially discovered and so on. We can open a new world of social interactions and what do I mean by that? Is that you know you have these contracts and these applications throughout the ecosystem, thousands of them. And just as you have user profiles, now you can think of like also app profiles, right? Or Dapp profiles. So these are not just like static things somewhere. These are things that you can interact with. So let's say you discover or when you search something like ARAGON. So in here you have like a list of the most popular actions, like assign tokens, create new votes and so on. And similarly if we take an example like something like Gitcoin, you have like the most popular actions being create a bounty and so on. The idea is to make it easy, right? So we can accelerate this adoption and it's not necessarily to look like to outside the community. We are already over one million people inside but the set part is that less than 1.5% of us actually use Dapps. And that's kind of tragic. You know if this is a decentralized app platform the usage of the actual apps is something that should be closely looked at and encouraged and nurtured. So this is why today on stage we're releasing ethereum.world. So you can check it if you want. And the idea is to open the signups for the alpha. We are actively working on developing it but the idea here is not just to sign up, leave the email and then come back when the app is ready. You can do that. But we invite you to do something more. And why is that? Because I think ethereum's most undervalued asset is not found on the financial charts, okay? On any of them. I think ethereum's most undervalued asset is its community. And there are as I said over 1.2 million people using Meetup to self-organize and have these events. And when you look at let's say the effort and these people actually have to be passionate enough to get up, get out and participate in these events physically. Which is let's say a higher threshold of engagement than just sitting at home and scrolling through Reddit. So these people even though they are so passionate and they are willing to go out to these events, they're not using the dApps. So the level of actual usage is like limited to like a wallet or sending tokens and so on. And ethereum can do so much more. Though ethereum currently is just living. It's not alive. We can bring it to life together. Like making it fulfill its potential of an app platform that's actually using platforms, right? So on the website coming back to the ethereum.world website I'd like to attract your attention on two things. One is the manifesto. And in here like the idea is to accelerate the adoption of ethereum based apps and services by transforming how they attract, engage and delight users. So the thinking moves from just finding that one killer app to finding that delightful experience. Something that is pleasant and something that's fulfilling, something that you enjoy doing, not something that you do just to get that coin out of the thing. And on the manifesto page there's also a section nominate values. And speaking of culture and speaking of like the community aspect, I think values are kind of like the DNA that can be used to codify the culture of ethereum as an ecosystem. And I'm one of the ethereum co-founders and in the beginning we were just a handful of guys trying to figure out how to bring this project to life. Now there's like millions of people, thousands of applications living on it. But this discussion about the values and the culture was kind of like, let's say neglected to an extent. And similarly to Bitcoin we didn't have this discussion. So we invite you now to have this discussion and to propose these values. What are the values that you think ethereum should have that we should have as a community? And then vote on them. And according to this we can build a list of values that will be reflecting actually the desires and the values of the community. And something else, the second thing that I want to attract your attention on is I have an idea. So this development of the world is not gonna be something top down. We don't want that. We want this to be decentralized, distributed and tapping into the collective intelligence already present in this community. So if you have an integration that you'd like to see an ethereum that you want to use but it's like hard to use but you'd like to see it here just propose it. If you have a feature that you'd like to use somehow it's something that maybe we didn't even thought of. Suggest it. If there is a language that you want to have this application in, request it. We are open to this and we invite you to become active co-creators and make this your world. And the theory of action is to build this for collective impact. And there are a couple of pillars. I'm nearing the end. But the idea is to establish a shared community vision, evidence-based decision-making based on the votes and so on and collaborative action. And one of the things in the process is to achieve that self-sustainability and that collective impact. Why? Because the next time someone asks you can I heads ethereum that you will be prepared and you will have something at your hand to show them why ethereum is awesome, why ethereum is cool and why it's better than other things before. And not only that they can have a dub, they can have a whole world of dubs, right? And this is the transition from the ether chain, just blockchains, transactions, hashes to the ether web, something that's usable. An interface that accelerates the adoption of ethereum as an ecosystem, a vibrant ecosystem of dubs developed by passionate developers. And I'm over time, but I invite you to join the fun on ethereum.world and to worder. Move that thinking from hodl and bidder to now worder from building features to solving problems together. Thank you.