 James Beck is the director of content and communication at ConsenSys, where he has spent the last five years telling the story of Ethereum to journalists and the individuals around the world. Prior to ConsenSys, James worked in public affairs and led us, US politicians and journalists on delegation to China to improve in understanding between the two countries. James is an enthusiastic member of the queer underground New York sea dance scene, and also is a Voluntary Street keyword in New York City. Thank you and welcome. Thank you so much. So that was a nice introduction. Do I have a way to flip through slides? This thing. There you go. So a lot of this talk is really setting the stage of 2021. Beyond the bull market, that was really the year in which I think Web3, Ethereum, all the things that we've been talking about at the last five dev cons really ascended into a lot of the popular narratives in pop culture. But with all that new attention came a widened aperture of critique. So first of all, one of the things that really brings attention is money, unfortunately. And that's when we had 2021 was record VC investment. So 40 of the 47 Web3 unicorns were born in 2021. We also had Web3 outpacing biotech as a sector, which to me is wild considering what we've achieved in Web3 so far. And similarly, a lot of the deals at least in Q4 2021 happened in the United States. You see outsize deals going to the United States compared to places like Latin America. And with a lot of popular understanding of Web3 came celebrities also changing their profile pictures to board apes. I encourage all of you to see if they have their PFPs. We also saw a lot of media doing like what is Web3 crypto explainers, NFT explainers. And so in a lot of ways this, you know, Web3 is already part of the popular imagination. And similarly brand started rebranding. So you have Metaverse becoming or you have Facebook becoming meta for whatever reason, because they think the metaverse is the future. You have Radio Shack. I don't even know what Radio Shack is doing. But if you check out their homepage, they seem to be a crypto company that is doing swaps. And yeah, also Square became block and not to blockchain. But with any frenzy sentiment turns. So, you know, there's a couple of people I have shown here. This is Molly White. She had a whole little feature on her in the Washington Post. She's a very prolific Wikipedia editor and now has devoted a lot of her time to maintaining this website called Web3 is Going Great, which catalogs all the stuff that we'd rather not have reflected on our industry. Ben McKenzie, he's a pretty washed up actor from the Orange County. He has also created an entire online persona around critiquing Web3 and really pointing out scams and critiquing shills of crypto. Finally, Stephen Deal, I think a lot of people, if you spend any time on crypto Twitter, have seen him get dragged by the crypto community. But he has submitted an entire paper to the US Congress, you know, urging them to resist crypto's increasing lobbying efforts in Washington DC. If you want to see, I mean, there was a crypto policy symposium last month. These are the sort of who's who of people who've really made their entire online persona being a crypto critic. You have Jamiah McKelly. If any of you work in PR, don't respond to her emails at the FT. She's not going to listen to you in good faith. There are people like Jacob Silverman, though, who's actually he's doing a podcast with Ben McKenzie talking about the latest crypto scams. We have Frances Coppola, who's, as she describes, a banking expert. But there are a lot of these people that spend day in, day out critiquing Web3. And it's to be kind of understood. So, Water and Music analyzes music and technology and how they intersect. And recently, the founder, Sherry, who has been really focused on music NFTs, which I think is an interesting way of looking at pop culture intersecting with Web3 narratives. So they released this report last year sort of analyzing, all right, if you're a big artist and you're doing an NFT drop, what were the reactions on Twitter? They used various Twitter tracking tracking tools to understand sentiment. And as you can see, there were very few NFT drops in late 2020, mostly in the genre of dance and electronic music. And then all of a sudden in the second quarter of 2021, you have all these major labels taking their artists and saying, how do we get into this? This seems to be a big chance for a cash grab. Let's do an NFT launch. And as you can see, perceptions started shifting. But overall, you could say most of it was positive sentiment. That doesn't explain, though, then a lot of the artists, some artists that I really love, all of a sudden deciding to drop their plans for an NFT. These are some of the things that she analyzed in the report and some of the things that she noticed. So, one, Twitter has not proven to be an effective platform for artists to address fan concerns around NFTs, especially around environmental and financial concerns. And she says Twitter is not exactly the best platform for nuanced discussion of complex topics. Also, Twitter data ultimately does not provide a complete picture of a fan's experience with music. The fear of adverse Twitter reactions alone can certainly dissuade an artist from experimenting with the technology. And we saw a lot of that, whether it was Jacob Collier had a pretty exciting NFT launch planned, dropped it, and Niels Fromm, who's a pianist who's German, also spoke out vehemently against NFTs after he started learning from his community of people who were saying he shouldn't do an NFT drop. But, you know, one of the things she also noticed is that negative sentiment doesn't actually, doesn't necessarily affect the financial performance of an NFT drop. Charlie XCX ended up getting a lot of blowback from her fans, but sold her NFT for 20 ETH. Similarly, even if you have an active community, it may not be the best way to sustain community engagement and community building experiences. Okay, so clearly some brands thought, okay, we need to confront this NFT stigma. You have Royal calling NFTs limited digital assets. Phenopoly calls them digital collectibles, and Surkey calls them fan passes. So already there's an idea that you can shift perception just with a name, but I don't think that's all there is to it. Narrative shape our perceptions. Narratives and then our perceptions form our realities which end up influencing our choices and actions. People hear a good story once and remember it for the rest of their lives. So that's why I think narratives are important. These are the four tactics I'm going to discuss for the remaining 20 minutes and hopefully have some time for questions. These are just tactics and actually Florian's talk prior to mine set this up pretty nicely because he was kind of describing in the ways in which there's already such a negative sentiment among mainstream regulators and how is that affecting the way in which people understand Web3 and our space. So I'm going to go through each of these, but first one is we need to better understand global sentiment around Web3 and that happens through polling and brand analysis. We also need to celebrate the inspiring stories of Web3. Every day there's going to be a hack. Every day there's going to be a scam. There are going to be grifters, but there are many stories that are inspiring and I've been going to a ton of talks here and I'm hearing them every day. We also need to win over environmentally conscious consumers and companies and finally we need to inspire with knowledge that sparks action. So how do we better understand global sentiment around Web3? I have to say crypto polling has gotten better, but it's really limited. There are a number of mainstream polling companies like Morning Consult that have regular crypto polls. Gemini actually did a really good one called the Global State of Port and it surveyed 30,000 people in 20 countries, but one of the things that is important is that they were only asking questions around crypto as a digital asset. It makes sense. Gemini is an exchange. People buy and sell ETH, Bitcoin and other assets. They weren't thinking of Web3 beyond buying and selling and speculating on these assets. This is another one that actually came out not too long ago from Morning Consult. They had a lot of coverage, but I'm just focusing on this one. Seven of the top ten adopter countries have some form of capital control and that's only something they realized through doing this survey and so Nigeria actually leads in cryptocurrency activity with 55% of the adults responding to the survey saying they buy or sell crypto at least once a month. Contrast that with the US. Only 16% say they buy or sell and then most of Western Europe fall below the median cryptocurrency usage range. And then you also have, quote, some countries such as Turkey and Argentina have experienced extremely high inflation in recent months which may be encouraging the retail use of buying and selling cryptocurrency. But I have to say again, Morning Consult is defining usage as buying and selling not using your Web3 wallet like MetaMask or Rainbow connecting to an account buying an NFT. That's not included in this. So again, people are only thinking and polling around buying and selling of cryptocurrencies which to me is only a partial story especially when we talk about Web3. So for that reason we at Consensus have actually earlier in Q2 of this year we did a survey of 22,500 adults in 15 countries I just noticed typo but what we wanted to do is actually contrast this with some of the other surveys we've seen out there which are just about buying and selling assets and think about actual Web3 usage. The report is going to come out later this year but I've actually highlighted some interesting data. So for one, we asked do you own a non-fungible token? It's a pretty simple question and some of the responses you could say yes I own one or several no I don't know what an NFT is. Look at Vietnam, it's pretty remarkable in that of the respondents although this was a survey conducted online so there's a bit of bias in terms of people who have internet access 50% said they own an NFT. Contrast that with Western Europe. Very few people have an NFT or even know what an NFT is. I think that's pretty telling given that this is a global community and there's a lot more adoption in places that aren't necessarily represented by those early statistics I showed of VC investment. We saw similar things with DAO awareness and participation. Vietnam, India, Indonesia all are higher than any of the other countries in terms of awareness of what a DAO is and yet at the same time in Vietnam there's so much awareness of what DAOs are potentially through reading and just general interest in cryptocurrencies but a lot of people aren't involved in any and I think that's a huge gap for us to approach as a community. I don't know if any of you have been following the discourse ahead of DevCon but it was pretty discouraging to see some bigger names in crypto critique the Ethereum foundation for hosting DevCon and Bogota. I think this is actually a perfect place to host future DevCons including maybe in the future Vietnam maybe we could have something in India or Nigeria and so I saw Kami write this article which is really timely it came out a few days before we all left and she's like the dead end of Eurocentric crypto and you should read the whole thing it's on mirror hopefully you can see in the top left but some choice quotes I believe emerging regions are where the next trailblazing use cases for crypto and blockchain will originate and why? Necessity breeds innovation. The financial, political and social issues that so-called developing countries experience paired with the maturing blockchain ecosystem will result in an environment ripe for the development of some of the most high impact applications of our time. So I think when we go to our next segment how to celebrate the inspiring stories of Web 3 I think a lot of the inspiring stories we haven't yet seen yet but I think a lot of the applications and use cases are currently being developed in places I need them most and we can talk about remittance payments we can talk about all the novel applications of DAOs so when I was talking about Molly White earlier this is her website Web 3 is going great it's a running log that I have to check once a week just because I need to know I need to feel the pain but this is just this week alone you know the US SEC is investigating UGA Labs we have Mango that that hack happened I believe yesterday and then you know Celsius they're masquerading as DeFi, as C-Fi and they're yeah they doxxed all their customers it's really messed up so there's just a litany of all these stories that come out often and so when you think about Web 3 and we want to encourage everyone in our industry to really share the stories of like utility and action and positive benefits it becomes hard when it's drowned out by all these negative stories and I don't want us to just be these sort of people like Carl Manger who say Bitcoin fixes this I don't think that's where we're going I don't think we should just say a Dow would fix this you know a multi-sig would fix this, Ethereum fixes this instead it's got to be real use cases I'm gonna I got his name wrong but Max yesterday gave a really exciting talk on the ways in which Ukraine has been supported by Ethereum donations and cryptocurrency donations in general but if you think about it it came out of necessity the National Bank of Ukraine made it difficult to transfer funds from Ukraine to the EU what isn't always on network 24-7 financial access it's cryptocurrency but then already we've seen impact from crypto donations I thought it was fascinating that more than half of all the donations have actually been spent in cryptocurrency so it's not people immediately switching them to fiat they're staying within crypto and spending and using it and using crypto and there's been many different estimates but Elliptic said around 77 million in crypto donations were given to the Ukraine war effort since the war began 45% being ETH and you know we talk about ReFi a lot especially in the Gitcoin community but one thing that I liked after ETH Barcelona was this there was an op-ed in CoinDesk from a professor who said Ethereum is to act as a laboratory for a broader political project and a site of economic experimentation although pro markets the aim of Web3 isn't exploitation but regeneration and a lot of what you saw at Shelling Point were projects around regeneration you could even see in Gitcoin grants 15 all the different environmental projects and I donated to a lot of them but it would be interesting to keep following up with all these groups and it wasn't just groups in the US it wasn't just groups in Western Europe these are groups all over the world that are using an open funding platform to source funds and hopefully solve environmental issues either on very local levels or on broader levels like turning carbon credits on chain people may have forgotten about Constitution Dow but a lot of the ideas around Constitution Dow last November about a year ago have really still like I keep thinking about when are we going to see the next Constitution Dow for something that isn't so frivolous as buying a copy of the Constitution there was a really good write-up in FWB from Drew Miller and Kevin Munger and these are people who study social movements and write and they said here was a group of people staking a claim for Web3 a tool that could be used to build a world with new rules by purchasing rules of the old one Constitution Dow represented a super-sized version of something that the world they created would be extremely good at so what is Web3 extremely good at? Mass Memified Mobilization and you could see in how much money was raised just for this really fun activity of buying a copy of the doubt not even knowing what they would do with it after and not even knowing that they could be outbid because all the funding was transparent but think about what we can do when we have that ability to quickly fund across borders not needing to require ACH transfers and actually moving money and coordination at the speed of the internet I don't have time to talk about this slide but I've been on the Susu Tanda Hue however you call it trained for a long time so if anyone has ideas for rotating savings account please talk to me I think there is an easy way to make a pool together that actually is sort of the same financial tool that people have been using all over the world for hundreds and hundreds of years prior to banks and lending yeah it's an awesome idea and I think it needs to be made at some hackathon sometime so step 3 is to win over environmentally conscious consumers we merged proof of stake that was a big deal I had been writing about it for a long time I'd been off by the date and I said coming soon coming soon but when we did this survey earlier this year we actually had even gotten to the point of proof of stake and now we have a network that's using 99.995% less energy and I say 995% because we actually did a survey or a report with the Cryptocarbons Rating Institute to actually understand not just in theoretical back of the envelope math but by running validators and comparing it with the proof of work Ethereum network and what they actually found was that beyond the energy reduction CO2 emissions are down 99.992% so from 11 million tons annually to 870 which is about 100 US homes that's incredible and you know the overall the consensus marketing team said how are we going to get people who are maybe not that interested in Ethereum maybe don't know what the merge is to care about this environmental fact and so we did this big campaign around the merge we also tried new tactics such as paid media across like earned paid partner and we really I think this was one of the first times as a community overall there was a lot of messaging alignment you know Carl at the EF started with the 99.95% more energy efficiency a country's worth of power no more but what we ended up seeing is that 90 what we found is that 90 I think it was I don't have it on the slide but 98% of the articles that ended up covering this were either positive or neutral sentiment we ended up taking out a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal you know Joe and other talking heads were on mainstream media and so we had this moment to where the world's attention was on Ethereum and we could actually reiterate this environmental message but it shouldn't just stop there and I think just to put this in context this is maybe the largest decarbonization event of any industry in history and it really aligns well with what's happening at Cope 27 there's a lot of industries trying to figure out how to decarbonize and the Ethereum community did it in a decentralized way across hundreds of different companies thousands of actors so it also shows us that really really complex global problems like you know the earth's warming climate can actually be solved outside of necessarily using governments or industries so it was a pretty cool story that we need to keep telling fourth step we need to inspire knowledge that actually sparks action and this is about not just using you know cryptocurrency to buy and sell as an investment but thinking about the actual novel use cases that Web3 enables everyone and I've heard a lot of talks everyone is talking about how education is a challenge and we have some amazing groups She-Fi for example, 101.xyz, Rabbit Hole there's a lot of people focused on educating people about the Web3 ecosystem and from all the polling we also see that you know globally people are more likely to you know try and use a wallet if they understand what you can do with the wallet so more than half the respondents in Latin America 51% said educational resources would make them more comfortable purchasing cryptocurrency so what we're doing is we're building a learn website for MetaMask I'm going to give you a little sneak preview but we're really excited about this because in a lot of ways and what we're going to hear, Taylor Monahan is giving a talk later sort of about the original sin of needing a seed phrase and how challenging that makes it for mainstream adoption but given that we still need to teach people about where Web3 is now and we're going to do so in a way that prioritizes simple messaging but isn't talking down to our readers we're going to have it available in multiple languages we're hoping actually 10 different languages based on where we're seeing the most MetaMask usage and that's not places necessarily that you think it does represent some of the places we saw on the map earlier such as Turkey, such as Vietnam, such as Indonesia we need to meet learners where they are in their own language and finally we want it based on experiential design so the idea that you're not just reading pages and pages about the theory of Web3 you're actually able to test it out without having to download a wallet without having to load it up with ETH and actually risk financially what you know maybe you clicking accept for something but it's actually going to give you permissions to drain your wallet or give someone else permissions to drain your wallet so this is an early look at it I don't focus too much on the 3D because these are all changing but the idea is that we're going to start out very simple this is v1 of the site it's going to be a Web3 101 course teaching you what a digital identity is how to keep your secret recovery phrase safe what a crypto wallet is and then introducing people to DAOs, DeFi, NFTs and every single lesson is going to have some experiential component where the user actually gets to click through and experience what for example doing a swap on MetaMask or another site or we're going to have it try to be fun and engaging where for example on the NFT side you're going to get to use a very simple illustrator and make your own NFT and go through that process again this is a work in progress we're hoping to have this out by the end of November so we look forward to sharing this with all of you soon I'm going to end with a quote if this will switch so just as kind of a closing thought or a minute for questions there's a tendency to treat technology as agency that has some essential property rather than as a site for struggle where people are fighting both internally and externally to it so I don't think that there is any inherent indelible principles to Ethereum I think that technology is technology it's neutral inevitably it's this community it's all of us here at DevCon it's the people that use and respect our technology that are going to be applying and ascribing values to it it's a site of struggle crypto can be used to scam people of their money but it can also be used to fund recovery efforts in Ukraine crypto can totally be used to sell monkey pictures online but it can also be used as a novel way of transferring digital ownership across different metaverse worlds and so there's no fixed state it's always changing and it happens with narratives and so I'd love to talk to any of you if you have ideas and thank you so much for having me at DevCon I think we have one minute for questions if anyone has any Any questions? There are Fira, welcome Fira she's an NFT artist from Colombia welcome bearded guy in the back hi hi hello I'm the first NFT artist from Colombia so congratulations welcome to my country do you like my country? I love Bogota I can't say I have been anywhere else besides Bogota this is my first time but I have to say it's like anyone who is worried about safety hasn't been to Texas where there's a shooting every single day thank you for having us okay any other questions? no? we don't have any time well if you have any question please look for the speaker oh yeah in the white jacket she's been avidly but quickly please thanks for your talk my question is it appears that the general sentiment for crypto and FTs from western countries is very positive is very negative but from developing countries it's very positive what do you think are the causes of that divergence? I think that a lot of the NFT sales I mean we look at our metamask statistics and a lot of the market places have been created in the US so you talk about open sea foundation inevitably there's going to be a wider aperture of critique if you have more people participating in them and also in terms of like pop culture board apes were really like a lot of people if they think of an NFT they think of that or they think of you know you go on Twitter or Instagram and you immediately have thousands of people saying buy my NFT a lot of bots I'm not sure I think you know I've lived in China I have experienced you know on WeChat groups and I think there's just generally a different understanding of what it could be used for in the future you know that's something that deserves further investigation that's a great question I think why I brought that up though is to say in our efforts to popularize mainstream Ethereum applications people should not be overlooking East Asia especially Vietnam, India, Indonesia there hasn't been as much NFT adoption for example in Japan