 Thank you so much for that introduction, and it's really exciting to be here with you together live in person. This is the third event in the Funding the Commons series. And the first two were virtual, so it's really great to see the community come together in person. If I'm getting a little bit of feedback, which makes it hard to talk. So thank you. Now it's still there. Great. So what I'm here to talk about is priorities for public goods builders in 2022. This is going to be a really critical year for public goods generation. And here at year I'm starting from now through the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. So what I'm going to go through is a case for why this year really matters and why this decade really matters in this century. I'll then talk about CryptoEcon for solving planetary problems. Then I'll go into how Funding the Commons got started and what our impact so far has been. I'll talk about some goals for the next year, and then I'm going to talk about a few different kinds of mechanisms and experiments that people may want to try. I'll try to conclude with some advice and thoughts for public goods builders out there that are trying to experiment with a lot of the tooling, and hopefully this is going to be useful in generating a whole wave of new things and new ideas and new solutions. So as I mentioned, sorry, the feedback is really very distracting. Is there any way that we can decrease it? Think a little bit lower? Excellent. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. So as I was mentioning, there's an extremely critical century. We are writing on several centuries of extreme improvement in terms of all our global development across any single, against most measures for human well-being that we know to track. We're just getting this broad-based improvement worldwide. Of course, there's all kinds of things that, all kinds of problems exist in the world, and there's all kinds of regressions along the way, and there's many things that are getting worse, but for most indicators of human well-being, the world is in a great trajectory, and the last few centuries have been a great direction. However, we're now confronted with a series of ex-risks, or how David had one of the researchers in our team likes to put public bads, in extreme public bads, that we have to really avoid. And these, especially the ones that are human-caused, present extreme challenges for us to get through, and we sort of control the speed at which we'll hit these, but especially things like nuclear war and engineered pandemics and unaligned AI. Those kinds of risks are, we're speeding well into those risks, so it's extremely critical that we coordinate our species to solve these. On top of that, there's this large-scale phase transition that we're going through. As we invented computing and as that computing has evolved and developed over the decades, we've gotten to a point where we're starting to blend and merge with our computing systems in the next few decades. When you look ahead to the next 80 years for the rest of the century, we're going to see the introduction of things like large-scale robotics, robotic swarms, augmented reality systems, virtual reality systems, brain-computer interfaces that will break through the barrier between these screens and the internet and our brains. And then we'll make AI systems that will be progressively and successively more and more intelligent to the point where we're very likely to discover AGI in this century. Many people are now estimating that this might actually happen in the next decade or two, which is extremely alarming in terms of the degree of a problem to solve here. Now to make matters a little bit trickier, the large-scale micro systems that we've been building and which have been responsible for our, the broad improvement and broad well-being for the last few centuries are starting to strain, are starting to get captured and they're kind of inadequate for solving these kinds of challenges. They're designed to go slowly, they're designed to solve problems of a different era and they can't quite cope with problems of this magnitude, of the magnitude that we're encountering and the speed that we're encountering in the map. So we need a new set of solutions, we need new structures and we need new coordination mechanisms that can enable us to solve these extreme challenges and we need those coordination systems to scale, to organize us at that scale, at that macro worldwide scale. Now it's extremely difficult to build systems of that magnitude and of that quality and hope that they go well. The last macro systems that we built took many iterations, there were all kinds of mistakes made and they progressively evolved into a much better structure. So it's a very difficult challenge to come up with something that can improve those systems and handle the breadth of challenges that these systems handle really well and on top of that then help us solve these next generation problems. However the way to get there is by applying our best perspectives and theories and testing them in the wild at various different scales, learning from those developments and get to a progressively larger and larger problem solving scales to the point where we can then coordinate millions of people, billions of people against these problems. So I think the promise of the entire blockchain world is that it's enabling us to have a programmable interface to build these kinds of coordination tools, starting with very small things that let us experiment and then from there scaling them to larger and larger sizes and along the way test that they're working well, test that they're really solving problems, test that they're actually yielding better ways of coordinating. So I'm very hopeful that we will solve a lot of these challenges and I think one of the... I often get asked what has changed my perspective about crypto and W3 and so on in the time that I've been in the community and it's that I very much undervalued and underestimated the potential impact and the potential utility of these systems. Once you step back and see them for what they really are, you realize that they're extremely powerful tools that can help us solve these kinds of problems. So let's dive into why that is. In terms of why this decade and this year really matter is that if a lot of these challenges are going to be figured out or things are going to be set in motion in the next decade or two, then this decade really matters to get to work through a lot of those experiments, get to really high quality solutions, and then from there scaling them. And in terms of this year, in the next... The blockchain world and the blockchain systems are now at the scale of somewhere between about a trillion dollars in value to three trillion depending on which month you look at it. Now that's a big enough scale to try very serious experiments but not such a big scale that it's sort of like a catastrophic system to test and vary with. So that's about the right size scale to experiment with. And if we can get some really good principles into these systems now while they're still young and they're still very hopeful and very positive, some oriented, then they'll carry those principles and those ideas through to much larger scales. Kind of what I mean by that is that when you think about putting in place things like allocating whole sections of a protocol supply towards funding of the goods, that kind of policy is very positive, some oriented, very long termist and is likely to go through now while the community is still very true to its roots and true to its values and way less likely to work in the future once everything gets much more competitive, much more zero sum oriented, and so on. So I think now is the right time to put in place these kinds of structures so that when these systems scale by an order of magnitude, two or some magnitude, and so on, they can carry lots of those values with them. So I think about the early value systems of the internet and how those inspired the web versus the web 2.0 world that became much more extractive and captured. Great, so I'm going to accelerate through these things now. At the end of the day, what CryptoEcon is about is CryptoEconomics, the study of cryptographic economic structures, is a combination of a set of fields that give us a bunch of tools to analyze these mechanisms that we can deploy at runtime into the worldwide computing infrastructure and then influence groups and large scale organizations. At the end of the day, I like calling this software eating mechanism design because it's about the software computing infrastructure that we've built out for the last few decades and using that entire continuous integration and continuous deployment structure with constant improvement and broad deployment into the world and then deploying incentive structures that can organize groups of people, whole large scale entities and so on through these systems. Just to give you a feel for how powerful these systems are, just think of the Bitcoin energy consumption and realize that that just drops out of two components in Bitcoin. One is the block reward impact evaluator and two, the price of Bitcoin. So those two things yield this tremendous energy consuming system. This was kind of an accident. Nobody quite intended this device to consume this amount of energy and waste this amount of energy, but this gives you a sense of the power of these systems. First off, we should fix this and get to better systems that actually make this energy use useful, but I use this as an example to give you a sense of the level of power that comes from these incentive structures and their operation at scale. In Facun, we're very familiar with these kinds of structures. We use the same component and we've gotten a feel for how powerful this stuff is. In just a couple of years, we ended up organizing the build out of a massive hardware infrastructure for providing storage to the world with, again, just using one core incentive structure, a block reward. So all of this makes me really, really hopeful that we'll be able to build these kinds of incentive structures that can scale to solve extremely large planetary scale problems by designing incentive structures, warping the incentive fields, and getting us to, little by little, problem by problem, scale by scale, solve challenges. And so I think I greatly encourage you, if you aren't already in this world, to try it out, to try creating some smart contracts and deploying them, to try working with other projects and so on to get a feel for how powerful these systems are. I'm very hopeful that things like this will have a huge impact on planetary scale problems like climate change. I've become very hopeful that these systems will let us coordinate massive action, again, millions of people, billions of people, whole industries, by letting us have the full power of law and economics and so on in a fully programmable environment. I'm also very hopeful that we can get to accelerate science and technology development by using these kinds of structures to create instruments to incentivize areas of the innovation chasm that are underserved, areas where it's extremely difficult to get funding for certain projects or where it's extremely difficult to get long-term rewards or long-term success. Many of you have probably heard me talk about this science and technology translation problem and the lack of incentive structures in that period in the chasm in the middle, and I think a lot of that just comes from the lack of reward structures there that make it impossible for groups building projects there to raise capital because there's no good incentive for capital to deploy there. So knowing all of this, knowing that this is a critical century, knowing that it's a critical decade and a year, and knowing that crypto economy is extremely powerful, why are we here? Why are we in funding commons? So we thought about this problem last year and we saw that the scale of blockchains and the kind of rapid pace of development in industry and the emergence of things like DeFi and DAOs and FT and so on, and especially the broad adoption by hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people of these tools gave us a very promising landscape to be able to solve these kinds of problems. And so we have the potential to solve all these massive coordination problems, but we're lacking good mechanisms. We need way better governance structures. We need way better funding mechanisms and so on. We need to study these things with much deeper theory and much deeper experimental analysis and so on. And we also ourselves needed better structures, better funding structures, better organizational structures and so on to do our own work, to develop our own teams, to grow our own networks. So based on that, we decided to organize a movement to build these kinds of new models, to arrive at much more sustainable public goods funding, not just sustainable ideally, regenerative systems with possible externalities that are not just sustaining themselves at some level, but actually creating a lot more value around themselves. And we hope to also create structures for much better value alignment within these networks. So we decided to throw an event last year, so it's less than a year ago, despite a number of other people that helped put this on, in my memory yesterday I remembered a set of folks who are here, which I want to thank for driving this and really creating this event, but it really takes a village to put this on, and especially the Yale events team and many others who have helped. And since then we've now had three events, two virtual, one in person, and we're scaling the community and the size of the conversations, the systems that we're reviewing, the mechanisms that we're exploring, the studies that we're doing and so on. So in this conference we've gone from 11, 18 talks and now 56, really encourage you to like attend all of them simultaneously, of course you can do that. Of course you can, later in time, they're all recorded. And we're also very fortunate to be working with a whole bunch of other folks in the ecosystem, building out the broader public goods movement in the blockchain space. Great. Thanks to the Gekwon community and the Shelling Point and many other groups that are very focused on building regenerative structures. So all of this leaves me very hopeful. You know, the other impact so far has been to explore a set of funding mechanisms. Here's a few that I pulled from the YouTube channel. A bunch of these mechanisms are explained and explored and so on. Some of them also have kind of experimental review. So early days, so a lot of it is still kind of not very systematic, not very well experimented upon and so on. But I'd love to kind of crank that up and get to drastically better study to the point where we can like analyze these systems with the same level of rigor that we analyze things like network protocols or like hardware devices and things like that. We've also sort of revived the impact certificates idea and field. We've gotten to explore a number of novel entity types. I know that a few of these are actually getting booted up now, which is really awesome impact for just a few months of talking about things. And we've created some, we've talked about some coordination systems that could be extremely useful. I think this is a very promising area, but probably understudied and an area that is maybe harder or seems much more difficult to get traction on. So it doesn't get studied as much. But I really think this last one, the coordination systems, how do you get large groups of people to organize much better that holds some of the most promise? As I mentioned, you can access all of these. We're making sure that all of this is getting recorded and built into an archive that you can go and explore. They can go and send around to other people. If you think that there's something important, talk to somebody you know, should watch, like please, please go refer them to them and so on. And I want to highlight, yes, I talked a bit about the funding mechanisms on the impact certificate saying it's one of these ideas that a number of people have been discussing for the last few years. And this event really helped revive that entire track. We'll probably hear a number of talks during this conference about impact certificates and a number of projects got catalyzed out of this. So that's super exciting. And so this is exactly kind of the kind of thing that we want to have going, not just in this one area of impact certificates, but across a whole variety of potential mechanisms, potential systems. So huge props and kudos, great credit to all the people doing this work. Let's let's work on this in other areas as well. I think that there's a lot of latent potential in this coordination mechanisms layer, especially I think there's a bunch of really good ideas around things like futarky and other I'm not sure that that particular construction will work, but I think we need to a lot of experiments with those kinds of governance structures to see if there could be ways of governing systems algorithmically and with a way of aggregating a lot of our perspectives and thoughts and values in a much more systematic way than sort of like very brittle representative democracy that like doesn't really scale to to millions of people. And I think in terms of a lot of the mechanisms and structures that that we want to build, there's a lot more theory that is needed. There's a lot more implementations that are needed. There's a lot more rigorous study and assessment of performance and so on that is needed. So really encourage you to kind of pick out any of these. There's lots of interesting work to to get done here. And so, yeah, there's a super packed schedule, lots of amazing things. Definitely look look forward to it. I want to frame some goals for the community for this next year and I would love to kind of see some impact in these things. I'm going to be working on a number of these things myself. Love to invite you to join me and join a number of the other people doing this. And it'd be great to look back. So I like commit that, you know, a year from now, halfway through next year, I'll look back and kind of see how we did on some of these goals. So, you know, to introduce these again, this is a very special year in welfare and crypto. There's this there's tens of thousands of scientists and builders worldwide. There's massive scale resources in these networks, proper, well, you know, well sized experiments scale is very fluid and very easy and very excited. It's a community that's very excited to try new things. There's encountering real large scale problems and is very interested in getting solutions to work, which is very different from a lot of governments. I don't know if any of you have tried to change your local government and try to pass something, but it's an extremely grueling process compared to the idea of starting a community online of people that want to try these things and try to experiment with them. And I think in this kind of like moment of downturn in both crypto and the macro world, it's a great moment to build a lot of these things and get poised for like a very strong refi summer to come out of it. So in the crypto world has had many downturns have been in at least four of them and usually follows a cycle of there's like a big hype moment and then a downturn where people start building lots of things. In one of those downturns I started Protocol Labs and built the first version of IPFS and with a whole number of folks. And then in the next one of those, we had all of the second new next generation blockchains, a lot of the layer twos, all of DeFi, all of NFTs, all of the Dow tooling, all of that came out of that one of those build times. So really hope that in this next downturn build time, we can build all of these kinds of regenerative structures, build out a much better framework for studying all these systems and get to a much better outcome. So some goals. First and foremost, actually there's a meta goal. Let's have a few meta goals. Let's continue to grow this community, explore a bunch of domain specific tracks. Let's dive deeper into certain kinds of mechanisms. Let's maybe think of exploring, having some events that pull together a set of people focused very much in one area. Let's try and experiment with workshops and hackathons. I think we've been thinking it aloud together for a while. It's time to put a lot of that into practice and stimulate that by having workshops and hackathons that enable both theorists and builders, often the same people, to come together, connect and make a bunch of these things and experiment with them. I'd love to have some network funding for ourselves to build a network-oriented grant program to support researchers and builders in the space. I'd love to kind of like target like a, I think a five million dollar fund size is like a good place to start. Of course we can get more, that would be even better. I think we should grow the community. We should think of this as an expansion space for for us and bring new people so like each of you like bring three new people to the event and this might be just refer them to like a talk or something like get them interested in the space and recommend three speakers that you think should be talking to us about their ideas and their thoughts. Now, very concrete goals. I think the impact certificates idea space is extremely interesting, extremely valuable. Let's dive deeper into it. Let's deploy more systems. Let's deploy hyper-certificates. Let's figure out the NFT structures for them. Let's build a market. Let's build ideally multiple markets in a few different verticals. And I think it would be amazing to get to a scale of having an impact market with around fifty million dollars in value next year. I think that would be that I think at that scale is where you can see some interesting things starting to take shape. Smaller than that is harder to see it working. Higher than that is like too hard to kind of reach for in one year. I think at the fifty million dollars scale is both achievable. It's very ambitious, but achievable. And I think we'll give us like really good outcomes. Beyond that, I think impact evaluators are one of these tools that are extremely, extremely powerful. We just haven't studied or experimented with them enough. And so I invite everybody to dive into that. I might lead workshops and so on on this kind of stuff. And really let's study the outcomes because this is one of these things we want to be careful because if you get it right, you build really compelling things. You get it wrong. You get like a runaway process that is like eating up all the energy in the world. So, careful. You know, it's like Mickey Mouse with like the brooms. So yeah. And then I really think that we need much better performance evaluations of all these systems. We need good evaluations and good mechanisms and start evaluations of mechanisms and structures. We need better frameworks, better benchmarks to hit. I'd love to get to a governance, a set of governance benchmarks where you could kind of like come up with a with a benchmark test suite to analyze whether a particular governance structure is doing well or poorly for our community. So think of like having a set of features that you would want your governance systems to do well at. And then we can turn that into, you know, a set of observations that you could apply on top of any governance structure. And then it'd be great to have that as a test suite for people to develop against. In the computer science world, this has been incredibly instrumental in getting us to build the modern computing infrastructure. Almost every field that you can look at in computer science tends to have these intense battery of tests that we kept getting developed and refined and improved over time. But then every successive system has to beat. And so you get this amazing evolutionary structure where whenever you're proposing some new system, you can always run it against this ever-growing intense battery of tests and see whether it's actually better. And that yields an extremely good evolutionary environment. We need something like that for governance structures. We just don't have that. We have no way of properly evaluating whether one particular governance structure is actually going to be better than another one in a systematic, repeatable way where we can all clearly see with hard data that actually works better than another. And I think it is very achievable. So I'm going to... Actually, given the timing and that I wanted to get us on track, I'm going to skip the mechanisms and experiments to try because you'll hear a ton of them throughout the week. Maybe I'll give you just one, which is this idea of an impact evaluator. I'll maybe describe it in high level now and happy to discuss it more in detail with folks. It's a very simple system which just says that you're going to have a periodic evaluation of some value across a community. So this could be a risk contributed. This could be a rated performance against some goal. And in each time step, the impact evaluator is going to release a reward proportional to the value contributed. It's very simple. It just provides a long running, repeatable auction that consumes a set of indicators from an environment. So it measures the environment and it rates all participants and their contribution in that time step. And then it rewards proportionally all participants with a fraction of the pot together. Now, that sounds kind of serious, so you can make it positive, thanks to Evan for this idea and some other folks, I think, by just scaling the reward gets put out by the increase in the thing you're trying to measure in the indicator. And so this kind of structure can be applied to all kinds of measuring, all kinds of properties that you might want to measure. And it's extremely, extremely useful because it gives you this repeatable thing that you can just keep scaling the level of impact and sharing in that pot of rewards. And if you associate the work being done with the value of the reward itself, then you get this amazingly positive feedback loop that then scales really fast. That's the magic behind Bitcoin and Filecoin and a lot of these structures. So in the last 30 seconds, some thoughts and advice for everybody. Connect with other folks. I think this is one of the times in the development of a field where everything is moving very quickly and new ideas will diffuse fast. There'll be a lot of independent discovery of the same thing. And there'll be a lot of people very interested in building things. So this is not a time to hold back your ideas and develop them very deeply and then publish something like kind of like drop information theory in the world or calculus or something like that. And spend five years thinking about it. That is going to be way too slow. And I almost guarantee you that most, if not all of your ideas will probably get independently discovered. And so you'll do much better by working with a lot more people, a lot faster, develop everything much more quickly, get it deployed out there, get it tested, get it scaled. And the sooner we do this, the better, because all of that value flow will compound. So if you have a great improvement and you deploy it now and we get to have more months and years to compound it, even if it's like 20% as good as you could have done it in a year or two years, that compounding rate and that utility of scaling it sooner will be much more valuable to everybody. So I really strongly encourage you to like collaborate, work with other folks, get things tested and really kind of experiment and try things out. Like just try something, see if it works, evaluate it, measure it and so on and whatnot. And reach out for help. So if you are running into some problem, if you have some ideas and so on and you feel stuck, reach out to the community, ask for help. There's a super positive some oriented community and group. Everyone helps each other. So yeah, just reach out with your thoughts, ideas and people will be glad to help. All right. Oh yeah, ship quickly. So yeah, I guess that made that point. Make it again. And then composability. So really focus on composability of these structures. If you build a thing, try to make it as simple as possible and try to make it very composable with other tools and other systems. That is part of what made DeFi scale. That is part of what made NFTs work really well on scale. That's part of what and I think that's one of the things that's holding back DAOs. I think DAOs are not nearly as composable as they need to be. They're kind of composable but they could be much more composable. So yeah, this is let's go forth and prosper. Thank you.