 The decentralization ethos arose over recent years due to a backlash with respect to the operating structure of the financial world, loss of trust in centralized institutions like national governments, and the hypothesis that top-down command and control may have served humanity well when communication and decision-making were slow and expensive. But now we have global instant comms and can make decisions together within 15 seconds on Ethereum, even if up to half of the actors on the network are malicious. This makes decentralization as an organizing principle viable for all sorts of systems. Hierarchical organizational structures are often rigid, not agile or responsive. They suffer from decision-making near the top, far from the situated awareness. Managers in hierarchies tend to silo information to keep power. Decision-making is often slow because the authority to do so is layers above. Creative problem solving and innovation don't tend to thrive or survive in rigid hierarchy. It can be soul-crushing for most in the corporate pyramid. Experimenting with decentralized architectures holds much promise. These systems can be flatter, more fluid and more effective. We and our many cousins in the decentralization ecosystem have much to explore together. The Ethereum project and community are dedicated to radical decentralization, as much decentralization as is practical. The theorem governance and forward progress of the platform is proceeding in a decentralized fashion, as it always had, with many classes of actor. Core devs, devs, researchers, security auditors, miners, pools, exchanges, hardware manufacturers, software firms, the vocal community, industry pundits, regulators, and even legacy finance industry experts with no familiarity, let alone understanding of the facts, all weighing in when the bigger decisions are being made. I know real. If you're watching, thanks for taking time to do a bit of research. Vlad's governance 101 post recently kicked off a new round of fruitful discussions. We have all much work to do on this front. Fortunately, it's proceeding in a decentralized fashion. As an aside, and before I dive into the talk, I would like to call out Vitalik's leadership. It is leadership by doing an example never by fiat. Vitalik has remained in the background with respect to various issues at a time intentionally out of concern that his words might be weighted too heavily. This is what I think of as leadership in the era of decentralization. I don't think anything can begin significantly decentralized, and Ethereum certainly started in one man's cranium. But Vitalik from day zero has been doing his best to empower people and to continuously open the project. As many as have many others, of course. But if we consider the responsibility the world has heaped on his shoulders and the shit that the trolls and the idiots on the interwebs sling at him, it's one of the most historic stories, heroic stories I know. With integrity, genius and grace, Vitalik goes about doing a job that even a decentralized army of crypto heads have trouble keeping up with. Similarly, consensus started in one individual's head, but decentralized rapidly. Since the beginning, we've been threading the needle between practical forward progress and decentralization. Our goal always is to build better systems, and we believe that decentralized architectures will usually win out, more so as the technology matures and scales. Consensus is dedicated to building appropriately decentralized systems, but also to walking the walk, working to decentralize ourselves throughout. We started as a venture production studio, intending to build dApps, wrap them in companies and put them out for investment. We've spun out a few projects and continue to do so, but we've also been able to be patient with many more. We consider consensus a fluid mesh of projects and companies all sharing some DNA, and internally we refer to it as the mesh. Early on, necessity drove infrastructure invention. Tim Coulter's work on dApp Store led to a set of scripts that evolved over time into the truffle suite. On Monday night, the truffle team was gathered as the counter flipped over on the one millionth truffle download. Huge congrats to the team. Karen Davison, later Dan Finley and the MetaMass team rescued us all from having to tell users to go download and sync geth before dApp can connect to the network. They remain on the bleeding edge of the technology, but labor tirelessly to ensure that nobody gets hurt. Deep respect to the team for always choosing the safer path for the end user, yet continually breaking new ground for the ecosystem as we see in the 15 second mobile MetaMass new wallet import. Stephen George and Martin Copelman of NOSIS began with the dream of enabling liquid financial markets for all of our issues and decisions. They piloted the prediction market technology and they've also built core infrastructure. The multi-sig wallet, which protects billions in value, NOSIS safe and Dutch X, an exchange that removes the ability for a centralized party to corrupt the fairness of token exchanges. In 2015, the Infura team, Michael Wheeler, Marie-Z, Peter Zak and Eiji Galano, and now so many more, helped out some consensus projects by consolidating our internal test nets. By DEF CON 2, they had externalized the service and offered it to the world. By DEF CON 5, we expect to have an open Infura protocol that enables anyone to get paid to run nodes that bundle different protocols. These and so many more infrastructural elements are helping to rapidly mature Ethereum and turn it into a foundational element of the decentralized worldwide web. These are some of the reasons that Ray Valdez, while at Gardner, estimated that the Ethereum developer community was 40 times larger than the number two, IBM's fabric community. The U-Port should probably be in that infrastructure list as well. The U-Port team has doggedly explored identity and reputation since early days at consensus when we realized we needed an identity construct that would not just enable access to apps via single sign-on, but also present the world with an alternative to the exploitative business models that are enabled because the web never had a native identity construct. The U-Port iterated solutions over the years, collecting constraints and concerns and whittling its offerings down to a minimal yet sufficient decentralized offering, one that doesn't even need a blockchain, but can certainly benefit from one and in turn provide great benefit to Ethereum. The U-Port team is a founding and steering committee member of the 56th company Decentralized Identity Foundation, whose mission is to build an open-source decentralized identity ecosystem for people, organizations, apps, and devices where decentralized identities like U-Ports are anchored by blockchain IDs linked to zero-trust data stores like 3Box, for instance, and are universally discoverable on Ethereum and other platforms. Interoperability across platforms is an essential goal, and self-sovereign identity and personal information should be fully under the control of the individual as we turn Web 2 business models upside down and architect Web 3 services to be user-centric. U-Port and 3Box personal data locker facilitate interoperation from the perspective and to the benefit of the user. Please check out U-Port's new developer libraries, version 1.0, just released last week. Theorem is emerging as one of the foundational components of a world computer, a Web 3 flavored constellation of interoperating protocols. Web 3, the decentralized worldwide web, would consist of many decentralized protocols for trusted transactions, automated agreements, smart software objects, storage bandwidth, heavy compute, identity, reputation, proof of location, legally enforceable agreements, certificates, resources, and asset tokenization, like for kilowatt hours and equities and real estate. Synergies among various projects on Ethereum are more easily achieved than in the Web 2 world, as the platform can be considered a single execution space. Interoperation within Ethereum or across protocols is what will enable us to move beyond siloed walled garden approaches on the Web and in the business world, leaving the us against them ethos behind and making collaboration standard across applications within sectors and industries and along value chains like supply chains or content creation and sharing. The new trust foundation enabled by the radically decentralized Ethereum base layer is what is facilitating this evolution towards collaboration. It is trustful collaboration, even with those you don't know or with whom you compete. That will enable a world of decentralized actors to thrive as they no longer have to depend on the embedded intermediaries, the music companies, the banks, the law firms, insurers, brokers, and existing sharing economy companies who currently provide necessary trust and from that privileged position suck up much of the value in their sectors. In these early days, the ecosystem is being built out by the builders largely for the builders. Yes, we've attracted financial and speculator types, but mostly it is about devs, engineers, entrepreneurs, and cybersecurity professionals. These are the people who are biddling and maturing the components and the standards. Elements like different styles of tokens, swap protocols and exchanges, data feeds, markets, IOT protocols, registries, name services, legally and automatically enforceable agreements and certificates. Hundreds of components like these are composable into a compelling app because Ethereum is all about easy synergy and standards that ensure exchanges, wallets, swap protocols, and other tools can interoperate with what is built. Ethereum is where standards are being forged. While protocols at consensus have a high degree of autonomy, we emphasize rich communication, collaboration, and interoperation among teams as much as possible. The standard Bounty Smart Contract integrates with Gitcoin so devs can easily fulfill open source bug bounties. AirSwap plugs into August prediction market, Meridios tokenized real estate platform and Opera's browser so users can swap ERC tokens instantly. Bounties and MakerDAO are working together to verify ocean cleanups. Ergon, Dharma, Zeppelin, and several other projects share technical docs on the Kauri Knowledge Network and encourage their communities to contribute tutorials and help one another so that we can build together faster. Kauri, Gitcoin, and Bounties.network are enabling us and others to get more work done better and faster. These platforms enable dynamic workforce assembly, enabling us to have smaller focused teams and bring more global and often specialized talent into our projects. And for the developer bounty hunters on those platforms, they can work on what they want, when they want, enjoy diversity of projects, get paid at higher hourly rates if they choose to work faster, and work from anywhere in the world. And both parties that they like each other can choose to solidify the relationship into long-term employment. Consensus builds protocol-based open platforms that represent collections of people and businesses inhabiting various collaborative roles in a network of services. We expect this approach will unify and flatten many industries, enabling smaller groups to interoperate with one another to get the same work done more effectively than current monoliths in industries like financial services, entertainment, and law. The protocol-based open platforms can be stacked upon or interoperate with one another. An open music industry platform like Ujo, enabling artists to directly interact with their consumers or with other artists, can reside on Ethereum. An open event management and ticketing platform can sit on or alongside Ujo, enabling artists to coordinate gigs directly with venues. A blocking platform can link to music on Ujo and get paid for curation. And an insurance platform can provide a parameterized insurance policy that protects the band. Pushing more and more functionality into these open network business platforms will enable more people to connect to these systems with their self-sovereign identity so that they can have an intermediated agency on all of these platforms, enabling greater satisfaction in their livelihoods and broader wealth distribution. Pundits attack our space with accusations that there have been no killer apps, I disagree. File-sharing platforms could be considered the first killer app of the decentralization space. While piracy is a problem, these systems pioneered revolutionary approaches to distribution and disintermediation. Great value accrued to the pirates. Since then Apple and Spotify have shown that if price points in UI, UX are good, people will just pay for the music rather than stealing it. Now we just have to build platforms that enable artists to directly access consumers so that content creators can disintermediate the entertainment companies and get directly paid. Last night Ujo Music crested 1,000 artists on its content creator portal. The second killer app has to be cryptocurrencies themselves, with millions around the world benefiting from better ways of transferring or storing value, especially in developing nations. The third killer app is the creation issuance, distribution exchange, and management of so many different kinds of crypto assets, pretty much all of which is happening on Ethereum. Projects are being funded and infrastructure for a next generation natively digital economy is being built to the tune of tens of billions of dollars that clear and settle on Ethereum every day. But the pundits don't notice because the benefits accrue in a decentralized fashion. Pundits are having trouble recognizing these killer applications because they don't reward existing intermediaries or pile stacks of value into new intermediaries, but many lives are improving. In referring to the lamenting over lack of an obvious killer app, Vitalik said, the killing will be death by a thousand cuts. Decentralization is the killer organizing principle. It's ushering in the Web 3 world. Blockchains are the killer automated trust foundation, promoting synergy and collaboration, and Ethereum is the killer ecosystem, an ecosystem that will transform global economic social and political systems. And of course, there will be killer apps on Ethereum that the pundits will recognize. I expect with the many independent layer two scalability breakthroughs that are coming online every day, we will see one or more in 2019. Applications in gaming, journalism, law, supply chain, financial products, journalism, music, and other niches will break through into the consumer space. The user experience once in a game for instance should be excellent, but blockchain UX in general might be a bit clunky to start, just as Web 1 and pre-Web experiences were. To address this, the consensus design group is developing a design system and language called RIMBLE, similar to Google Material, but with many new elements unique to Web 3. We're in the early era of decentralization. Looking at are we decentralized yet.com, Ethereum is in the lead with nearly 20,000 public nodes. Bitcoin has nearly 10,000, Qtum nearly 5,000 and dash, or 7,000 and dash nearly 5,000. 34% of Ether is held in the top 100 accounts, 19% of Bitcoin, 75% of Qtum, and 15% of Dash. As more daps come online, the Ether number should shrink faster than the others. Chinese miners dominate Bitcoin mining, but this is not the case for Ethereum. I've seen numbers as low as 13% for Ethereum. When proof of stake arrives, the low barrier to entry and lack of efficiencies of scale will strongly decentralize validation of transactions on Ethereum. Ethereum is far in the lead as a viable candidate for the base trust layer, and it may be a few years before our ecosystem achieves profound decentralization in the base and higher layers. That's okay. We can grow into a radically decentralized future as we have lots of adoption, use case exploration and definition and UI-UX issues to take care of, which will keep us busy for a few years. One near-term killer app that started to gain traction is OpenLaw. The business model of many law firms is to create irrelevant issues and as much detailed friction as possible and charge their clients by the hour to handle it. The trillion-dollar global legal industry has enabled us to be more civil for a few hundred years, but it has evolved into a pay-to-play, manufactured gatekeeping function. OpenLaw is a platform for blockchain-based legally enforceable agreements. The protocol ingests agreements and turns them into structured, computable living objects embedded into agreements, embedding into agreements variables that can be assigned values like names, numbers and other complex logic that populate the document. These agreements, one can tie the smart contract code to a real-world agreement, which renders the entire transaction legally enforceable. OpenLaw is developing a library of smart contract components that can be easily plugged into any arrangement. Clauses or agreements can be assembled like Lego blocks. For example, a party can grab a standard OpenLaw-based escrow agreement and embed a smart contract to escrow money, tokens or other blockchain-based assets. Actions can be triggered when conditions are met, based on timing or injected oracle data. Evidence of agreements and the counterparty signatures are time-stamped on the blockchain, while the plaintext can be published or kept confidential. OpenLaw enables peer-to-peer digital contracting. Our legal team work with OpenLaw to create an Ethereum-based NDA generator, accessible by all our teams as we are integrating OpenLaw solutions into many of our processes. Ujo Music, for instance, will soon use OpenLaw to enable artists to attach usage policies to their music for instant purchases of licenses for downloads, streaming, public performance, synchronization or derivative works. Rocket Lawyer, a service with 20 million users, is embedding various aspects of OpenLaw into its platform. As we speak, OpenLaw just released its library and API to enable developers to build on top of OpenLaw. It's converting tens of thousands of agreements into blockchain-compatible contracts and surfacing them through APIs in a GitHub-like platform. Type OpenLaw into YouTube to see demos of decentralizing the deal, or blockchain-based lending, or the end-to-end purchase of end-sale of real estate property. It will be a holy shit moment for you. The journalism industry is on life support. Radio TV print have been rolled up and are owned by a few holding companies or funds and are being milked. The local news industry has been gutted. We get our news today in sound bites and snippets on hyper-stimulating social media promoting basically binary views, subtlety of issues, and measured discourses lost. In such a context, how can we adequately govern ourselves? Healthy governance is breaking down in the face of overlapping exponential technologies that are being wielded by central powers. We have these emerging tools, self-sovereign identity, blockchain-based transparency, cryptography-based voting systems, liquid democracy, and quadratic voting to experiment with, but they're useless if we can't access information we can trust. A project that is breaking through as we speak is CIVIL, a platform for ethical and sustainable journalism. There are already 30-plus newsrooms on the platform, websites and podcasts exploring topical or regional news. It had a token sale for a consumer utility token that was the most and least successful token sale we've run. Most successful in that it attracted far more interested parties into the top of the marketing funnel than we had yet seen by an order of magnitude. But the sale failed to reach its target for UI-UX reasons, because these were normal people, not crypto heads. And because we made it a rigorous process, forcing people to pass a test ensuring that they knew what they were doing and they were technically accredited to purchase tokens. So the conversion rate of people actually able to onboard to the system was low, but the platform will launch anyway, and we will get know-how and tokens into the hands of the interested parties one way or another. CIVIL has a constitution and a foundation run by the former CEO of National Public Radio in the U.S. Newsrooms of professional journalists have formed, written a charter, and can soon attach themselves to a token curated registry by staking tokens. If they act unethically, their audience can challenge them and perhaps have them bumped off the platform. The Associated Press and Forbes have committed to operating on the platform, and more announcements are in the offering. Viant, our supply chain, track and trace product and team is reimagining a world where trust and transparency are incorporated into the goods we buy every day. This summer, the team working with the World Wildlife Foundation served yellow fin in Albuquer tuna that ethereal participants in New York could trustingly consume able to track the journey of the fish from bait to plate via an app. Very soon you'll be able to experience the same as this technology rolls out to consumers buying tuna in retail stores. The Viant team is applying the fundamentals of the bait to plate technology to bring transparency to other consumer products. Imagine the ability to scan products from store shelves and get the origin, purity, etc. from raw material through manufacturing to the end product. All this verifiable and anchored on Ethereum. Consensus invests in our product teams, education and events, and we co-venture with existing companies. Our Ventures Arm has made 30-plus investments in Ethereum and related startups. We're working to build out the token economy from defining standards and evolving legalities globally to the creation issuance exchange and management of tokens. We see all of this as the evolving democratization of finance. Yesterday, we released the Coven or Coventuring project. Coven is an open platform for venture capital investment. On Coven, prospectors propose companies for possible investment. Subject matter experts can diligence these projects, facilitated by a staking game, and investors can either challenge and capture the stakes or invest in the projects. I expect it will improve access to capital while greater expertise is brought to bear to diligence projects, and good projects get broader exposure and stakeholdership. Consensus makes monetary investments, but like all of you out there, our dearest investment involves the heart and soul that we put into our work. We're constantly working to apply our approach and our tools to our own internal organization and processes. Consensus endeavors to be a flat organization, and we've developed novel software and processes to help us in that regard. Sobol.io is a project that used to be called TMNT, Traditional Management Nullification Tool. We had to change the name for obvious reasons. Sobol.io is a cross between a corporate internet linked in and teal management software like systems designed to support holocracy. Teal organizations are orgs that have an evolved structure with respect to governance and day-to-day operations. The teal paradigm envisions the company as an organism with various functional organs and lots of measurement processes and feedback loops designed to keep the organism healthy without traditional org charts and managers. Everyone can log into their Sobol profile from their U-port. We can see how Consensus is organized as circles within circles, with each having its own identity, vision, mission, values, operations, and life cycle. People are associated with different projects, and their percent of attention to those projects is depicted. OKRs and KPIs can be defined for people in projects, and soon an agreements tooling will be offered so that two people, end people, a person, and a team or a team itself can forge the operating agreements. Yes, using open law by which they pledge to interact. Consensus members self-organize. Nobody tells anyone what to do. We don't do 20% time at Consensus. We have 100% time as we prefer that everyone work on what they are passionate about. As a result, our organization requires new ways of taking responsibility and assuring accountability. We're working to put processes into place that enables autonomous or decentralized governance and decision making as much as possible. Each of our functional groups, service circles like finance or legal, product teams or companies, gets a budget that is allocated often via a peer-driven process, and is free to chart its course for the most part, which includes defining how it conducts its day-to-day and long-range business. We're working to have each of these groups wrap themselves in public APIs so that others can know what is available. And we will soon use open law to place SLAs on each API, so a consumer of an API knows the terms under which the provider offers it. With such living agreements available, if a product team makes use of an offering from the marketing team, data can be sent into the agreement that memorializes and conducts that interaction, and compensation from the product team can flow to marketing based on measured performance. We're in the early days of exploration of exploring what a decentralized company can be, but the vision emerging is one of many autonomous units, each operating as though they're embedded in an efficient free market. The Consensus Mesh is a hybrid organization in various ways, part software company, part professional services consultancy, part VC. It is a hybrid in that it maintains structures required to operate in the legacy world, especially in our finance HR and legal groups, but it is also mapping out what we might be possible with respect to operating in the decentralized future. As we get better in articulating APIs and SLAs for our various functional groups, we can imagine that even marketing, HR, finance and legal will be able to offer tools and services, not just to our internal groups, but to other companies as well. Our marketing group has recently started doing this under the Catalyst brand. Legal, we have some coders on the team, is building software tools designed to protect consumers better in the new token economy. With respect to Dynamic Workforce Assembly, Oplis, a project that we're close to, is enabling professional employment organizations to serve our ecosystem, and we'll evolve these into decentralized employment organizations so that many small companies in our space can band together to handle human resources' needs and issues. Like Gitcoin and Bounties.Network, Oplis will enable an increase in the velocity of work and enable individuals to engage in self-sovereign employment, balancing the power of the developer without of the organization that she develops for. As many of our groups externalize their offerings, and as we all evolve towards greater decentralization, soon it won't be hard to imagine companies using our various services and effectively permissionlessly attaching themselves to the mesh. One last item. Consensus believes investing in the ecosystem is critical. Perhaps now more than ever as this experiment that we've been privileged to be part of is moving towards usability by consumers and towards becoming globally systemically important. We're also passionate about open source. Gitcoin and Codefund enable open source developers to get compensated for their important work. Our protocol and systems engineering group Pegasus just released Pantheon, a new Java-based Ethereum client that is synced to and running on mainnet now. The code was open sourced on GitHub a few days ago and released under the Apache 2 license. We welcome Jim Jigilski to the mesh a few months ago. Jim is one of the original eight Apache group members. This evolved into him co-founding and directing the Apache Software Foundation and serving as a core developer on several ASF projects. At Consensus, Jim is our open source guru, helping our projects with their open source strategy and mechanics. A decentralized future is one worth imagining and investing in. So we're excited to announce the new Consensus grants program. Soon we'll be unveiling a $500,000 fund that will be dispersed in amounts of $10,000 to $25,000. Successful projects in this round will be eligible for follow-on grants. The grants program is an effort to encourage the growth of the Ethereum infrastructure layer with bounties and grants for open source projects. Grant awards will focus on infrastructure, research, interoperability, usability, and developer tools. We'll cooperate with Gitcoin and the bounties network for some of the dispersals. More information including categories and application process will be coming soon. Learn more and sign up for more information at this link. Consensus.net. Thank you very much.