 Okay, and our next talk is on positive framing and communication for Web 3. The talk is hosted by Oliver Renwick. Oliver is a terminologist, SBC enthusiast, and translator. He currently lives near Cleveland, Ohio, USA with his wife and two kids. He works at Consensus, creating and maintaining support documentation for MetaMask, Infra and other products, and in general tries to explain the madness of Web 3 to those who want to know more. He speaks Spanish and English fluently, and he get himself into trouble in Italian, Arabic, Catalan and French. Please help me in welcoming Oliver to the stage. Gracias. Is this on? Yes. Okay, cool. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Tropical Sunset Stage. I am Oliver Renwick, as was explained in my introduction. Before I get started, I just want to say a shout out to the interpreters in the booth back there. They have been doing an amazing job all week, and I will try to speak evenly and not use really strange words. One last note. I will be giving the talk in English. The slides will be in Spanish. If you see a slide that's all in Spanish, don't be alarmed. I'm going to say everything that's on it in English. Okay, so with that, let's get started. Okay, so the current state of affairs. Here we are. It's 2022. Crypto is going through its rises and falls, and we had incredible user growth during 2021, and the ecosystem is expanding outward, and rather than sort of homogenizing and becoming less complex, it's opening up and becoming more complex. More people are doing more different things, and we have people who have heard about this crypto thing and want to get involved, or they've heard about Web 3, maybe, and they want to get involved. So how do we explain that to them? So as a terminologist, as a translator, I focus on words. That's my thing. And what I've noticed about Web 3 and the terminology that we use to describe distributed or decentralized technology, it has two main features that define it. First of all, it's very technical. This is the language of engineers, of computer people. And second of all, you can see in the terminology that we use sort of the origins of this technology that it was born in a place at a time that was rejecting the previous generation's tech stack and their philosophy, right? So as a result, there's this sort of what I call negative theology, but in general, it's sort of a negative framing that permeates Web 3. And in its best moments, it can be sort of edgy and cool and makes people interested and want to know more. But I find, especially dealing with people who are new to the space, that it just confuses things. It makes things impenetrable. There's a lot of jargon. Sometimes people use metaphors to describe things that are a little bit unsettling or weird. And a lot of things just get framed in negative ways instead of in positive ways. So how do we go from the negative to the positive? Briefly, in this session, I'm going to lay out for you what I have categorized, what I have observed about this terminology. And then hopefully we'll have a little bit of time to sort of dive in. And I'm going to be pointing at people and asking for things as well. Hopefully we can get interactive. So I will say I do have a background in linguistics. I've done qualitative studies. I've done quantitative studies. This is not that. This is more, you know, I've been working at consensus, writing documentation for end users, talking to people that are new to the space, explaining things to my wife over and over again. Not because she doesn't understand, but because probably my explanations need to be improved. And so what you've got here, what I'm showing you is sort of my gut feeling about where we're at in the space. This isn't meant to be a prescriptive model of what we've got going on. This is not based on data. This is trying to start a conversation. So in my time as a wordsmith, as it were, I've gotten a lot of people saying things like, yeah, but who cares, man? That's just implementation details. That's just words. If we make solid tech, if we make a solid product, people are going to use it. I'm here to argue the opposite. I'm going to argue that if we want adoption to increase outside of our crypto bubble, we need to learn to explain our technology in a clearer and a more empowering way. The empowering part is important and we'll come back to it soon. So I'm going to now break down a little bit of sort of what I've observed about the way we talk about crypto. First of all, there's what I've been calling negative framing or negative theology. The second sort of big category of language is impenetrable jargon that should be improved. It's got a laser here. So, yes, oh, it worked. Okay. It's working now. So the third, so we all know what I'm talking about and we'll get into some concrete examples of that soon. The last one gets into sort of marketing or branding a little bit and it's more subjective. And that's the question that we all have to ask ourselves is what I'm saying edgy and revolutionary and is it going to energize people or is it like kind of cringe and like edgelord? So that's not who we want to be. Okay. I'm really excited about this topic. So negative theology and negative framing. So look at this set of terms, right? This is terms that we all know from being in the space, non-custodial wallet, immutable transactions and things. Governance free, trustless, permissionless. Permissionless is one of our favorite words, right? There's a whole event called permissionless, decentralized, censorship resistant and arbitrary. Arbitrary is in bold and we'll come back to it. So let's see here. Can somebody tell me what permissionless means? And yell it out and I'll repeat it. You don't need permission to use it. Yeah, I think that's actually what it means. Yeah. But like, but from, from like, imagine, like wipe your, wipe your brain clean and imagine you've never heard of crypto. Imagine you've never done this stuff and you're like, oh, it's a permissionless computer network. What? Like, yeah, you decide how you interact with it. That's a really cool definition, but it's, I, I don't feel like that's inherent in the word. You see what I mean? Like, if I'm completely tabula rasa, like, I don't know what, what that means. And, and trustless is a similar thing. Trustless I love, right? Because trustless is like old Bitcoin OG speak, right? And they're like, it's a trustless system. And that's so cool. And people like, I've had, I've used that word and people have been like, that's bad, right? Like, you can't trust it. And I've had to be like, no, no, it's because like, you don't need to trust it. It's, it's provable. It's math. And a lot of this comes down to it being technical. So we'll move on to that in the next point. But I want to talk about non custodial, because non custodial is one of the biggest examples of this kind of language in our space. I threw up a screenshot of what is a non custodial wallet? Look at all these explainers. BitPay, Gemini, I can't tell what that one is. But Bybit, economictimes.com. So I was, I was upgrading, rewriting the MetaMask documentation for users last year. And I decided to try and translate some of them into Spanish. And so I sat down with the first article that I was going to translate and it was called MetaMask is a non custodial wallet. And I just sat there staring at the title like, how am I going to say that in Spanish? And so, so I ended up sort of dando le vueltas as they say in Spanish. And I ended up with MetaMask is a self custodial wallet, una vietera de custodia propia. So this is what I was saying about making our language empowering. So if I say to somebody, check out this wallet, it's a crypto wallet and it's non custodial. They say, what's non custodial? And I'm like, oh, the bank isn't the custodian, you're the custodian. So I'm telling somebody this is a good thing because screw the banks, man, you're in charge, right? So I'm automatically putting them into this like power struggle, right? And that can be exciting and that can be interesting. But it's also like a lot of information. Whereas if I said to somebody, here's this crypto wallet, man, it's self custodial. Whoa, right there, I've given them the power. The crypto is theirs, right? And they understand it immediately. So that's the difference in framing things negatively versus positively. You don't have to do that mental gymnastics to work out how the negative thing is a good thing. The same way we were saying with permissionless and trustless, right? You don't have to figure out, oh, I don't have to trust it because the math proves it. And that's a good thing. Anyway, so, okay, al siguiente, por favor. Gracias. Okay, there's a lot going on here. Impenetrable jargon that should be improved. So RPC network. What's RPC? Remote procedure call. That's right. What is an RPC network? A network of computers where you can do remote procedure calls. So where does this come up? This comes up in your metamask. You're like, oh, I want to get onto polygon. How do I do it? Oh, I need to add a custom RPC network. Doesn't make sense. So RPC is from JSON RPC, which is an old web 2 era standard for passing JSON blobs, which is a type of data around computers, right? So we refer to our EVM mostly, not necessarily actually, we refer to a lot of our public blockchain networks as RPC networks as a sort of technical shorthand. And those of us who are like initiates into this technology, we get it. But for users, this is putting too much on them. We had a lot of conversations. I brought this up in a Slack channel and was like, we need to change this. And we had some conversations. And we didn't settle on anything firm. So this is an area where I think we as a community could maybe come up with something better. In a way, just saying network is a better option. Like add a new network or add a new blockchain network if you want. Or I don't know. And a connection point. Connection point might be good, right? Because sometimes, like let's say you're somebody who wants to connect to different endpoints within MetaMask wallet for the same network. We might need a term there to differentiate between, well, yeah, I'm connecting to Arbitrum, but I'm using a private node, right? And so what's the term for maybe we call it network endpoint, right? And maybe that's a better option. So RPC network is a great example. There's this whole mess. How many of you do you think know the difference between a wallet versus an account versus an address versus a public key, private key, seed, secret recovery phrase? And you use them correctly every time. You do. Good job. Good job. So like a lot of the time we sort of shorten it, right? We're like, yeah, I sent it from my wallet. Yeah, you sent it from your wallet or I sent it from my address or I sent it from my account. Like they're kind of different things. And getting, so I work in customer success within consensus, right? So I help, like I'm writing the documentation and in coordination with a lot of our support agents. And the support agents kind of have to work with users who might be using these things interchangeably, right? Like the coins got stolen from my wallet. The coins got stolen from my account. What do you mean? So there's a lot going on there. So smart contracts. They're neither smart nor contracts. I know, I know, I've read about the history of them. I know where they come from. But I'm like a word geek and I care about that. Most people don't care about that. Anyway, smart contracts. I feel like that ship maybe has sailed. And maybe I shouldn't fight that battle. So I wanted to point out this example, though. I saw this while I was like months ago and I was like, this is perfect. So this is from mirror.xyz. And for those of you who don't know mirror, it's kind of trying to be like the medium of Web 3, maybe? Don't don't at me. And so this is a little snippet. This was like a clickable thing. This was supposed to make me want to click and read more. For the first time ever, convex users will be able to collateralize their VLCVX positions, allowing them to earn yield, i.e. bribes, and leverage their assets at the same time. This will be accomplished through a new technical collaboration with TribeDow and redacted cartel. Yeah! Right? So I work in this space and I don't entirely understand what's going on there. So thank you. Thank you. Here's another great one. This is from one of my favorite articles, front-running the MEV crisis or MEV, whatever. I don't care how you pronounce it. So this is a great article explaining crazy stuff about how MEV works. And so what is MEV? Definition. Minor extractable value is a whole paragraph of definition. Then we get to the next paragraph. The term MEV can be misleading as one would assume it is minors who are extracting this value. Cool. Cool. That just makes me want to be like, I don't know how words work anymore. So one thing that we've been talking a lot about that I've been talking a lot about here during the conference is Layer 2s and ZK Snarks. Love ZK Snarks. They're like the most empowering revolutionary technology, not just for the Web 3 space, but Web 3 plus ZK Snarks is, we could do so much with it. They're called ZK Snarks. I don't know what else I need to say. So obviously any discussion of ZK Snarks could be sort of massaged. So you could be like, okay, there's this new technology. It's called ZK Snarks. This is what it does. What does a ZK Snark do? Anybody? You don't know? Well, right. That's the whole point. Right? We don't know. That's good. Seriously. Can anybody offer me a succinct explanation of ZK Snarks? Prove a true or false statement without any other information being shared. Yeah. Or prove that you know something without revealing what it is or something. Prove that you know a secret without revealing the secret, maybe. Say what? Without interactions. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. That's like, I love the technology and I want to be able to talk about it better. And roll-ups, right? Roll-ups are really cool. Anyway, okay. Por favor, dale la siguiente. I'm running out of time. I'm getting excited. Okay. Last one. So this is branching out from sort of terminology into sort of softer stuff. Well, softer. Marketing, branding, perception, right? Like I was saying, our technology has the potential to do really amazing things. We can change centuries old power dynamics with our technology and that's what a lot of the biggest advocates and minds in our space say that we want to do and say that we're trying to do. That's awesome. For some people, that's going to bring them in the door, right? They're like, I want to burn it all down. I want to start over. Other people are like, I don't want to burn everything down, right? So the question of how you brand your project is a delicate one. They're sort of my favorite example of this. They're like a cool public goods, right? They do awesome stuff and they have satanic branding. It's cool. Dogecoin, maybe they kind of nailed it with like, yeah, we're a coin but we're a meme and apparently that caught on, right? Darkfy, I had the privilege of sort of encountering them at East Barcelona over the summer and they had this awesome patch that had this logo on it and it said like, I don't know, something really sketchy about like, you are your keys, you are your finance or something in red lettering. Their manifesto is really powerful. It goes into some pretty hardcore. They're trying to work on a more anonymous DeFi, if I remember correctly. Really cool project. But like, it's very much like, are you into Edward Snowden? This is for you, right? So there's a lot of people into Edward Snowden and I'm sure in this room. But you got to, you know, as you're coming at it, are you pitching for a public audience or who are you pitching for? I'm going to shill mildly here and say that I feel like IPFS kind of nailed it. They kind of got a middle road for their product. This is on their homepage. You scroll down a little bit and you find this. The resolution isn't great but they've got sort of these web 2-esque friendly diagrams explaining what their technology does, right? It kind of illustrates it. And they've got brief like statements about what their product does. So this one down here, let me see if I can back up and read it a little bit. Read it here. It says, today's web is addicted to the backbone. IPFS powers the creation of diversity resilient networks that enable persistent availability with or without internet backbone connectivity. So that sentence there. It's a mixture of techie people talk and normal people talk, right? They say it enables persistent availability. That's sort of like signals to the people who care about cloud computing, what it is. But then they gloss that by saying internet backbone connectivity, right? So they're saying these are two different audiences they're speaking to. This means better connectivity for the developing world during natural disasters or just when you're on flaky coffee shop Wi-Fi. This is a very powerful like sort of value added statement, right? They're breaking it down for you and they're saying look at what IPFS can do. Asterisk, what does IPFS stand for? Interplanetary file system, right? So this is where we get that mixture of like, yo man, we're the interplanetary file system. We're ready to go to the moon. But then they bring it back down to earth and they're like, look, we're going to make it better to browse Wikipedia at the coffee shop. Okay, I talked a lot. These are the takeaways that I wanted to sort of dissolve, distill all of that down into. As we're writing, as we're talking about our space, as we're branding our space, we need to find ways to phrase things in the positive rather than in the negative overall in general because it empowers people. It is a lower cognitive burden, right? And that's what we want. We need to find ways to approach the technical jargon from the point of view of somebody new to the space, Tabula Rasa. We need to use phrasings, metaphors and explanations that assume as little knowledge on the user's part as possible. Making comparisons to Web 2 might help sometimes. It might hinder sometimes. Think about whether your users want to be empowered on their own. This is the example of like self-custodial, right? Here, it's a self-custodial wallet. Now you have the power versus they were part of a social, political, economic, technological movement, right? Like it's non-custodial because screw the banks, right? They're two different audiences. Last point, consider whether your branding, your image, your slogans, et cetera, are culturally bound. Culturally bound, this gets into translator theory stuff, but basically, does it translate well? Is it something that means something else in a different language or sounds like something else in a different language? And if you think I'm overreacting, ask a Spanish speaker about the Mitsubishi Pajero. Okay. Siguiente, por favor. Okay. This is the final run here. Siguiente, por favor. This is a comedy in three parts. This is from Twitter. Guys remember when the AXI chain got hacked like a year ago? So much money got stolen. So this guy's, this ape is narrating it. You cannot make this up. Hacker steals 600 million in ETH from Ronan blockchain, the one underlying AXI. Hacker then goes short Ronan and access AXI token, knowing as soon as news breaks that tokens will plummet, but no one notices and they get liquidated on short before news breaks. Siguiente, what is ETH? Who is Ronan? What's an AXI? What's AXI token? No clue what short is? What language is this? Siguiente, por favor. And then somebody very helpfully explains. It's a cryptocurrency. It's a blockchain network. It's an NFT. It's another cryptocurrency and says, asserts that this is English. I have my doubts. So this, I thought this was a really good illustration, right? Of like, we're on crypto Twitter. We're like, oh my god, they shorted the position and they're liquidated in the arbitrage and the, I don't know. And normal people are like, I'm going to learn about crypto. Oh, I hear it's big on Twitter. I'm going to follow people on Twitter. Okay, Siguiente, por favor. Okay, I'm done. So now is the time for Q and A. I've got four minutes here. I have lots of examples, but questions. With respect to educating designers and people who work in crypto UX, how would you best want to disseminate this knowledge through like workshops or like blog posts or what's effective? Come to my talk. Yeah, no, that's a good question. Yeah, I mean, this space is supposed to be the space that's all about how do we collaborate together, right? I don't know. Are there already like UX DAOs? Is that a thing? Yeah, okay. So I'm just ill-informed. So I don't know. As a terminologist, like my approach to this is very much like, I'm going to make a glossary and I'm going to study the terms and I'm going to say, this is what this means. These are synonyms, these are homonyms, and I'm going to map it out and make decisions about which one I like and then I'm going to, with an iron fist, enforce it. So that's maybe not the most crypto attitude. I don't know. I don't have a good answer to that beyond that. Time for one more super quick question. I had to put you on the spot. It is a super quick question. Yeah. If you could un-invent one word using this space, what would be the one word? Oh, man. Sorry. Oh, no, no, no. What was it? I was talking about it this morning. Oh, man. I don't know. There is one mining. Oh, God. It is harmful, but don't worry about it. We're on proof of stake now. It's fine. I don't know. I hate so much of it. Oh, come on. I mean, I'm all about clear communication. I don't know. I'll think. So real quick, there is something that I failed to mention. I had lots of examples, but obviously I'm not going to have time. One thing, so within consensus, we're aware of all this. We're looking at this. We're seeing this education gap. I think across the field, lots of people are seeing the education gap. What I'm excited to see is that during this bear market, lots of people are bringing out educational resources. If any of you saw my colleague James Beck speak a couple of days ago, he pitched a thing called MetaMask Learn. It's a thing he and I are working on together, along with a lot of people at consensus. We are sort of relearning a lot of these lessons in there. We're writing. We're trying to make that intro platform to the people who maybe bought some ETH, but don't know about Web3, right? So that's going to be launching hopefully at the end of November, and we're very excited about it. Yes, on Twitter, I am MapaChurro, like MapaMAPA. Churro, like the cinnamon sweet stick. Thank you all very much. I'll get off the stage now. Thank you so much.