 So, this morning during ZX's intro, he talked a little bit about FIPS, which are the Filecoin Improvement Proposals, and the role that they play for crypto economists in not only proposing changes to the Filecoin network, but also for helping them to sort of study and understand some of the macro changes that are going to impact their research down the line. Within my role, it's very important that we manage these things very transparently so that everyone who is interested in understanding these things can do so excessively. But I really want to sort of dive into a little bit more about what ZX was touching on this morning and also explain some of the unique challenges that arrive when you try and bring governance of a really large ecosystem with crypto economic research more closely together. So to get started, I first want to talk about the simple high-level overview of what governance even is. Oftentimes when we're talking about an open network, we oftentimes default to just thinking open source, okay? We all know that the Filecoin blockchain is accessible, you can use block explorers, and oftentimes the kind of research that is performed by the crypto econ lab, although results are also made available through open notion sources or notion pages and wikis. The very sort of data inputs that they use are also publicly accessible to anyone with an internet connection. But beyond technical accessibility, it is important to remember, and I think difficult to sometimes fully comprehend, that this is also an open social ecosystem. There is no product team, there is no foundation that gets to set priorities or roadmaps for what it is that we use to drive Filecoin forward technologically. And when it comes to innovation, it is a community prerogative to decide what's important, what resources go where, who gets what and when, and at what scale. So my responsibility when we talk about governance is to design the systems and processes and tools that allow anyone who is a member of the Filecoin community, including all of you, just by virtue of being here, to understand what's going on, to dive deeply into these different priorities, and to also be able to share your own needs and perspectives as storage providers, as researchers, as economists, as data clients potentially within this network, so that we can all collectively move forward and really create a really cutting edge data ecosystem. And I want to point to this graphic. I was very worried that this was going to make it look like a governance is in charge of all of these different ecosystem functions. But it's very much not the case. It is more to say that governance is actually an ecosystem horizontal function that, again, works with all of these different stakeholders and all of these different operational units of Filecoin in order to bring them together, to generate best practices, and help them communicate with each other so that, again, they can make those decisions about network priorities and the technical and community changes that everyone will weigh in on in order to drive the network forward. So it brings us to sort of the point of this presentation. How do we govern Filecoin crypto economics? And more importantly, how do we take crypto economists and incorporate them in governance so that the research that they're doing can inform the governance decisions that the community makes? And so that, as the community proposes new governance proposals, crypto economists are knowledgeable about these things, they're able to audit these things. And they're able to help us understand that the changes we want to make are going to be secure for the network and they are not going to pose an existential risk down the line. However, over the past couple of months, as we've worked to try and bring this relationship to bear, we've noticed that there's a couple of things that make it really difficult to do this. The first is that a lot of what makes governance legitimate and makes it accessible and acceptable to community members is that it's open, okay? Although we have a lot of colleagues amongst us and we like to dive deep on crypto economic topics, the majority of the Filecoin community cannot do that. They do not have the expertise. Storage miners have an interest, they have a motivation. And although we are all part of the same Filecoin community, we may disagree or be misaligned on what we consider a priority to be. Crypto economics, on the other hand, often concernedly network sensitive topics, not just in the sense that it has to do with tokens, burn rates, gas fees, etc. But because the level of complexity at which we're really exploring these things is not that accessible to people who aren't already deeply involved in this space. Which brings us to the fact that governance is designed for a broad array of stakeholders and asks them to come together to make decisions and understands what's being proposed. Whereas crypto economics applies deep expertise to those complex research areas. The presentation we saw right before mine would not be accessible to most people that we work with as peers in the Filecoin network. It was a fantastic presentation for those of us in the room today. It is not going to be very effective at communicating governance needs to an array of thousands of people across the globe who are interested in Filecoin at varying levels of commitment. Which also brings us to a distinction that's a little pedantic when you first see it, but it also has to do with the fact that we have sort of a different perspective in what we're even trying to achieve when we talk about doing crypto economics or doing governance. For me and my work, what I do is take a social layer of this ecosystem, a broad array of stakeholders from various organizations, and try and focus their attention on a singular, very clearly scoped technical problem and ask for their feedback, insight, and guidance. Many crypto econ lab researchers, et cetera, however, take a technical phenomenon, something that they can quantitatively observe in the network. They try and model it, study it, and expand it with the qualitative variables that are going to help us understand why it's happening in the first place. It's an expansion of the knowledge we have with quantitative and qualitative methods, rather than a narrowing of the information we need from a broad array of participants. And last, but what I think is very opportunistic, is that both governance and crypto economics do have something in common and that they are both emerging, trans, and interdisciplinary areas of work in complex systems. I do not think any of you here are native crypto economists, except maybe ZX. And certainly none of you, including ZX, got to go and learn from crypto economists who came before you with decades and decades of deep experience. Same thing for me. I went to master's school, whatever, for political science. We are all trying to bring together various domains of expertise in order to understand what problems we have and how we're going to solve them. And that makes it really challenging to work together. We have a ton of really exciting questions. We have very, very few answers. And in order to bring those things kind of together, we also need really strong project management, which is itself a skill and a task. And so we come together and we say we really want to work together because we understand what's going on and we understand the strong need between our various business functions. But how do we do it when there are no best practices? And I think that answering these questions and recognizing these challenges actually creates a really strong opportunity for all of the work that we are collectively doing, just not quite together yet. So at the heart of that is my assumption, which I would like to assert very strongly, that crypto economic expertise is a necessary input for generating robust, secure governance outputs. When we talk about the FIPS process and Filecoin network governance more broadly, it is really, really important that we're not just sort of softly accumulating different people's opinions and arbitrarily deciding what to do, but that our proposals are the benchmark of really intellectually informed decisions about what is value aligned for this entire community, what is technologically innovative and exciting, and what is going to deliver the most interest and the most value to this entire community. It is in that space that crypto economists play a really important role in not only auditing FIPS that we can understand what kind of an impact they may have on the network technologically, but also so that they're aware, again, of those macro trends. So if we make a technical change to the protocol, perhaps there are unintended consequences, we can recognize them in advance, study them as they occur, and we can put elements in place to actually change them if we decide ultimately that they are not serving the function that we hoped that they would. So over the coming weeks and months, I hope that we can continue to work on making these linkages stronger and improving the way that we do this. And I think that there are three key pathways forward for all of us to continue to work together to do this. The first is improved communication of research outcomes, and that is not to say that the crypto econ lab network or any of its partners are not communicating their research very well. It's all very open and it's very accessible to those of us who know about it. But it's to say that it's really important for us to find better ways to market this information to a broader audience so that it's accessible, and so that all of this knowledge is managed appropriately so that we can continue to build on things as we learn more. We also want to build deeper engagement around FIP issue items so that we don't have last minute proposals that suddenly need a bunch of eyes, but that we can actually create research best practices with plenty of time to generate the models and outcomes that we actually have more fundamental questions about. And it also means creating lightweight workflows. It's that project management piece that CEL research staff and anyone else who's interested in participating in asking those crypto economic type questions are able to easily understand what's happening in governance, get involved, and do so without it impinging on other areas of their work. So I really want to make sure there's plenty of time for questions, feedback, or ideas, and that's the high level overview. Thank you. I think we have three minutes. I'll go first. I'll take MC privileges. So can you describe the mechanics of a FIP? So say we created a nonsense FIP like what should the color of the font be? It just gave everybody the opportunity like, oh, let's all weigh in and vote on this. Do you go to a web page? Is there a login? Do you go on GitHub? How does that work just kind of process-wise? Very quickly. So a FIP did not come out of nowhere. It's a descendant of how Python manages changes, how Bitcoin and Ethereum manage changes. And it's really rooted in this soft consensus mechanism that, again, is oriented around a proposal. So this is a huge community, lots of contributors, lots of people with preferences and projects. The only things that require FIPs are those core protocol changes or anything which fundamentally changes the logic of participation within the community. So for example, when we formally changed the term from miners to storage providers, that was a FIP. For this process, we do not gate it. And there is no voting. You do not need to be a token holder. And we use the term Filecoin Community very loosely to really refer to anyone who wants to participate. We use a GitHub repo and a variety of other forums to capture ideas and create space for community members to ask questions and propose ideas. But from there, we do have a workflow, a template, a list of requirements for people that they can go and propose items. And we also have a series of FIP stewards, including myself, who are responsible for ensuring that different community members with different levels of expertise are able to get the resources they need to bring their FIP to fruition. So we have a lot of very talented data scientists and researchers who write FIPs. And they tend to do it in full, gather some feedback. And it's a relatively quick process. But it's also sometimes a much longer process where folks don't have the ability to fully write a spec, fully plot out an implementation pathway. And that's our job to find that expertise within the broader community so that we can really collaborate on bringing that issue to bear. Once it does, then we have a final last call period. We gather feedback. We answer questions. And we implement them. Is it always in the form of yes, this FIP passes or no, it doesn't? Or are they picking between option one, two, three, and four? Great question. So the reason we don't have a voting mechanism is because we really want to be cognizant of not reducing governance decisions down to a binary of yes, no. Oftentimes we have proposals that are really large in scope and the types of people who participate in governance deliberation. It's not really a yes, I support or no, I don't. But it's questions about why this proposal, why this approach, or even presenting alternatives to implementation. So it is, again, a soft process to monitor very closely of gathering feedback. But the way we actually determine consensus has been reached. We have a final draft. It has been made available for a certain amount of time. It has been shared with all relevant communities and more broadly. And we make sure that there are no outstanding and unaddressed concerns or questions or stakeholder groups that would be unfairly sort of considered for this proposal to be implemented. Thank you. Who else has questions? Hi. So I had a question regarding communication of research in crypto economy. And what would be, in your opinion, the right peer review or review process? How are you going to gain credibility to this kind of research? What's the right process in your view? Great question. And I think it really speaks to the challenges inherent to like producing academic quality research and then making that academic quality research accessible to people who are not academics. And this is a huge challenge. I've actually been working with Alex Terrasis, so I don't see here. He recently joined the crypto econ lab. We talk about this quite a bit. My perspective is that the actual review, whether it be institutional or just within the organization itself, that is a project management decision for the crypto econ lab network. When it comes to actually communicating those standards, it really is focusing on better knowledge management, which to be fully transparent with you is something that I don't think the governance team does very well right now. So creating repos for accessible information, including any crypto economic analyses, even if they're just sort of short one page summaries within the body of fit materials that we submit as part of the overall governance package. There's lots of different ways that we can structure this, but lots of ways that we currently don't, just because we don't currently have very robust sort of research mechanisms for all FIPS, especially ones that may not come from sort of the crypto econ lab network. Is your leniency to lean on the academic community to get their kind of thumbs up on certain research or you want to establish your own credibility there? Sorry, which community? The academic community. So like a piece of research, would you actually aspire to have it published in a peer reviewed academic journal or you have some other mechanism that would be good enough? I hate to defer, but that's not a question for me as much as it may be for ZX. I would say that academic quality research and publication is not just a sort of professional achievement, but it should just be a research standard. So my instinct is that, yes, you would seek academic approval for research in terms of quality and review, but when it comes again to communicating that information, we want it to be accessible, but actually having academic standards for the more marketing side of the governance proposal process, it's not a priority. I think we have time for one more question. If anybody has one? Sure. So I'm Danny O'Brien. I'm from the foundation, but a different part of the foundation from Caitlin. So I think one of the things that I've got an observation and then I thought, which is, that's kind of the same thing, that I think one of the challenges that we see looking at this is that often, I love the title of this talk, which is what, you know, why don't the devs fix this? I think one of the challenges right here is that the community and the voices we hear from the community are often people who are acting under the incentives that the Crypto Economic Lab is both analyzing and creating. So it's really easy to devalue that, right? Because they're sitting there going, why don't you, you know, do this? And the answer is because you wanted them to be that way, and that's not how it fits into the other thing. So it's pretty hard to bring those things to do together. The other thing I would note, though, is I think Charles raised this earlier where he said, like, who is the target of the product of the Crypto Economic Lab analysis? I think one of the things we might want to think about is the community is the target of these things, because ultimately they're the people you're going to have to explain and convince because this is the machinery by which these things ultimately can and should be implemented. And if they're not, then people leave the machine that we're building. Other systems have done this, like the W3C has sort of has like a technical advisory group that has a status in this that acts as a consultancy. Is that, sorry, this isn't a question, but like, does that make sense? And what do you think that relationship should be between the Crypto Economic Lab and this community? I didn't plant Danny here, but if I had, you would have said the exact same things. Yeah, I think this actually also rolls into your questions are about, like, do you shoot for academic literature? Is that the baseline for research quality? And it has to do with this, like, I think it's a communications thing, right, where we have integrated workflows that the Crypto Economic Lab and its vast assemblage of researchers are able to produce the type and quality of literature that they deem useful and important. And then it comes over to me to make it accessible and digestible. The FVM is going to be on mainnet very soon, which is really exciting. This is a huge project or protocol change that is going to transform the usability of the network. It's something a lot of people are very, very excited about. And yet the documentation in the governance repo is extensive and highly technical. When we talk about making Crypto Economics accessible and part of that governance workflows, it means taking research that is just as technical and just as difficult to comprehend to non-experts and breaking it down without losing sort of the crux of what's being discussed. One smaller piece of that at the same time I also think is that there is a bias towards expertise when talking about technical topics. And in communicating and sort of simplifying research outcomes, I think it's important that we be very cognizant of making sure we're not saying this is what CEL recommends because we do not want community members to just sort of defer to that as the end all be all of what we're going to actually do, especially with larger and more controversial proposals.