 Hello, hello. Hi, Stani. Hey, Alon, how's it going? Hi, I love it. I was just commenting backstage. You're wearing the most finished outfit right with the speaker shoes. They're very traditional finished shoes. They're actually very finished and very comfortable. Yeah, which I think is on point because you're quite a local celebrity here that I've learned. I was talking, I'm going to be interviewing Stani on stage and everybody was like, oh my God, you're going to meet Stani. So, yeah, you have quite an amazing story. We're sort of old friends right now. We've known each other for a few weeks, which in the space of Web 3 seems like eternity. It feels like ages actually. Yeah, so you dropped out of school, high school, when you were 16. Then you like found your way to get a law degree, but that didn't cut it through you and you ended up starting what now is the fifth largest bank in Finland which, you know, by assets under management. Yeah, tell me about that. Like, how did you get into space? Yeah, I mean, kind of like, I would not say we're running a bank. Yeah, okay, we're not saying, yeah. If there's some... But yeah, we're building like technology that actually might be the infrastructure of the whole financial ecosystem in the future. And, you know, it also creates sort of opportunities to innovate for young people like me and I stumbled upon on decentralized finance in Web 3 pretty much by accident, mainly because, you know, I was just very eager to finish my degree here in Helsinki and I had a programmer background and I loved finance. I used to build FinTech applications where, you know, you innovate a lot of things in kind of like a front end of the applications and user experiences and in DeFi and decentralized finance you kind of innovate in the back end of the systems. And I wanted to finish my degree and find like something to write which is like tech, using tech and solve legal agreements and found like Ethereum and smart contracts and like my mind was just blown away like what you could do. And you also volunteered at Slush three times, right? Before now running a really impressive organization. Yeah, that was one of the, you know, best experience here, you know, in Slush and like I think my time in Finland as well. You know, I met so many cool people and it's just like it's all about like the culture and I pretty much like people who did talks here like I still like remember them and I feel them, so yeah. That's incredible. So let's get everyone on the same page and imagine I'm your grandma and explain whatever is to me and to everyone in the room because it's, you know, we know it's a P2P, it's a decentralized, I mean, it's a protocol running on the Ethereum blockchain. What does it mean and why should everyone in this room care? Yeah, I think the easiest way to explain Aave is that well, one thing Aave means ghost and finish but as what the product itself does it allows to grow your cryptographic assets in interest and why it's important is that, you know, cryptographic assets and blockchains pretty much are a very efficient and secure way to store value meaning that essentially because it's safe and secure you can store any value on chain and it doesn't need to be direct value but just representation and pretty much like one of the biggest storage of value at the moment is so-called stable coins which are representing the US dollar, they don't fluctuate like traditional like we know how cryptocurrencies fluctuate and that's pretty much one of the most kind of like popular things to do you have stable coins, you supply them into the Aave protocol and you earn quite a lot of interest compared to the low interest economy we have now in real life. So the reason people should care is that they can, you know, get their wallets, they can start using Aave and they can actually have much higher yield on whatever little or a lot of assets they own. Yeah, and I think it's more about opportunity because like it's nice that you have assets that are growing in their amounts and your earning interest because you're kind of like fighting against inflation but I think it's more about the accessibility to financial infrastructure because what decentralized finance does very well is that it just as a permissionless protocol, a network it allows anyone to participate. I don't understand permissionless protocol but I'm assuming. Yeah, well protocol means that, you know, it's just accessible. Protocol is accessibility so internet is a protocol, you know, domains are protocol so when you hit Aave.com in your browser, you know, there's protocols behind that redirect to you to a server and it's all like in short, like in Vep3 everyone is talking about protocols and it's very confusing but essentially it just means that it's accessible. So let's say that if I supply assets here in Helsinki, I live here, I have the same kind of like opportunity that anyone else is supplying from India or let's say Brazil or Argentina and we have like an equal democratic right into the financial infrastructure. And I think this is major, right, because like this space and I think we can talk about it in a second if these are right reasons or wrong reasons but has the PR problem, I think even talking about, you know, the social impact or like the, what is the impact of this space and what is the PR perception of this space, I think a lot of people are rolling their eyes and they're saying, yeah, it's a bunch of people like playing the global casino, people changing their avatars on Twitter to like a JPEG and like starting to communicate in memes and you know, I think some of that is probably justified. We can talk about it in a second but it is also true that right now we take certain things, especially when it comes to access to banking services and certain financial products even if they're not great for granted and there's many countries in the world where you just don't have access to that and like there's no way you can, you know, you don't maybe even have an ID to like register properly with, you know, so you don't have access to those services which I actually think there's a strong case for economic empowerment that it took me a little bit of humility to realize because I was very much on the train of, yes, crypto is extremely exciting, I mean, the space is moving extremely fast but I think there's a real question like which I would love to talk about, you know, there's a question of access and obviously bringing, especially globally which is like not something we think about all that much like people give that access to opportunity but, you know, I think it's all, I would love to talk about, you know, how you think about in general taking a step back from other, this space, you know, is it increasing global inequality or is it sort of, is it increasing access, like is it, like how do you think this space can evolve so it's actually this exciting tool where the claims of decentralization are actually going to play out in a way that's building a positive future for more people and not making, you know, the 1% have crazy amount of yield on the assets that they already have. Yeah, I think that's a very good point because like the part of all decentralization value is that you're working with a model where you are putting the network kind of like business model ownership to the users and we can talk more about that but essentially what you are trying to do is that you're trying to empower a lot of people but also give them the decision power of actually how these protocols will evolve in the future and I think regarding to kind of like how in fact all the technology is I think like there's multiple aspects there I think the accessibility is of course one thing but it's not just accessibility to let's say you know like financial services it might be stable coins that are built on top of for example Ethereum that allows you to if you're living in a country where there's a lot of inflation you can actually hold an asset that doesn't lose value on a constant basis but also it's more about letting the users and people decide what kind of financial services they want to actually use because the whole financial infrastructure is built in a way where I would say that you know it's based on consumers giving their funds to someone else to manage and everyone is focusing on their day time job and they expect profits but it's more about you can choose as an individual as well what do you want to empower so if you want to use particular protocol and be part of that community you can empower that way as well so the thing is that today we have more information as users we have the internet we have more data about financial markets and finances so we are able to manage it even better than the traditional financial ecosystem and decent as finance proves it quite well but I think there's still a lot of work related to if you want larger empowerment because we definitely see that these D5 protocols are helping if you have capital but then the next step is to help like how do we get all the billions of people more capital but whether it's actually useful to be a D5 F3 user we have actually a lot of examples where by using these protocols just by once or twice the projects and the founding teams are rewarding the users by giving them governance power and that governance power might be worth tens of thousands of dollars what are some of the examples like for the people here who I've never seen any of the airdrops I think the recent one was ENS so Ethereum Nain Service where if you took yourself an ENS normally Ethereum address is 0x like 1, 2, 3, 5x blah blah blah but then I could actually mask it by just having stunning.eth if someone wants to send me NFTs here so that's how you mask it it's a simple application and people can use it to send me NFTs or use it in applications in a programmable way but also because I created this and claimed this ENS domain I received an airdrop of being part of that community and these airdrops are it's a new way of taking the value where traditionally shareholders are having the value loops back to the users and letting the user decide how this most important infrastructure in the next internet are governed so I think it pays off to be a user I think that's an important I guess heuristic in this space that the user own networks and whether you care about finance and whether you care about DeFi I think we will see many more of those ways of how things are done in the web 3 how everything is done one of those ideas is that the user own networks so why should people care explain what does it mean and how maybe give me a good example of now we take a lift we never benefit from the fact that we take a ride but how does it work in ways of doing things in web 3 and why is that important normally how we see businesses being structured for example everyone or someone here I'm pretty sure took a Uber when you came here to the sludge from your hotel or wherever you were staying and pretty much you paid for that service but that value goes to the company and the rise to the shareholders well in web 3 the model is kind of different because for example when you supply funds into the other protocol on each every second you get governance power and with this governance power you control that particular network so it will be the same as every meter mile you take with Uber you get part of Uber equity and you can basically decide and participate in the meetings and why it's important for me especially is that because this infrastructure is very important for the future and I think when we are talking about finance we're talking about the most foundational protocols I think they shouldn't be governed by companies they should be governed by people who are using them actively this is why what web 3 is all about it's user owned networks and they become communities and they can be in a particular community because everything is code anyone can take the other protocol code for it create a better of it or if they don't like the way things are handled in the current governance they can create their own how is other user owned maybe explain like how like user governed yeah so example like when you deposit funds every second you get the governance power and you use the governance power to vote on changes and the other team can't go and just change the code and the code is the thing in web 3 meaning that let's say that if the interest rates want it to be changed or any kind of infrastructure how much the as a DAO so the community governance means and user ownership that there is a DAO decentralized organization that is collecting part of the yield from the activity and then using that for grants and improving the protocol and hiring folks so it's a new term that was introduced here I want to make sure everyone is on the same page a DAO a decentralized autonomous organization I'm sure many people already know what they are but for those of them I'm going to explain and then you can tell me how I messed it up it's this idea of a decentralized organization where there's no that's fully user owned I mean there's a future where it's fully kind of run by the code but I guess now and practices mostly community governance with a certain set of rules and the promise of DAOs which I'm sure you've all you know read about sort of on the high level is that people can organize in a way that's not necessarily a cooperative it's not a corporate sort of entity and a company and people can join and just essentially say I want to contribute in this way and essentially join start benefiting financially through their labor or through some other participation without anybody having to like formally hire them or so it's a new way of organizing and tell me about again like what I messed up about the definition and also what is the other DAO and how does the DAO yeah and how is the DAO involved in the governance there yeah it's it's very simple like anything any kind of a change that needs to be applied into the protocol it has to go to governance process so there is first fearless discussion in the governance forums and whether something should be done there's some part of politics related to that which is interesting to follow but also there's this attitude of like you know getting things done and you know making the protocol more efficient you know competing with other protocols and communities and ensuring that the users are getting most out of the protocol yeah and you know they come together and once the proposal goes on chain into the blockchain they come and vote with their tokens basically and always interesting as a protocol because it's cross-chain and there's cross-chain governance which is kind of a new thing that we what does it mean for yeah so you these interest finance and web three kind of was it started in Ethereum because it was like very active community and it had smart contracts but now the same you know infrastructure is a bit in other networks you know Ethereum is becoming very busy meaning it's it's becoming a bit more costly to interact with and now there's other networks so-called polygon avalanche and and and these are another communities as well networks are communities as dowels too yeah and the protocol has been deployed on these other networks and also the the avadao in other communities governing cross the different networks and normally why it's so interesting is because the networks do not talk to each other unless there's some sort of like a bridging facility and we have this kind of like a governance bridge that we created and I think like it's just about like different kinds of communities end of day yeah so we have maybe eight more minutes I want to make sure we sort of take a step back and also get back to the talking about how how some of the amazing intellectual and creative energy in this space and just the speed at which the space is moving can be used to solve big problems in the world and hopefully not contribute to too many new ones so speaking of dowels so everyone here and this is like it's confusing it's like oh my god like what are those things what about go join a dowel like find one that like you like you don't have to like be yeah like we all actually joined we're part of the same dowel which was a real world dowel called the constitution dowel and do you want to it's like a yeah do you want to do you want to say what it was yeah sure and also we can create the slush dowel you know if anyone wants to sign up I'm down for it too and yeah and yeah the constitution dowel I think there was this young kid came to our office so always you know if web tree community is very open you know people come to our office in London as well and you know work in different projects and one of this young developers Miguel was telling me that they're raising funds to buy the constitution of the United States and I was like well that's a good idea how do you plan to do that and he basically said that they're going to have a dowel where everyone can contribute to Ethereum and and then once they have enough Ethereum you know convert that to dollars and buy that constitution and the idea is that all the dowel members jointly owned the constitution of United States so a pretty simple idea just if you're if we're losing anyone here essentially it's almost like crowdfunding in this case people said there's this remaining piece of the constitution let's raise enough money so we can bid on it and we can buy it and then donate it to some place so it's not held in some private collection but it's displayed to the public and the thing that dowel was doing was pooling funds and then having a governance token where people would be able to vote what happens with that constitution so the dowel members would essentially be putting in money and then governing what happens so a very simple model of like what was the goal of that dowel and I think like they they were outbid by a trad fi so traditional finance guy my hedge fund guy which was a bit sad in one way but it was a lot of work to do to bid the traditional finance or get them to join us but I think like it proved very interesting point is that you know, Web 3 and blockchain are an interesting way to get people gathered together for one particular cause and this same like playbook can be used everywhere else you could use it to rescue some sort of forest fires in the same cause and have a joint effort and ventures so it's a way to organize and have kind of like a voting transaction that is on chain transparent and it definitely is a way to and dowels don't need to be like everyone needs to vote you can delegate the voting power to like a smaller sort of people that the dowel trust to make things efficient it's just a very very efficient way to manage kind of like the voting governance and capital together it's likely that there's already an issue you're passionate about there's probably a dowel that's trying to do something about it so there's dowels that are trying to like buy in all the sort of scientific research that like locked in academia and commercialize it for free so like you can be involved there and see what those dowels should be purchasing and how they should commercialize it there's like dowels trying to impact the climate and it's interesting because those organizations are managed in a very specific way using native tools of Web 3 and it's an amazing learning curve I think right so I know I want to talk about two more things that we chatted recently I know you're also excited about some of the universal basic income projects tell me about like how this space could be applied to you know further redistribute the global wealth and hopefully make a dent in reducing the income and equality I think like two interesting parts now like in terms of research that we're like doing it now and thinking of course is that one is social graph because that kind of creates identity and solve some of the issues in current social media social graph essentially the idea that like social graph or Facebook or Twitter right now it's owned by companies right you're trying to do an open public good social graph that yeah tell me yeah so currently you know if you go to Twitter you have 3,000 followers that you know are loyal to you and you want to port your followers somewhere else so for example there's another application that is getting traction they have interesting way to interact with the content and user experience you can't port your audience there but for example if you have something on chain meaning on the blockchain you could actually just create an application on top of this kind of like a public social graph where you own the content so let's say if a developer across the world creates an application on top of this social graph you come with your wallet cryptographic wallet you connect and you see all your audience there so it's a way to populate your audience but also kind of like create a bit of identity around you and the next thing we're thinking is that like how we can actually expand the impact of web tree and universal basic income is very interesting experimentation because it's you kind of contested properly in real life economy because real life economy is very fragile we're very scared to touch it which is very kind of smart thing to do because you don't want to experiment with economy we did that in 2008 and it didn't work out and in DeFi you can do a lot of experimentations so DeFi isn't just finance it's a big big sandbox there's protocols like everywhere we build for institutions like larger capital adoption but you can experiment a lot of things and universal basic income is a nice experimentation area because you can actually try to create some sort of a system where you know as you generate the cryptographic address you get daily income there if you subscribe to it and I think it's a way we can actually manage to do in a very scaled way because anyone can generate a cryptographic address any part of the world and if you start to receive funds there you know that's a way to empower masses in the future and when the reason it matters and I like I hope I just keep bringing it back to like the grandma is that a lot of people especially in the developing world they don't have a way to receive funds right now so there's not even an efficient way of sending them something right so there's many projects in that space and if you're excited about this idea of like hopefully people getting unconditional cash transfers just before because they're alive and just because you know that's the human right to have enough money to you know feed yourself and your family there's actually a lot of crazy positive energy in that space with quite a few really advanced projects that I think can finally make a dent I'm like the first time in many years I'm actually optimistic of like maybe the goal of UBI being achieved because of Web3 because of what's happening there and I don't think it was possible before and yes there's many very different things happening in this space but I think it's important for everyone who's like trying to make a positive difference to like not discard it and actually take it for like the incredible potential that it has yeah anything else we should like we should you want to mention I know Al is launching something early next year. Yeah I think we should really do this launch now I mean if anyone is into it I mean Drava today in one of the other kind of like parties and if anyone wants to talk like I'm very excited to build something like that they're throwing a most amazing party tonight so yeah if you're hope you can make it I think we're at time so this is this is about all we have but thank you so much for thank you for listening yeah thanks