Aya Miyaguchi - Supporting the Infinite Garden-- how we started, how it's growing

Transcript

[Music] buenos dias hello everyone um it is really great to see you and i'm very excited to be here in buenos aires for the first time um i tried to come here a couple of years ago but ended up not making it so thank you ethan brenositis for inviting me as a speaker to for giving me an opportunity to see the country today i'd like to talk about um

what kind of organization the ethereum foundation is and how we support the ecosystem but before that i'd like to talk a little bit about my background and so that you can understand how we became the organization to support the infinite garden of ethereum when i started my career in japan i was a teacher i believe in the power of education and still think that i am an educator with my current role knowledge and access to information can lead to reshaping the future of a community over the world i also taught my students the importance

of learning diverse cultures and views which is also essential to for global understanding and also global coordination then i moved to san francisco and discovered crypto and i got fascinated with the possibilities that this nascent technology could blink financial inclusion and development of new economies with more open access to everyone then i joined kraken um as one of

the earliest members of the team and working at clarken i met a young vitalik um he was very young he's still young but he was very young [Laughter] and he was working on a new idea that can improve blockchain and crypto and i was also fascinated because this new idea can increase the potential in things like financial inclusion more than a hundred times and yes the idea with was ethereum and later

when i left my previous work vitalik and some others asked me to come join at the ethereum foundation to help the organization and i did back then ef was just a hub for developers and researchers focusing on building the platform with other community members ethereum was pretty big already and i needed to redesign the the roles of ethereum foundation first there were already many uh contributors outside of the ethereum foundation uh who was who were working on the infrastructure of platform

as this is an open source project but there was no not good system to support those contributors so one clear example of the first thing that i needed to do was to add the grant giving function to the ethereum foundation today we do more comprehensive work than just giving grants and i will explain part of it but we do what's best for the ethereum's healthy ecosystem long term by healthy i mean physically and culturally every good idea has trade-offs just like

ethereum's trilemma we sometimes have to sacrifice short-term advantage in order to achieve long-term vision but we believe that that is one of virtues that the ethereum ecosystem has and that is tied to the soul of ethereum and within the af my most important role is to keep the soul of foundation so that ef can help the ecosystem keep the soul of ethereum i envision the future when our society will have systems that are more inclusive and open

so every single person has opportunities and access to be part of solutions i believe ethereum can help build that future which is the source of our motivation my motivation and and we are working toward that future together so what is the ethereum foundation the ethereum foundation exists to support things around the ethn technology and ecosystem ef is a very unique organization we are not just a normal non-profit or a company why do we have to be unique

we believe ethereum is a protocol for human coordination it is not just money it is not just technology it is a protocol for human coordination that is supported by many great minds and it can enable humans to coordinate better with more inclusiveness transparency and security so while ethereum brings new views in we learn that it requires new type of definitions and approaches to be understood and explained so just like ethem ef had to create a new type of

collaboration system so that we can function flexibly to support the needs of the ecosystem we have a little bit of more than this but we are yes so instead of being a normal organization we are like a community of teams a community of teams that help coordinate many different things projects people teams businesses and schools that are building developing researching and spreading the knowledge of the lithium technology and the ethereum ecosystem we do not just allocate resources

we coordinate activities discussions knowledge and education in the ecosystem teams in the ef community are very aligned in a mission loosely coupled the structure allows us to adapt to ever-changing coordination conditions around ethereum more easily also lets us distribute power to support more organic growth some examples we have ongoing development teams working on long-term projects like

this they usually have a lot of independence and we also have the ecosystem development side cluster to support everything else in the ecosystem teams on this side are not developing specific things but finding ways to better support the ecosystem with a bigger picture their roles include building relationship allocating funds facilitating facilitating education and spotting risk in the ecosystem and these are examples of those teams

and you know devcon and esp is ecosystem support program there are others an experience i yes so our team told me we have a booth outside today and some of the team members are here if you have any questions and they will explain anything about the ethereum we another normal top-down organization in order for teams to support this unique and decentralized ecosystem they often need to act independently

but they also need to act for the same mission and goals i said our people are very mission oriented how do we keep the mission there are three guiding principles that are key to the way we think and act which i think are also important for the ecosystem first one is long-term thinking you may not see the impact of what we are doing or what you are building today or even in a year we believe our impacts should be measured in decades or centuries we need to think about the time when we are not here to be alive

anymore for the next generations we take care of resin for the infinite time beyond ourselves and our times the second one is subtraction you might have heard of this i introduced this in a devcon plug in 2018 we resist the natural tendency of organizations to accumulate prestige and power normally an organization thinks about competition and tries to grow bigger instead we push opportunities outwards we are excited to see others to succeed

we try to matter less so that the ecosystem can thrive without with or without the ethereum foundation in the long run this was especially not easy at my earlier time people really wanted ef to have power people wanted they have to have control but uh this if if you think about the blood we are building i believe each potential big power should subtract things get decentralized and so power gets distributed this is an important philosophy that we spend time and energy for new new ef people to understand well

last one is stewardship of bodies like i said ethem has a soul the values of our community are what may made ethereum what it is values like open source decentralization open access privacy and many more we care about nurturing the values that are important for the community um there are many other values we have and believe that are important but these are the one that we you know we we stick to and come back to you and the bigger our ecosystem grows the more decentralized our ecosystem becomes

i increasingly feel that having shared values is very important that leads to our vision of infinite garden the garden of ecosystem where everyone lives in a healthy sustainable environment in order to continue playing the game together instead of someone winning the game i came up with the idea of infinite garden by reading the book finite and infinite games by james cars i recommend this to anyone in the community it's very easy to read and short and you would understand what i meant by

playing the game in order to continue the game together so with our principles we try to focus on what only ef can do the ecosystem is growing and it's nice to be decentralized now we are more than happy if things go smoothly without the ethereum foundation we constantly ask this question what are the things that still needs with us that only ef can do helping others be mindful of the past potential blockchain and ethereum beyond cryptocurrencies or defies uh is one of the ideas that naturally occurred to me

asking that question what are the things we have team expedient so we can think deeply about next billion users and builders those who can benefit from this protocol of human coordination we also have the ethereum fellowship foundation fellowship program to help support a group of change makers that originally studied in in emerging economies the first cohort just finished recently the bottom left narowa is working to

to connect schools with internet and building a new system to facilitate efficient efficient collaboration between schools government and internet providers and some of the governments that are involved actually are starting to stake benson on top right he is working on decentralized insurance for small farmers in sub-saharan africa working with the community team etherisk and kudeep bottom right he is working with black the biggest ngo and microfinance operators in bangladesh

for to use blockchain for humanitarian projects and i have a video from them to introduce this i remember i read one of the first books i read about blockchain there was a quote that says it doesn't matter what you want to build with blockchain try to fix something that is broken or corrupt we try to fix or at least improve even at a very small level how the public sector works you can end up improving the lives of many uh you have said that with the the concept of the next billion uh so almost six hundred thousand six hundred million people uh in in latin america kind of

fulfill that description of the next feeling this really is key for ethereum foundation's mission to reach the next billion because in order to you know be part of this network you first need to be part of the digital economy and have access to the internet so it's really solving this first foundational challenge that we face where over 600 million students and young people don't have access to the internet around the world and in particular in sub-saharan africa we're in the very early stages of understanding what you know how do we understand it and what benefit does brac does brag get from using blockchain because you know bragg inherently started as a core a

decentralized organization units working in the field solving problems where they are and kind of like solving problems in a decentralized manner um so it kind of made sense on on a theoretical and a conceptual basis that or we could use blockchain in organize in our organization to good use the problem that i'm working on currently in africa has been the claims process has been traditional insurance has had a lot of problems when it comes to claims payout they would be delayed number one and they would also not be guaranteed because information trickle down was limited so that has been the problem that we've

been solving using blockchain technology smart contracts they're able to quickly generate payout schedules now ensuring that we would know who needs to be paid how much when quite fast since 2014 more or less i've been um deep diving in into what we call blockchain mid-scope which means how blockchain can serve as a government technology working on how governments how the public sector can meaningfully adopt blockchains i got to meet the other fellows doing awesome and wonderful things we connect at different levels discuss different things especially on how to move our project

squads so at the end of the day the next billion are going to be new users that will make the network bigger i think open source is the way to go blockchain is an open source solution ethereum is open source and i think the solutions that we look at in terms of the development sector should also be open and thank you for this beautiful conversation as well very thankful and happy to to be part of the of the fellowship that's really really exciting um so and one of the fellows that chewie who just spoke in the video like he's in latin america he he's based in mexico but he's he also has team members in bruno silas

and he team has been working to provide solutions for government his team is now working with the city of buenos aires together with other blockchain startups to kick-start an ecosystem it's called tango id tango which is the self-solving digital id decentralized and permissionless the goal is to support more accountable institutions and sustainable economic growth fall provision provinces in argentina are implementing blockchain id including the city of buenos aires so that is very relevant to to

share um today and speaking of latin america as you know we are bringing deb con 6 to bogora colombia it's happening very soon in october when we made that decision i tweeted about this a couple days ago we did not just pick bogora we picked latin america including the city of buenos aires and we're actually in 2019 when we were discussing where to go next which for devcon patricio from porp he uh

he did a pizza actually in berlin at east berlin he did a pitch to me to blink that gone to buenos aires we you know like we picked bogor in the end but his pitch was like gave me confidence we were wondering whether we should bring this to latin america and then we made that decision and we are very grateful for um that argentinian community has been very supportive and helping the devcon team together with other latin american communities so thank you thank you argentinian community so in latin america many places are

struggling to do better for its basic infrastructure and systems including financial inclusion but they also became a hub for talents and entrepreneurs it improvised tool to build your own solutions and in latin america i can see people's motivation to build their own solutions coming from genuine passion to change their own life and i think that's very very powerful this is why the ethereum foundation sees strong opportunities the opportunities for ethereum's next billion builders and users to be born from latin america

we have been supporting teams and projects in the region and will continue to do so so that you can join the infinite garden so please speak to our team members here if you again like if you have any questions about how we support and if you're interested in getting our help coming to argentina is also very special for me and our team members we enjoy seeing how far the garden has grown here you have a big community here and i'm very excited to learn more about the

country and the community i also want to say some things about the originator of og's of this local community the buenos aires community has been one of the strongest ethereum communities in the world and i also learned the hackathons and crypto gathering at this place were the origin of birth to the teams and individuals that have built this beautiful community there are also teams that have not just been successful but also have been contributing to the entire ethereum nomic

on top left who's been working to develop tools for developers including hard hat as you know are and now working with other teams as a foundation i am a long term big fan of porp yes uh because i think they they represent the culture of ethereum uh in many different ways and there are also other social impact projects that i cannot wait to learn more and last but not least i hear

argentinian ethereum community has the highest percentage of women among everywhere in the world that is so encouraging and great i definitely want to learn why during this trip so we can encourage other communities to learn from you i'm so happy that i came to your home buenos aires the city of passion and hope and of course you have wine and tango with passion and hope

and i really hope i can learn more of those fantastic stories during this trip looking forward to hearing your stories including your struggles stories full of magic and adventure which is gracious [Applause] you