Using NFT's and radical economics to save animals

Transcript

big picture hey everyone so cool to see so many of you guys out here today whoo and you know I've got something real special in store for all of you so here today we are looking at using in if teased and radical economics to save animals so that's exciting right how on earth would you do that how can we save

animals with NF T's and radical economics and that's what we're going to get in today and hopefully there'll be some super interesting questions you guys have so we can better figure out what is going on here so to start off with this project was created by myself and a bunch of friends it's called wild cards and we have these always for sale Digital conservation tokens but now let's just take some time to unpack what all of that means but even before that let's take a look at some of the problems that we are facing in society today right global animal populations have declined massively over the last thirty years and this is a trend you know that seems to be pretty apparent

and entrenched at the moment and something we really want to obviously combat correct but often we find ourselves asking things like where should we donate how is it best to donate you know perhaps it's quite difficult across different borders to reach organizations that are looking after animals and some remote district or place some more issues or donations are so often once-off right how often would you guys do something but then you don't think ah every week I'm going to go back and keep helping this organization do something it's very much a once-off thing unfortunately a lot of the time and finally it can often be

pretty unrewarding and attached right who here has maybe just fooled in their credit card details clicked whoop and seen those $50.00 you worked so hard for come off your credit card and in that sort of way it ends right it's not like yeah I feel so good for just seeing that Bank notification and that's where it ends so how can we make this is a bit more rewarding okay so solution how do we try solve this and do something really cool and novel with NF T's and radical economics well I'm gonna tell you how we started doing that and we're gonna go from there let's go through the journey so initially this is what our website looked like I guess

about eight months ago when we started a long long time ago and we started by simply having one nft on our website it's that karela in the middle over there we call it vitalik and that NFT was always for sale and through this always for sale mechanic immediately we started generating money for the conservation x' we were supporting but what is this always for sale mean and how is it generating money so let's get into that now always for sale is sort of this nice interesting intersection between somewhat of maybe a subscription

model maybe a little bit of an auction mechanism but it's sort of something in between and essentially what it means if we go back over here it means I can come along and I can buy this asset let's say it's Vitalik now at any point in time for its listed sale price so right now it's listed sale price is xx and it's still actually at 28th and if I pay xx I will earn this digital asset but in order for it to remain always for sale I obviously now have to immediately set a new selling price as I purchased this asset so anyone else could come and buy

this asset from me immediately or whenever they want at the selling price I have set but what stops you from setting an exclusionary selling price of five billion dollars I don't want anyone to buy this from me I'll set it really really high well there's a thing called Harbhajan tax which is where sort of the radical economics comes in and it basically means you have to pay a percentage of whatever price you set in order to keep your ownership of this assets so by you choosing your selling price you set you're actually also choosing how much you're going to have to pay every so

often in order to keep custody of this asset so that's always for sale and that's really one of the interesting concepts that we picked up from a book released in 2018 radical economics and they talk a lot about harbor attacks and how it can be super useful in a lot of cases and we actually presented at ETH in Zurich a couple months back at the radical economics meetup where we talked a lot about it so it's cool to show our real-world implementation of how it's actually working so now if I have to tell you a bit more about our platform maybe give it to you in a nice digestible sentence so the wild cards

platform has these always for sale non fungible tokens right representing endangered animals right so if you haven't guessed it already when you buy one of these assets the percentage of the selling price you continuously pay to hold this non fungible token this is flowing directly towards the conservation organization that is supporting this animal in real life so you're in of tees are doing some good so how do we take our websites well a project I guess from here where all you can do right now is you know buy the NFT and contribute but maybe there's not

so many incentives for people to come in and buy Vitalik for twenty-eighth how do we make this a more engaged community and how do we get people to participate how do we make things interesting so there's a number of different ways to do that to kick-start the social impact economy and we started trying to do them and a couple of the cool ones are gamification and social aspects so as you can see today we have many more different animals that are round over here and I'll just switch live to our website over here what you can see is there's a number of cool different things like streaks so you know who's holding the animals for certain amount of time

there's leaderboards there's social aspects let me walk you through a couple of these cool aspects that were using along with the radical economics to actually kickstart people and and get them involved in this economy so one of the first things if I go back now over here is leaderboards so our leaderboards are actually really cool and this allows the whole game of a gamification aspect to really shine through people can now rank and see who's giving the most per month who's given the most ever among amongst another a bunch of really cool metrics and the reason these

leaderboards are cool as well is because they are linked to people's identities right so you can start building your patronage profile which is quite simple and interesting so I'll show you over here if you scroll down and you you have a look at our leaderboards over here you can maybe go into this user Marvin and and right now the leaderboards tool or the profile still quite sparse but you can see we've integrated with three box and we pulling his information from there we've got stats on his monthly contribution which tokens he currently earns and which tokens he's previously earned so that is something that we're working on so far and you'll see here's Marvin's profile already as we see and

as we see it going forward there'll be a lot more aspects that will add to the social profile we really want to put in badges that can be very interesting you know who held this animal first you know who's the first person to ever hold it who's held an animal for more than a hundred days there's a really cool array of metrics and we really hope that this will help people to actually join our community and get involved in something that's fun and that's for a great cause another really cool thing which we've been building which is a lot of fun is a Twitter bot and since a lot of our users have linked their profile to three-box in verified their Twitter identity that means our servers are able to look and

see which animals this person owns and tweet notifications at them and say hey at whoever owns this animal your deposit for your wild card is expiring soon or hey that's whatever someone just bought your wild card don't you want to buy it back and we really think this bot can be used to you know display all of the activity in our platform and create quite a lot of engagement which is cool it's really also been a lot of fun building all of these aspects and web 3 you know plugging them together pushing seeing what's actually happening and what's possible some other cool things we do is yupp basically some summaries on the daily activity and what we want to also incorporate is personalized

shout outs you can use our Twitter bot - you know maybe send a memoir to one of your friends if you buy them a token or something like that and and we'll talk about how that can be done so another interesting aspect which would be great - to hear your idea as we almost you to deploy this upgrade to our smart contracts and this is rewarding users with ERC 20 tokens so right now you holding an NF T and if you hold our NF t our wild-caught con continuously over time will mentor token or will mint ELC 20 tokens our tokens and we'll send them to you and these tokens we are still deciding some of the cool best use cases

but some can be used to maybe you know burn them to send a message through our Twitter bots they could be used to purchase cool little items you can use to spruce up your wild cards profile they could also be used for governance perhaps you know maybe there's one animal and at the end of every month these tokens are used to help coordinate where these funds should go to which exact organization so again that's that's another way of expanding the community and and building on this radical economics to bring more and more value to all of our users who hold the tokens um so a quick journey where we are so far we've been live on the main net for I guess now about

eight months which is great so far everything has been smooth sailing there's been no biggest problems and we've partnered with Ubisoft we've been here at station if in Paris for the last six months part of their incubator which has been really great we've also been with CV VC in the incubator and Zorgon Switzerland we've partnered with and we supporting to conservation currently live as it stands while tomorrow fund and send a verda and we continuing to expand that network as well so if you know anyone as well who'd like to be part of this early project also please get in contact with us we'll be here all weekend as well and you can just drop us a comment or see us on our website this

talks a bit about our attraction and you know we actually started this project at the East Cape Town hackathon and I can't say enough how great these hackathons in the community are there really helped kickstart so many cool friendships ideas projects and it's been such a privilege to be involved in a number of them also if India you know if London if Berlin and we've participated in a lot of them and refined a lot of these ideas so we've talked about a bit about radical economics and the fact that now through smart contracts we can program this logic where you can have a digital asset that's always on sale and it can you know instantly change ownership if someone buys it and it can manage that

the person is paying what's required to hold it and what other aspects could this apply to so this is quite interesting so we've done now one animal conservation to raise money for endangered animals some other interesting ones are climate change which I'll get to in the next slide Digital artworks as anyone heard of crypto voxels and some very cool yeah there we go the crowds going wild digital advertising another very interesting one I can see Griff over there and he supported one of our digital advertising radical ideas early and then finally obviously digital labs let's talk about a few more of these

which are really interesting so some of you built at the diffusion hackathon in Berlin carbon credits club was again quite an interesting project and I won't spend too long on it but we had enough tees representing plots of land where spec Boehm it's a type of plant was planted and this plant is really good at basically capturing co2 and these in of teas would mint or generate ERC 20 tokens carbon credits at the rate at which in real life they were capturing the carbon and then we had a secondary market for our carbon credits which he could burn and verifiably offset your carbon emission so that was another fun

idea yeah go for it um the websites still active unfortunately we've been spending with there's only three of us which I'll get to now so we've been full-on on wild cards and we we don't have so much dev time to build so many things at once but it's something we really if we had more time would still be active on yeah great yeah let's chat off to it's basically there was just a question saying this is a cool project so you should look at it virtual art galleries so this is where some of our NF tees feature in script or voxels which is really cool and this is a whole

nother can of worms but we're also using a whole lot of radical economics inside the crypto voxels word world and this is to be talked about more soon in the future so keep your ears peeled for some some more really cool announcements of some things we can do in the virtual world with virtual land and and art galleries this is our team back in eath Cape Town when yeah vite electro and we didn't have much space and the teams we actually unfortunately you know but yeah this was this was really a great time and this was where the journey all started we were all wearing these red these red hats as well for no particular reason it was just a lot of fun so we thought that was a great thing this is

our team so you can see it's myself Jason and denim our three co-founders and we've really just been working full-time on this together we met studying computer science and in university and we've read enjoyed the journey of building this all art it's really been so much fun and yeah we can't wait to keep working and building us out and keep saving all the animals that are around and that's our swinging in so right now I think what you should do is take out your your iPhones or your favorite cellular device and this QR code is pretty big so you can scan it and then definitely join our mailing list which will be great we can keep you up to date with everything we're doing and right now you should

definitely go onto our website wild cards dot world and you can play around it's live you can see we're generating money pretty much continuously because people are continuously paying to hold all of our wild cards and you can go into an asset puncher you can see the story behind this asset you can buy it obviously you can buy all of them at any point in time which is pretty cool you can look at the details you know how much is this person playing every month effectively to earn this asset how much deposits available who's currently owning it you know how long has it been hold and we can keep going and we can look at some more details you know of

the person who owns it if they haven't verified worth three box you won't perhaps see what their details are yet but if they do their history will always be there which is pretty cool and y'all go go play around please do it would be great if you supported us you can go into expert mode a few more crypto orientated we have a bit more crypto words over there for you to understand and yeah it's been a pleasure speaking to you guys thank you so much wild cards dot world and if you have any questions on just the process how we built it it has everything been fun then please y'all go ahead to some questions there chiman thank you very much for sharing about your project I

think you guys are crazy and I think the goal of your website this is pretty great so my compliments I maybe it was just me or that I didn't get it but like how do you actually help the animals like do you imp maybe you said that I missed it I don't know like are you in partnership with some nonprofit organizations like how do users make sure that you actually use the money for helping the endangered animals just this okay that's a great question so yeah we've partnered with a couple of conservation partners you can see at the bottom here and the habesha tax so that continuous money raised by

people holding our assets that flows directly to these conservation organizations who help those animals so unfortunately at this point we're not out in the trenches actually you know feeding the animals or anything ourselves we more platform that's helping these organizations raise additional funding for their conservation efforts and you know a lot of these conservation they're really awesome at what they do but there aren't web developers and maybe they don't have the best online presence so they aren't able to raise funds best for their platforms so wild cards is really something that's hopefully engaging and allows them to get out there and raise more funds for what they're doing okay so this is more of a technical question

but do you have any advice for people that want to implement harberger tax for their own project maybe a separate a separate example besides this that lessons you've learned while implementing it anything like that yeah for sure so I mean I think we had all started for us where is probably the best place to get started is there's a project called this art workers always on sale by Simon and you'll find the repo very open on github and it's it's an awesome project where there's a piece of artwork and it's just a single digital asset and the smart contracts and that are pretty clear and it basically shows if you fork the project you can get going pretty much immediately and that's actually what we use predominantly for our hackathons so

as a first step I would say that's a great start for trying to understand how it actually works and build your own project technically and from there if you want to learn how to try do it on a bigger scale we'd be more than happy to discuss it with everyone because there's a lot of security risks you basically don't expose yourself to and beyond security like also game theoretical attacks are there any lessons that you learned along that dimension maybe you just want to pass the mic to Jason just to the left of you over there he's one of the co-founders he's got some good knowledge on this yeah I would I would say the the mechanism doesn't work for everything so you have to really be

careful are you are you solving the problem that needs to be solved an example from this weekend was I was at the East London hackathon and I was really excited because another team did a Harbach attacks project and I thought the use case was great only went once they explained that so for example the ens team initially were discussing using Harbach attacks for DNS names and they decided against it for some quite crucial reasons basically imagine you've got a business that's yours and it's registered as a DNS name and someone else could buy

that from you and destroy your business or you had a search engine that was trying to compete with Google you a doctor go and Google would just keep buying your you know domain so that I mean those are cases that that don't work but for example let's say you've got a a thriving business the example they gave me was satoshis die so it's an it's a gambling thing and it's all digital online and basically the website is what makes the money so there let's say I've built it up and I want to now retire but you know keep profiting from the good work I did I could make that

into a harberger tax token and put that on the open market the market decides the price and I earn the harberger tax but the person who owns the token earns the revenue and the market will balance things out so it's more about use cases and some don't work and some do work so I see you've made two cents in the last 20 minutes good going so mine's more it's just a question of ownership

right so I understand full well that's if you're not on the grounds and you're offering a platform that's fine it's good to see other people from South Africa as well by the way except you're from the wrong city thank you I went to Josie my question is that of presumably these are trickling in you know like the the taxes coming in but my question is on who has the rights to withdraw any deposited money so you know I would find it a bit weird if you guys for example being the owners of the platform would be able to pull out the ether that's designated as this tax so do that senda

verde sin diverter yeah yeah dude do they have someone on the ground then that's just a minute like the owner of an address that's got exclusive permissions to pull a hitha yep so if you go onto our Twitter you'll see all the verified transactions of all the funds flowing from the contract address the ether we've raised to those specific organizations like sin diverter and then sin divert on their Twitter's publicly also posted their public address so you can verify that it's it's theirs so is that an automatic transaction every time it hits a threshold or do they have to explicitly ask for a withdrawal at the moment it's it's manual it's not it's not automatic

but that's something yes definitely exactly what we want it to be like so yeah that's great for spotting that that's another scent alright shot Thanks thank you have one small question do you accept died or any stable con if I say it tonight also another good point so at the moment it's it's just eath but you know another thing on our timeline is people obviously have a deposit and eath that continuously pays for the ownership of the asset why not you know have that died and then they earn interest to further support their their assets so that's a great point again it's just dev time getting enough time to build out everything actually it was the last question I'm sorry I'll

chat he altered thank you so much everyone have a great evening [Applause]