DAPPCON 2025: Opening Speech - Friederike Ernst

Transcript

Hi everyone and welcome to DAPCON 2025. It's an honor to open this year's event. Devcon's always been special particularly to me because it's not about speculation. Um it's about building, right? And there's a room full of people here who believe something quietly radical that with the right tools, individuals can reclaim control over their money, their identity, their

governance and their data. At Nosis, this belief has been our northstar from the very beginning. And by beginning I mean a time when the fundamentals were barely in place and everything in the Ethereum spa space still felt like a huge experiment. Noses the noser story is turning 10 this year. So it's it's been a while. Um there's a big wall of noses in the uh in the hall. So check it out. Um I take you through some of our history. Okay. So we started with prediction markets not because we saw a market opportunity but because we believed that they could

serve as collective intelligence better than individuals and institutions um and uh kind of combating fake news if you will before that before that term even existed. And the conditional token framework um that kind of emerged from this is still around and it still powers um most of the prediction markets out there including poly market. From there our journey unfolded not as a master plan but as a response to real needs. Each product we launched, each protocol we supported emerged from a desire to unblock users, to remove friction, um, and to create

new forms of coordination. When the existing multis were fragile, we built what later became the safe, which is now the standard for secure onchain custody. Around the same time, we were thinking about how to improve access to longtail tokens. Um, assets that are absolutely essential for prediction markets but are very poorly served by um, uh, by dexes that then existed which were automated market maker based only. And this is how we started building co protocol actually.

So initially it was designed for this this use case. um of trading longtail assets. But we soon realized that we could turn Ethereum's discrete um block time into an advantage. Um which led us to batch auctions and intentbased execution which now protects users from front running and improves price outcomes uh for users in the space. Cow is now the biggest DEX aggregator. Um, and it's used by most pro users.

As Ethereum adoption grew, so did the pressure on block space. Fees rose. Um, throughput bottlenecked. You guys remember this, right? Um, became harder for everyday users to participate meaningfully just because of price pressure. That's why we joined forces with the XI community to evolve what then became Nosis Chain, a credibly neutral communitygovern network with hundreds of thousands of validators. Today, it's arguably the most decentralized and secure smart contract network after Ethereum itself. resilient foundation for applications that

prioritize credible neutrality and sens censorship resistance. This combination, the deep alignment with Ethereum's values and a robust validator set in its own right makes Nosis chain a unique environment for experimentation, accessibility, long-term sustainability um by extending kind of Ethereum's ecosystem horizontally. But onchain infrastructure only matters if people can actually use it, right? So most people's financial lives still run very firmly offchain. Salaries, rent, everyday spending. So if we want user

agency to extend beyond cryptonatives, we have to meet people where they're at and give them a bridge into something that is genuinely better. That's the idea behind Nosis Pay and the reason we built Metri, which is an intuitive self-custodial wallet for everyday use. Earlier this year, we also brought Nosis HQ into the into the ecosystem. It's an onchain business account built on top of the safe, helping teamm organizations manage permissions, payments, and reporting. Together, this stack makes it possible not just to hold tokens on chain, but to actually operate

onchain as an individual, a team on organization. And this isn't just about catching up to legacy finance, right? In many ways, we're already ahead. So if you think about borderless payments, real time settlement, permissionless yield, access to US dollars in unstable jurisdictions, um fully collateralized lending with uh competitive rates, they they are already way ahead of what's out there in legacy finance, and we'll keep doubling down on this, unlocking smarter infrastructure, peer-to-peer payments, and financial systems that users truly own.

While much of what we've built improves on money moves uh improves on how money moves, circles asks a much deeper question. What if money itself actually worked differently? Instead of being issued top down, um, circuits is a bottom up currency system where values where value emerges from people themselves and the trust connections of their social network. Kind of taking the social fabric that kind of underpins our everyday lives and and using it for um creating money on chain. So everyone issues their own currency and liquidity

grows through this mutual recognition. But this kind of fundamental rethink depends on foundational tools, right? So you need secure self-custody. So the safe you need to trade longtail assets. Everyone has their own currency and even group currencies they are they are probably in the most cases long tail. Um so uh cow protocol you need cheap credibly neutral block space because this is kind of where the social network lives. It shouldn't be owned by by anyone in particular right so you need nosis chain so circuits builds on all of this um and it's a long that makes it kind of a long-term experiment in economic coordination from the bottom

up. If we want to build systems that promote agency, we can't just replicate old logic on new rails. We have to rethink the societal product protocol that is money itself because this is a fundamental insight in circles. Money itself is a technology and we get to choose how it works. We can change how it works. We can be the architects of the next evolutionary stage of money and of course agency also depends on access.

So if you can't reach the network can't participate that's why we re recently launched NosisVPN a project that started with a proposal from the hopper association to the Nosis DAO. The goal, build a decentralized VPN that protects privacy, resists sens censorship, and ensures connectivity even in a hostile environments. Just as safe protects your assets and cow protects your trades, NosisVPN protects your ability to connect. Whether you're in Berlin, Buenosiris or Bangalore, you should be able to reach the the open internet and coordinate freely.

All of these tools, Save, Cow, Nosis, Chain Pay Metry HQ Circles VPN are part of a larger vision. A vision that started with a handful of builders and has grown into an ecosystem where real people can live and work on chain. The through line of everything that we've built is quite simple. It's agency, right? kind of enabling people to do things that previously they couldn't. Um and in the in the early days I have to admit this was mostly aspirational right but now it's becoming operational. So we finally reached a point um where we can

offer not just ideas but we can offer usable tools and not just for early adopters such as yourself but to everyone. I'm not going to say your grandparents, but basically your non-crypto friends, they should be able to kind of use the things that we're building. And that's that's 100% kind of the user experience goal. And I think we kind of have the tooling to actually make this happen. Um, there's still a long road ahead. I'm an internal optimist. I always think kind of things happen faster than they do and then kind of building them actually takes time.

Um, but that's why Dabcon matters, right? So this room is full of people who are building for the long term. People who want to shape infrastructure, who want to build dabs and who don't primarily chase trends. So let's keep going. Let's build for the world that we actually want. Open by default and controlled by the people who use it. Thank you and welcome to DabCon 2025.