#DappCon22 : Day 1 - 4 Years Minting Soul Bound Tokens, Patricio Worthalter

Transcript

foreign tokens which I believe are co-ops but we'll find out thank you um so as I said before in case there's someone new um we can make this a conversation it doesn't have to be one way so if you want to add and add anything to what I'm saying ask a question have me double down on something just interrupt me um the nicer and more reduced if this is for you the better so so be pretty confident that getting your questions answered is my first priority so effectively the talk is about the many lessons lessons we

learned over these four years running pop-up but for explaining that I need to present a little context so I am 35 years old from Buenos Aires the capital city of Argentina I've been full time on the ethereum space since 2015 so I've seen a lot I I joined the community shortly after the main it launched it took me a while to understand what all these things were about it took me a long while um but it went well so the first couple years when I said it went well I was for the first couple years mostly learning so the period

between 2015 and 17 I mostly focused on on understanding the technology what we could do with it what could be useful for Concepts like decentralized consensus and and everything distributed databases and permissionless Innovation and trustlessness they were pretty foreign to me although I was a tech person still it was it was all too abstract by 2017 I had grown much better understanding of what all these things were about and then I felt pretty confident about this technology is being useful for Humanity in the meantime I have been like many of us buying and selling different assets that were popping around

for the most part for wrong reasons but still after 2017 when the crazy Ico bubble we were in crashed the market was pretty depressed and there were doubts about this technology being any useful the Bitcoin media conglomerate at that time division the vehicle media conglomerate was coin desk and and coin Telegraph and some influencers and traditional media they were pushing a narrative that was pretty inaccurate about Bitcoin being the only crypto asset that made sense and everything

ethereum and smart contracts being too complex too insecure too naive to actually create anything value for Humanity and and we're pushing that narrative they were being pretty successful and and the sentiment around ethereum was down and and there was this appointment all around with some friends in this context we were all pretty hardcore resilient people we wanted to create something that proven ethereum viable technology that could be a showcase from making clear for an external

Observer and let's say an external honest and educated Observer to see that ethereum was not only viable Tech but actually useful because in case you don't remember you don't know in 2018 ethereum had been around for three or four years depending on how you consider the beginning and there were no doubts there was nothing you could do in ethereum that actually was useful out of buying and selling little tokens and 99 of the trading activity was mostly a scam spam sponsored schemes in 2018 the main gas gustler the smart contract that used the most gas was a little Ponce scheme by design called proof of

weak hands and whoever put the most money left I don't remember but it was like it was an experiment in computer science about Ponce schemes and it was a pretty freaking fun experiment I didn't participate but it was fun but it is more that to put it into context because if we think about doves today we have a very wealthy ecosystem flaps but in 2018 we had literally none maker that wasn't a thing I mean it was a thing but it didn't have every every dab that was out there had experimental an experimental nature so maybe they had 10 20 users the nurses Community has seen a lot things like prediction Market decentralized

exchanges of sorts and other things and nothing was working in dapcon 18 they get you an Easter card that had some old tokens and you could do things with them and nothing was working so we were saying with my friends what can we build that creates the desire of random non-crypto people to use these things that couldn't be done without with any other technology stack and on every installment process I presented a long time dream that I had um because I'm a collector um collecting things with one of my passions so I

propose that we build a set of Open Source Products for people to be able to use this magical fascinating globally distributed database that offered immutability that offered an easy way to interface with it and to analyze it to create check-ins when you do something like in Foursquare and and this early Vision eventually Cassie evolved a lot it is the earliest there may have been some earlier experiments but some people call it an affinity saturate the Yoshi Solvang token because a checking like token a

token that you can only get when you have done something it's a solventus they can be there's no money that can get it to you there is no way of you to cheat in the blockchain and nfts at that time were a known there may have been 50 or 100 people that knew nfts and they were all mostly developers like cryptokitty steps and such and if this had this these qualities that offered indisputable authenticity perfect provenance and immutability so you cannot have a counterfeit nft I mean there might be the concept of a counterfeit ft but it is technically impossible to forge an authenticity proof of an nft they have perfect

provenance so you can see where they were what happened to them whether they were traded mob transferred lost and because they live in this decentralized database you have immutability guarantees that no other centralized system could offer if you store this checking uh this checking Collective as on something that's not a blockchain there's no easy way for you to be sure that they will exist forever preservation of digital assets it's a massive challenge for Humanity that hasn't still been solved the pictures you take today the media you create the videos it's all very likely going to be lost in in 20 to 40 years very likely 90 is going to be lost in 100 years 99 is

going to be lost not just because of a storage challenges but indexing challenges if someone wants to see this recording if we are are we recording um in 100 years time it may be somewhere but it's on a little impossible to find it so we created pop-up which is an ecosystem for the preservation of memories using solo one tokens and not that we knew but once the ecosystem has Awakening to nfts and discovered that you our value proposition our community exploded Bob is now the most popular non-financial crypto native application

there's 500 000 humans that hold power ups the value it's being created that you see on people faces when they mint a pull-up it's unpaddled um I was yesterday at seaways pretty close nearby next to the river as well I've seen a person that told me whenever I am sad I go and check my pop collection and it helps it helped me remember happier times feelings like this in the blockchain were unseen taking out

people are making money out of the trading of these digital things that we have been buying and selling so we believe that we were pretty successful on creating this showcase to prove that it's viable Tech eventually the whole ecosystem flourished so you could see plenty of different things proving that it's the most viable useful technology but once we felt that we achieved that we came back to the drawing board and we were like hey um what's next we achieved our goals of proving ethereum viable Tech where do we go after um we discuss this internally

um we said very new ambitious goals and what we are working these days and and it is it is a massive undertaking we want Soul bound tokens to be a globally adopted technology that can be used permissionlessly or or as permissionless as it could be by every human and this is happening there are earlier signals that there's no missing pieces pop-up has radar communities in tens if not hundreds of countries our curation body public security ecosystem for a pop-up to be

compliant with the protocol's policy it has to have some checks which are mainly not using pornography not publishing hate speech and a couple of things like that the curation body reviews more than a thousand drops every week and and this is growing by the way similarly that's on the community side people that serve their own pull-ups because they like it and they use it for birthday parties barbecues any kind of ceremony whatever they are doing similarly we are seeing very exciting adoption on the Enterprise side we have a global scale partnership with Warner Music Group many of the most renowned artists are about to use pop-up if not using power already we are talking about

bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ed Sheeran The crypto ecosystem has made power up the dominant indisputable player for this solvent tokens so it's really exciting um to be back to dapcon because upcon in 2019 has been the first conference that has welcomed us on an official capacity um again at the series event I met a pop collector that had a pop-up on the range of the ID 2000 and now there's over 5 million pop-ups on mainnet this is growing at a really fast and accelerated rate so so it's been really fun

um this is a part of the talk any questions so far comment um if not I have a couple anecdotes um because some people have asked me pretty frequently and even today how did you come with the idea of power and eventually how did you make it a thing um I have met hundreds of Founders at hackathons I was a regular of hackathons I I went to almost all these Global events and others and I've seen um I was going to say unfortunately but not exactly um but I seen a crazy amount of Australian entrepreneurs that had launched jobs or

wanted to launch the apps and couldn't get to product Market fit and they want to know what have we done different how how has power up created a dynamic that somehow clicked and made people wanting to use this and and I said this happened this hasn't happened overnight this was an easy but there were a couple conscious decisions that were taking derivative derivatively and were fundamental for this to happen so one of the first decisions if not the main one is that although we were a solution looking for a problem which is

something that is supposedly wrong because we had ethereum and we wanted to prove ethereum useful and viable and we didn't know what to build and that's that's kind of wrong that's why most of the these Founders that I mentioned has failed because they wanted to use the technology for something but they found really hard to create something that they actually needed ethereum in our case so one fundamental difference difference was that I did want to be a user of a system that allowed me to keep my checkings and and my my memories preserved on a high quality system so the tribe for building this technology wasn't so much making ethereum useful I mean it was such but the idea was based on a desire that I

had that also had proven product Market fit because for a square the inventor of the digital checking somehow had already hundreds of millions of users so we knew that the idea of having a chicken when you go somewhere was something that made sense and people wanted it so that for once when you build an app and you know that that's a similar to the origins of gnosis when nurses starts um the main uh the main proposal was to build a prediction Market which is something the founders have been wanting to build for years they eventually got to know ethereum but I I haven't seen it because it was prior to my time there was a primitive of a prediction Market

that the nurses Founders had run on bitcoin so when you go back to the idea they did one ethereum to be useful they did want a permissionless ecosystem for building decentralized applications but prior to that they wanted a decentralized prediction market and it's similar to power so that was one of the secret ingredients for pop to achieve so much traction and the other similar ingredient it's like a startups 101 it's like something that no successful startup hasn't had which is sacrifice um myself and every person that has help with power up has pretty much sacrificed everything that needed to be sacrificed for Pope to be a success and that has been

um we have five minutes left um we can use it for questions if there's any or I can continue with the couple things that we are missing story um any question raise your hand otherwise I continue um okay I continue I mean have you seen anyone wanting to ask something and and again we can make this bi-directional it doesn't have to be one too many yeah I've actually just a quick question um what uh like what what gets power up to 100 million users right like that we are pretty confident that the main

components out of that because to begin with there are a hundred million people that want to preserve their memories they don't care about the blockchain but they want about them existing forever they want them about being social they want them being composable they like the idea of being able to consume a product or service or showing a club or buy something because they have these check-ins so the main components are there there are fundamental missing pieces in the user experience and the most important missing piece is wallet the wallet experience it's still extremely hard for the consumer so there

are more than a couple tens of millions of people that are willing to put up with all that it takes to have a traditional either externally on account or multisig wallet now I want to believe and I think most of us want to believe that eventually this problem is going to be solved the same way bandwidth was a problem on the early internet and it was really hard to move High volumes of data or video or audio and eventually optic fiber and networking equipment has gone up to a speed and now bandwidth is no longer a concern nobody has stopped building anything because there wasn't enough bandwidth whether it's going to be social recovery or or threshold signatures or any other

technology for wallets to become friendly I don't know but once that happens we believe there's gonna be that's gonna be a massive catalyst and we don't believe that it's just 100 million um we expect every person that has a personal electronic device to eventually be a Holden and collector of power up um now a couple of things on the sacrifice side and I think we close with um not just a generic sacrifices of putting down almost everything that's not your work was needed to get power up to what it got ethereum was so early and the community

was so small in 2018 that our growth strategy was having me and a couple friends and some of them are here being ambassadors of a protocol and having boots on the ground on every event so for many of the most hardcore resilient people a power was the first nft they got and having power peeled all these people that eventually become the influencers of the newer generation we got a footprint that gave us this this very sweet um dominant position that we appreciate a lot and when when you say dominant position that sounds like Monopoly but

in poor we are in building a monopoly we are building a public good for the preservation of memories and for it to unfold and cover the whole Humanity as I said that's our Target it has to remain credibly neutral so we are not building a traditional Monopoly we do appreciate the dominant position um we like the idea that pop has no competitors we like the the stickiness the mode because once you're a pop collector you don't want to transition to a new ecosystem for the preservation of memory you want Powers people want Powers it is a massive challenge to build a global scale public good accessible to

the whole Humanity but we remain optimistic most of the ecosystem is supporting us is helping us we don't need to figure out by itself everyone who's building decentralized public goods it's helping us find out what works and doesn't work I met Lucas from safe in New York and we were discussing since you guys have a massively successful public good which is a safe and and it is by many metrics the most successful D5 product and you guys are in the process of decentralizing it how are you thinking about this and that and now we are eagerly waiting for them to continue on

their part to decentralization so by the time poem needs to to I would grow with existing format we have plenty of centralized components there's very extensive and high quality priority so whoever is building anything in D5 in crypto in web 3 especially in the social aspects that has either integration potential with power up or overlapping challenges come talk to us either to me or to any one of our team we have a both on the side and and see how we can do it together now one thing before we close there is a pop-up for being here in this talk um on the power up you have to tap on mint on the lower right corner type

secret word and I will say the secret word but I'm gonna try it first myself this pop-up will always be minted for people that are here in 10 years time when you are making the pull-up of your newborn or the pub of your wedding you can also see I've been at the at the talk where Patricio has presented the story of the first four years so you go to the mint button you type secret word and the secret word is dapcon 22.

you are barely getting it Pascal just type dapcon 22 on the secret word input and get a verifiable proof that lives on the analysis chain that you've seen my talk has it worked for someone yes um thank you very much everyone um are there anyone has any questions do we have time for another question yes Manuel that's good hi can you hear me yeah I was wondering like is there a secondary market for pull-ups and what's the importance of holding a memory of

someone else um there's a very active secondary Market um pops are transferable by Design the Solvang token Community has been aggressively telling us that pop shouldn't be transferred and we are fighting back we believe that it is important that you have true ownership of your memories and you do whatever you want with them pull up doesn't want to be opinionated on what you do with your memories when you are an Olympic Athlete and you want something and you got a medal you get a medal which is pretty much a proof that you being an Olympiad athlete and you do whatever you want with your medal do you want to sell it you sell it

and the buyer won't be able to claim that they won an Olympia that whatever and similarly with power so you got this proof if you want to sell the power up that you wrote Because you were in this talk um you're free to do so we don't we don't chat here does that answer the question sorry maybe it doesn't yeah it's it's more just for us to tap in some discussion here I'm also thinking if I want to evolve to a new digital version of myself and I want to migrate my previous memories I mean does it lose any of the original

value um the value is in the eye of the beholder so uh again we are not opinionated or the value they should have for for the person that suffer from depression and uses the power up as as a little source of happiness that you're extremely valuable for every other person they are completely relevant now there are plenty of Forbes that have utility because they are erc721 tokens and there is a massive source of gambling like activities based on them and Powerful utility of course have easier price Discovery because if you

have a power up that gives you a 10 discount for a conference you can somehow approximate a market value we don't engage with any of that the product collects is for preserved Memories the way it makes the memory preservation is highly composable so of course there will be plenty of adjusting opportunities for adding value creating opportunities and such we love the idea we support that and we let the community use them the way they want it and we hope we don't have to make a call on this being right or wrong

as a protocol has to be incredibly neutral if the community at large somehow Express that's been sold is of lesser value that's on the community I have my personal opinion and it's kind of what I said that doesn't necessarily reflect the opinion of the protocol of course because the protocol is still run by a centralized company that I am the CEO of my opinion kinda has a greater weight hopefully in the future this is no longer going to be the case and the community will establish what's appropriate socially acceptable usage of power thanks Patrick I really like pull up so thank you very much and see you around

[Applause]