Hypercerts.xyz with Holke Brammer | Green Pill #66

Transcript

foreign [Music] ation how's it going on the Pod with today we have Hoka Brammer who is a research scientist at protocol labs and we are talking about hyperserts you can think of hyper asserts as an nft that acts as sort of a carbon credit but it doesn't just work on the carbon credit and carbon capture Vector it works on any impact Vector so as opposed to a carbon credit that says that you took 10 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere think of a hypersert as a carbon credit on any impact Vector so a hyper cert that says that you funded 10 months of Open Source software a hyper cert that

says that you took 10 people out of poverty a hyper assert that says that you fixed 10 bottles in your community um any impact factor can be made into a hypersert so in this episode we talk about bootstrapping a triple-sided Marketplace between people who are issuing hyper certs people were consuming hyperserts and those who are evaluating the hyper certs for their legitimacy what would it look like if any impact Dow that is creating impact can just issue hyper certs and get rewarded for having those hyper certs and the more impact they have the more value they're able to capture if there is by pressure on hyperserts in this hypothetical future world so really has been a lot of uh it's just been a huge

pleasure to work with Hoka on hypersearch this has actually been a collaboration between super modular my new company and protocol Labs we've been building out hyperserts.xyz together and uh protocol Labs is just really really smart really uh been a good partner in developing hyperserts and there's a pilot app available at hypersearch.xyz so we're at a minimum viable product for for at least one side of those marketplaces and are starting to think about how could this actually go into the wild over the next quarters so if you're interested in how do we align incentives so that people can just work for impact and get paid for that then this episode is for you you we did an episode a couple weeks ago with Legion

and Matthew freilic in which we talked about making impact in investable or purchasable or um and and this is kind of an episode that follows up with a tangible example of how that could be done and I'm just really here for it what if we could create a systemic incentive for people to work on the public good and work on the commons and get paid for it I think hypersearch is a really interesting primitive for making that happen but you know this is a complicated technology build out and if it if it is obvious then it'll only be obvious in retrospect so a really good episode with hulka and I hope you enjoy it the world has woken up to refi and celo is here for it celo is the layer one for the regenerative Finance movement it's fast Planet positive and built for the real world

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build with sellout hackathon live now with a prize pool of over a hundred thousand dollars working in web 3 is awesome it's freeing powerful and so much fun but working outside of the typical W-2 employee structure is a deal breaker for so many people opolis is helping the self-solving worker focus on what they do best their work while opolis manages the back end there's a lot of nation state overhead when working in web3 and opolis takes care of all of the back end stuff freeing you up to do what you do best your work opolis leverages group buying power through a community employment Co-op helping you save 20 to 50 on high quality affordable health care options through Cigna so do what you love and maintain your

financial security with office you must be authorized to work inside the United States to receive office's benefits but office is expanding its services to Canada starting on June 1st of next year so book a 30-minute free consultation with oculus experts and join opolis by December 31st to get a thousand work and a thousand Bank tokens go to connect.opolis.com bankless to get started so what are impact evaluators and how do they affect the legitimacy of hypersuits yeah and so so basically the basic setup could be that just like some people create impact some people fund the impact either like Prospect if you are retrospectively um through a hypersert um but it really becomes interesting if you add kind of the function of an

evaluator because the evaluator would um kind of specialize in evaluating um an impact and I'm thinking of like that's probably like an impact evaluator um just for a specific topic or like a specific impact vector and then this evaluator sends a signal to the retrospective funder or to the funders in general um to um about like was this work really impactful what um how did we see over time this impact and we can also submit multiple evaluations over time um to track if there was more and more impact created from this work that has

been done because like sometimes you do like work at one point in time but it actually has impact over a long time period and we can use evaluations um over and over to really um see and track the impact and then um adjust the the rewards um to the creators according to that and they evaluators um that can be like a full range of um of either people or mechanisms that are basically used and sometimes we can just like ask the beneficiaries of a public good what they think really about the impact and then the funder kind of kind

of listen to what what the beneficiaries really says say um but then sometimes it is more really like something that experts have to really look into very deeply because it is maybe about like some um like some technology that is not that accessible to others so we kind of create kind of a panel of experts that look at it and ideally we would um commits to how we really evaluate that impact and how we select the the experts up front so that the expectations from the projects are again kind of can be formed and they can create like these reliable expectations

um and then the impact evaluator can also be um just like a smart contract that like looks at some data and automatically then evaluates the the hyper cert or the work that is described by the hypersuit and um that basically points to whenever we create a hypersert we can also add the functionality that there's either already funding for a certain evaluation mechanism or we can Define kind of a smart contract that will automatically evaluate this hyper cert later on According to some some mechanism that we specify up front and then the the evaluation

um is points basically at the at the hyper search um for all the retrospective funders to actually see and to observe so we create like Market signals for the funders which are like the most impactful public goods um which should they actually um uh purchase in this sense and reward the the creators of of that hypersuit and to the creator of the public good and um that again then creates kind of a reputation for certain evaluators so the more reputable they they are the more often they have actually been right in in saying this is really impactful and then um later on it turned out to be

impactful and other um evaluators agree with that so it's really like a mechanism where um we we build up trust in the system for different evaluators um and the trust is always um kind of the the relevant trust is from the funders to the um to the evaluators so those evaluators who are trusted by the funders they they have a lot of influence about what which public goods get funded and those evaluators who like don't do a good job or they just like say oh this was like everything was really great um they don't really provide a very interesting signal for funders so funders won't listen to them and

um they they have no influence on the uh on the market here um so that's and yeah like I have two different thoughts on this uh because like the the impact evaluators um when when they like it's it's a problem that is currently when you look at the the classic impact markets or like the classic impact um sector there is a problem that we don't see actually a lot of negative evaluations of impact like we don't see oh like a project was funded but it was not the most efficient way of spending that money um we don't see that because currently neither the funders nor the project creators really want to know if their

their resources or their time where like not really used very efficiently and that's why like an impact report most often actually tells everyone hey you did a great job and with with this mechanism we really incentivize that we have um meaningful signals to the funders because the funders have to decide based on this information which um hypersearch they want to buy and based on which episodes they want to buy that is again what they can then display um for like on their website to um to whoever gave them the the funding in the first place or to to others if it's a company to their customers or if

it's potentially also an individual who funded the impact then they that you can basically um show those those high pressure to actually show um what you have done with like like what kind of good you have caused with with the funding that you have so in that sense like hypersearch um can turn or like that the idea when hypersuits become kind of a norm or in retrospective funding a norm then hyper certs represent something like the the new Rolex um that you show off like what what good you have done in the world mm-hmm yeah it feels like that reputational economy with the impact evaluators is going to be really important and I can almost see different markets being created not only in different niches

obviously open source funding pandemic prevention DSi are all different vectors of impact and they're going to have different sub niches of impact evaluators within them but the you know if one impact evaluator favors a different methodology or approach or is just more lenient than another one then you kind of create an economy in which the reputation the evaluators that have built the strongest reputation and methodology in a rational Market are going to be the ones that are going to create the most demand for their hyper certs and um you know to me that's that's kind of a really neat idea is is is is is the fact that we could have this diversity of a market of evaluators and there can be all sorts of diverse different not

only types of impact certs but ways of evaluating them and and and I think that that diversity is important because it allows the system not to be captured yeah and and it points to another thing that we really want to build like an open ecosystem where every player in the ecosystem can optimize their own function in the ecosystem so evaluators get better and better and more efficient in evaluating the impact funders get more efficient in allocating their fund funding and finding out who are the the valuators to listen to and um with those signals the project creators and they they can also like

optimize their own function in the system and that's how like the system overall um gets better and better over time and that is um why this is not like thought of like oh we just like built one system and then then it works but more Building A Primitive on which um different applications and different evaluations um Can can work and being can like also different evaluators the other platforms can be developed um so that we get really this Dynamic that everybody kind of improves their own function of the system and that's really like kind of the power of of markets um that it's not uh Center centrally controlled but like everybody has incentives to contribute in their

own way to the system overall um yeah um I I mean I I think that this you know clearly I think that this is powerful uh you and I have been working on this for uh about half of a year now we're um where do you think you know one of the questions I always get when I when I explain this to people is where does the buy pressure come from for these hyper certs so people typically there's a triple-sided Marketplace uh impact owls are creating impact um people we think will be purchasing this impact and creating buy pressure for it and then you've got the evaluators in the middle and so once people sort of

understand the the architecture of the evaluators the next thing they probe at is where does the buy pressure for this come from so uh any thoughts on that side of the marketplace yeah so like I think it's the difficulty is to imagine how that that system like suddenly is is bootstrapped and suddenly exists I think like when we when we think of a system where um retrospective funding became already a norm and like it's just like the normal thing to do for those institutions that today already fund impact because like that like we spent a lot of money through governments foundations um on um public goods we just say kind of reallocate that and then also show

others how they can more efficiently allocate this money so maybe there are also like new funders coming into this space so there's a world um in which that is kind of just like the normal thing that that happens but the world or like the steps towards that world I think that's the difficulty to to imagine that and that's where um I referred earlier to it a little bit already but like it is uh let's start with something like um price competitions so um and we are currently thinking of um partnering with vita Dao um on the longevity price in order to kind of use hyper certs in that system

so basically we we announce um some kind of a a price on longevity and um I mean the bad at our community they um are working on that currently already but then um when we connect hyperswords with that it is basically whenever this price is actually then paid out then um the retrospector funder so whoever gave out the price they receive hyper certs from the um from the projects that kind of won the the price competition that's just like the first step where we have actual retrospective funding so and then if we um if we imagine that this doesn't

happen just once but that we have like a lot of different price competitions where they all run on the same system with high pressure on the same primitive so every project that works in a specific sector um kind of uses hypersearch in order to to apply for different price competitions then later on we can generalize this system where we don't need to actually announce um the the prices um as specific anymore but people just know that there will be retrospective funding um in the future so the buy pressure really comes here from from Thunders who get used to funding um funding like retrospectively instead

of prospectively more or less with the money that they're currently already spending on on um creating impact but they realize that like if they do it afterwards they can allocate their funding much more efficiently than if they just like try to bet um on on different things in in the first place so because that without anything in the future they don't create any um any real incentives for the project after they get the funding to really create the impact so it's it's kind of a mindset shift for for funders and the way to get there is or like one way to get there is through different price competition and probably also for

when when we just like work with some funders who are like open to to experimentation and um see kind of the value of the whole system that they just like start doing this and the more people actually start doing this the more other funders see like the value in uh funding it afterwards yeah it does it does feel like as the mechanism gains legitimacy it opens up the opportunity for new funders to come in you know some of the ideas that we've that we've talked about is well getcon grants is already doing six million dollars per quarter worth of funding for open source what if each of those was a each of those grants contributions was

contributing to a hyper cert um what would it look like if we made hyper certs cool to collect such that you wanted to show them off on like your online dating profile uh you know going from like virtue signaling in web 2 where there's no actual proof of virtue to proof of virtue in web 3 where you've actually put your money where your mouth is and have purchased a certain amount of hyper certs um and then you look at organizations that have ESG goals that possibly a way of meeting their ESG goals could be to purchase hyper certs and that creates buy pressure and then the ultimate final sort of progenator or at least supposed to be progenator of the public good is governments so local state and National

governments a lot of the funding that they use is or that they're supposed to be using their funding on is is creating public good and so what if there was a private Market of people who are already creating that public good in their Community you don't have to worry about the government administering and and creating that public good in communities anymore they can just purchase hyper certs in their local community providing a market-based incentive for people in their local community to get going so you know those are off the top of my head the the actors that I see I could see creating creating by pressure for for hyper certs and um I think that the future is quite bright if you can get if we can if you can align that that triple-sided

Marketplace the impact creators the hyper asserts purchasers and then the impact evaluators it feels like bootstrapping those Network effects together is is going to be um kind of part of the challenge here so so what is the status of the project uh hypersearch study XYZ exists and uh what are the initial pilot projects that that we're going to run here um I mean like let me add like one one thing to to what you actually said because like I think there is like when we look at like the the public goods problem in general and we see it as uh a free write-up problem and wherever we can actually make

transparent who are actually the free writers that can also like increase kind of the pressure on them so if we take the case of Open Source software we can actually kind of make more transparent who are the ones who use open source open source software Without Really uh paying for it so that is something that we can like not perfectly but approximately we can um we can actually see that and then if um those that that really um like you said they also buy Hyper search from the from the projects that created the the software that they're using then there's like some some kind of like let's let's call it a

leaderboard of those for the the best contributors to the software they actually like where their their tools are based on and then you have a list of those companies that build software and have a business model um and use open source software but they're actually not paying for it and now we can actually see that because they are not purchasing um hyper search so we basically have like a list of of kind of the the the good the good uh companies and then the bad companies who kind of just like Free Ride On the Open Source software of of others um and that also then kind of creates the buy pressure so that's kind of the the thing where where we can also work on um kind of the the

um the shaming aspect of public goods usage without paying for it um so there's like kind of like you're creating a set of the different actors in the system and based off of their hyper search balances you can see which ones are supporting the public good versus free writing on it yes and I mean it's it's similar to what happened in the carbon market right like we we know which companies actually produce uh more carbon so according to that they also should um buy more carbon credits so and like in in specific areas like open source software we can um try to create a similar system yes I I think that I I ask you a very loaded or I made a very long and loaded comment

and then I asked you a question at the end of it and I think the question was what where are the pilots that hyper certs are being rolled out in uh in the next few months yes um so I mean one one thing is that we are developing kind of this this primitive and we developed that further um thinking currently how can we also make it easy for different projects also on different chains to to use uh the episode primitive and to still have kind of um one kind of public good space where all hyper States live in uh because like that's that's also something cool with the project that a lot of people are interested in in using hyper search in enjoining this um ecosystem that is just like

um starting right now but like there's a lot of interest uh last week we had a community call with 10 different projects um just like pitching how their idea and how hyper search fits into their project um so that was kind of the the first hyperset Community called and um so we are developing this this uh this primitive further and then um we want to show that it works in a few different impact markets ourselves um and I already mentioned um the potential cooperation with the longevity price um so running a price competition with Hyper certs um uh second is that and you refer to it a little bit already the like can we

attach kind of a hypersearch to the git coin grants protocol so whenever we actually have a funding round on um on bitcoin the funders can receive hyper certs um or like get awarded High research from the projects that get funded and um they are more concretely we are thinking about just running a pilot early 2023 on um with like 10 projects in a specific vertical in open source software looking back on their impact that they had in 2022 and um so running like a retrospective funding round on git coin um and then whoever participates gets

actually hyper certs um awarded from the projects um and so that is kind of like a test run to make this really like a module that anybody who runs a grants around with the new grants protocol um that they can just like flip on a switch off like yes I want to like issue a hyper search um with with my projects for the funders that support me either like prospectively or retrospectively um and then we also look at how can we use hypersearch in our own ecosystem at protocol Labs how can we use that in in combination uh with funding in our ecosystem if that is like ipfs or firecorn or the other projects and how

can we uh because like we have done retrospective funding already but um haven't used um hypersets as a primitive yet but like if we can add that and then also track in our own ecosystem the public goods that that we fund and then also invite other funders who are also interested in funding some of uh that technology and kind of combining um our strength and uh funding funding open source software in in our own ecosystem and in that sense also um uh trying out um the the mechanisms that we develop in our for our own uh projects Goldfinch is a decentralized credit protocol with a mission to connect the world's Capital

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that short list uh I mean we have a few on the on the on the short list um uh probably something that we have like thought about quite a bit already it's also um AI alignment and AI safety um so because that is um something that is just like such so important that we get it right now because um the The Primitives that will Define how AI is developed and used in the future um the the research and The Primitives are defined now so that's something where um we think um hypersuits and retrospective funding um can also um like be very helpful for this impact

vector yeah well um if people want to get involved whether as an impact evaluator a purchaser of hyperserts or an issue of hypersearch where can they find out more about the project yes uh definitely just go to hypersets.xyz and there you find you can sign up for just like email updates if you want to get email updates from time to time but if you want to get more involved join our telegram group that's where um like a quite active Community is um starting up and um as questions they are introduce you you and your project um and then

um join our community Cults um and get in contact directly telling us um what what kind of role you would play in this hypersearch ecosystem great is there anything I didn't ask about hypersearch that you want to say uh I mean that's there's so much about hyper sets that we can say but uh we got a pretty good um overview I believe um yeah I think we get we get through some of the benefits some of the like what does it what does it really an interoperable um hypersearch system look like um the different roles of the the actors who covered that

um so um and the the practicalities so yeah I've got one um in a world in which hyperserts is maximally successful what does that world look like like take me to it's 2022 right now so let's say 2032 uh there's a deeply liquid a set of hyper certs that are being purchased and issued uh every day or every week and how does what is the world in which hypersearch is maximally successful look like um so that's that's a world where basically like all the talent that like today is I mean I don't want to say waste it but to some extent waste it on a lot of products that the world actually doesn't really need

um all that Talent is really focused on the most impactful work that they can do and this this is possible because um they know that they get rewarded for this work if they are successful um so and that is kind of the function that hypersearch play here so um all all the people who like want to start new things um they they are not thinking about um the specific um like classical business model um but they think about impact but in a very similar way so they they are thinking about what is it that will maximize the impact that I can have in a specific area because that is exactly

the same as what is it that will get me like uh a retrospective reward in the future so those things those two questions are now aligned and kind of entrepreneurs social entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs are actually now more or less the same thing so we don't have um that some people are like for profit entrepreneurs and others are social entrepreneurs these are just like fully aligned um and that is kind of the the status of kind of more the entrepreneur side but then there exists um a lot of like impact hours and other organizations that just like found found a good way to recurringly produce impact

and they found like a sustainable model to to finance that through hypersearch because they over and over produce impact and um funders will then reward them for the securing impact so they they built um then also scalable models for this impact and it's not just like by project by project basis but they can build large scale organizations that become really efficient in providing this this impact and get rewarded for that impact yeah one of the things that's really deeply cool about a lot of well one of the themes I guess I'd say I'll be

seeing on the green pill podcast is like how can we provide a systemic incentive for people to work on the commons and on public goods and instead of have to work on their own private goods and I think one of the things that really excites me about hyperserts is that it closes the gap between value created and value captured for entrepreneurs as an entrepreneur you have to worry about capturing value so that you can pay your staff so you can pay your bills so you can continue living and if you could just be rewarded for the value you create then that's much different than only the value you captured and you know once that systemic incentive alignment is handled you can you can take the world's talent and all of the amazing beautiful uh resources and and talented individuals in the world and you can reorient them

towards working on the most in problem important problems in the world so it feels like a systemic incentive change and you know um I I'm just really I'm just really excited to see where this goes I think that there's uh there's a there's there's a lot of upside to getting this right but it's going to be hard and uh and I hope to have you back in a year or two and and we can compare and contrast how uh how things have gone yeah and and I mean that's an interesting thing that the project in itself is kind of like a high potential public good because it there is of course like some kind of a um uncertainty of this like how we really um implement this

um but if it works there's a really like a high high potential um upside um for a lot of other projects um to build um on this yeah are you saying that we should issue hyper certs to track the build out of hypersearch so that we can have more rewards for building hyperserts I mean the nice thing is that uh currently we don't need to do that and um I think it's also like we want to produce this as a public good to like to get this started and then other people building on top of that um so um we ourselves don't need to to get retrospective rewards for building this um so we like this is kind of our public good that we are giving to the world

um and then later on um uh if you want to like see what what kind of impact that really creates yeah I love that um you know and while we're talking about the build out of the hypersearch.xyz platform I think I want to give a quick shout out to raid Guild which has been doing a lot of the legwork on the development and it's been really great working with Ray Guild as as a Dev team to to get that out there and so you can see the work that they've done if you go to hypersearch.xyz and you click on the demo button over there you can see the uh the the demo app that's been up there or I guess it's called pilot app on the UI but uh it's been been really nice to play with that on with that on testnet alrighty well I

think that that's uh that's all the time we have uh any last words before we break Hoka um no but I mean if as you uh gave a shout out to to Red Gold I can definitely uh agree with that and like it's it's not only like the work is really cool that they did um but also just like really fun to work with them and um the same is through with everybody else who has uh involved currently in the hypersets project um that is like the the direct contributors um on the team uh but also the community that is super excited about um about hyper certs um which like the community colleges showed but then in addition to that um all of this came out of like the communities from funding the comments

and shelling point and those are also the communities um if if you want to get involved not only like through a telegram group but I also want to meet um the people working on this um come to the sharing point and finding the comments conferences um we will have um many many more of those um next year in 2023 because uh we want to really build out this general public goods community so um also show up in person uh we would love to get in contact with with uh more excited uh people who who want to build public goods and build a new ecosystem for that yeah beautiful well I think this is a good place to wrap uh thanks so much for your work on this and looking forward to seeing how it grows yeah thanks for

having me [Music]