Iran Unchained -- NGOs meet DAOs / Shayan Eskandari

Transcript

hi everyone um I'm here to talk about Iran Unchained a project we started a while ago like maybe a few months ago and it's fun so far um so a bit about who I am like I'm more a technical guy um I worked at the Bitcoin ATMs the wallets the software's back in the day and then joined consensus diligence doing smart contract audits that's one of the first time I worked with Amin solemani and molok Dao V2 audit or the Lao back in the day and then I joined another company as CTO of a publicly traded company it was fun um on the side I'm doing my PhD but I'm not here for talk about any of these mainly I'm here to talk about all the non-profit educator things I've

been doing and I have immunity talking about that just a bit background I was born and raised in Iran for the first half of my life and that's on the other off side of the sanctioned wall and I was a growing up being a geek and I was not understanding why the board hates me um and so I tried around I had to like learn a lot more of the English to be able to understand what's happening and realize that for especially crypto is a really life it's life-saving technology in Iran and for people in the other side of the sanctioned walls and I realized the language barrier is like really huge like we have hard time on communicating with English speakers what we are doing here just consider like how the language

barrier would affect that so I started this non-profit movement uh one was a podcast called shariahad I started in 2015 and more technical blockchain just just these tried not to have that much of a price talk there there's another website called coiniron with a few of online friends we started um it's a it's a Farsi blockchain news content website more like coindesk not coin Telegraph coindesk like more on that and one of the things I'm proud of is uh be mentoring Bremen blockchain Farsi and multiple ethercatons and mainly between health of the blockchain Farsi we were able to do two solidity boot camps zero to one what is a hash what is

cryptography to how to do D5 flash loans all in Farsi um and I just want to say just want to say the timer is not going there so I don't know how much I'm talking but like um meanwhile in the last few years we I did like a few multi grants on git coin give it see other funds around thirty five thousand dollars raised we applied for ethereum foundation grants uni Swap Grants UNICEF we haven't heard back from them that much but just want to say I have experience like playing around with grand platforms um so there is some backstory to this there's this talk um at ethanver which I talked about all the experience we had in the last few

years on trying to do things in Farsi community and getting back getting kicked out for sanctions either for mostly for just cautionary reasons um just one thing so another slides have this QR code just because there is like a lot of Side Tracks and other topics feel free to take pictures of them um that talk was about like the story from the last five years till March and um yeah and there was this other talk that followed by Amin ceremony about Iran Unchained and that was one of the first times we announced this project um that we want to do this NGO also another QR for that talk and just to say overall what was discussed

there so there is this my talk talks about like the tldr of this timeline as like 2021 was a really great year women blockchain and coin Iran sponsored a lot of students to go to consensus Academy boot camp uh we were like the community was growing really fast and on the second round it was in September 2021 around 65 students were there and that's around the time that Virgil Griffith was pleaded guilty not arrested pleaded guilty and it trickled down in the whole ecosystem as like getting rid of every risk sanctioned risk that there is so um consensus suddenly banned the Iranian students from the academy like two and a half months in of the three-month course

git coin suspended women blockchain Farsi Grant and this was a shock to all of us um I really want to give a shout out to giveth that gave a home to women blockchain Farsi and they kept the values of web3 um and that was the year ended we celebrated the new year and we're like all right let's thank everyone that helped us get here give a pull-up to everyone and then Paul rejected me because of sanctions and I was like I'm in Canada what they're talking about uh that's where we were like all right let's take things on our hands let's just the show will go on and let's do this and around February women blockchain Farsi released all their contents and courses online for free on YouTube it's fascinates me to see it's

in Farsi it's solidity and has more than 40 000 views um the QR shows a lot of like other timeline with links to other news agencies that I have like talked about this uh it's educational like reading those um those events so that's where we started on a chain it's a Dao it's a molec Dao V3 around 15 members um it's backed by U.S I mean it connects to a us-based NGO and one thing we realized is like especially because Iran protests are happening now sanctions are a bit lifted from the population and Iran Iranian people especially around like internet Freedom I'm going to talk

about it in a bit but Banks still do the over compliance they don't let you send money so we're like let's crypto fairs let's figure this out um and you have to place twice yeah so we deployed the Dao on in April the down members ratified the charter the NGO Charter so the NGO and Dao got connected um it was a fun experience to like do the signal signaling on dial and basically we started with five initial Brands like we said like let's do a bunch of Clans figure out if this works this is almost still proof of concept like we think we can work this out but let's see so we started with a few grants internal freedom for Iran

supporting urania and nftr tests and a few others that I'll talk about in a bit um so entire freedom for Iran is an interesting topic here because a lot of the web 3 companies that blocked Iranians fall into this category um and it's actually like providing support to your Iranians for internet Freedom was recently explicitly encouraged by a U.S treasury and um that was the umbrella grant that we created and we started looking around we found one company one group of people funny enough its name internal freedom for everyone intent for eye and their goal has been to prevent regimes proxy companies outside Iran that has been helping the

government to shut down the internet for people but not the banks and the government um and we these are one of our grantees for internal freedom for Iran and they were working and they got um like scale their project they started Distributing a lot of like VPN connections to the Iran and other Raspberry Pi's to like um used as a proxy and one thing that came out last week out of this whole initiative which I'm really happy about and it's one of the first time I'm happy about someone getting sanctioned as there is this company called app R1 which has been helping on the tech side to basically block internet and around sensor internet but give access to the government and with the help of internal

4i and a lot of other people apparently around 200 people were reporting these people these team these companies and they got sanctioned which is a big deal because then they can't buy these servers outside and help Iran government to sanction people while to shut down internet while Banks work and government so infrastructure still works um the second grantee we had is this newsletter called zanzenegozi which means women life freedom one thing I really like about them they have a really like 90s looking website I like that they're basically documenting verified news as it happens and it's really rare in the age of misinformation and it's really valuable to have this and this was an interesting grantee

because they're fully Anonymous team really high at stake because if anything leaks from their identity their risk execution and it is Iran government we're talking about um and basically we gave them Grant they're continuing to work on this and the messages we got were we actually signaled them you guys are doing great job continue doing your work um another fun grant that we did uh which is uh supporting ring an nft artists and just for everyone to know art has been exempt from sanctions almost forever and this is also one of the reasons we want to do this is to Signal all these NFD marketplaces that ban hearing and artists open see and to you don't have

to do this this is bad like you don't need to do this and a shout out to foundation and other platforms that keep ripped through values and don't just block people just because of their IP address um just looking at some of the Arts these are some of the Arts that we bought these are all from Iranian nft artists and basically we put this announcement online call for applications we got around 400 NFD artists applied um and we end up buying around actually the first round around 69e a 69 nfts we didn't plan to have 69 it just happened it was a signal that we're in the right track um and so yeah one thing we did just

because of the logistics we start buying them gradually over a few days when you're back to went back to the nft artist profile to like send this this tweets I really suggest reading that tweet thread because like we notice how impactful this was like if we changed someone's life in it one day at a time and like people who wake up to their first nft sale and they were so happy and they didn't even know that they're talking about this Anonymous collector that bought their collection they didn't even know they were selected for the the thing they applied and this was really heartwarming warming to just see and there are a few of these these are one of two of the nft artists I love which

I really like mix mix art media and these are like a really interesting one the the one to the left the mixture of Super Mario Nostalgia with like Iranian poetry and they also have music I couldn't make it work and also this other one which most of the people said oh this looks like it looks like Japan I know and it made me wonder if if Iran's Islamic revolution did not happen 40 years ago how would Tehran or even Japan would look like it could easily be like this um so a bit of a geek time now I just want to say how Iran and chain Works under the hood um so basically it's a anyone can start similar Dao part the legal side this is the side um you can go to the Dial House website

summon a ball you get this whole package which is like a Iran Unchained there's a molec Tau you get Sam which is a voting share it's all bound you can really move it around and the treasury which manages write it down this is how it starts this looks a bit busy but this is the whole thing this is like you don't want to change the whole thing so like anyone can come to the website create a grant we'd suggest to create a forum discussion get the signal before creating the grant because you have to pay gas um and then creates a grant which is a nosy safe owned by the Dow and the idea is anyone can start a grant they can install race fund funding race funding

and when there's enough money down members can get involved by basically doing the due diligence legal consultation just to make sure they fall on the general license e or D2 and basically send the signal to withdraw vote on it and let's send the money to grantee and we have to do offer quarterly reports which we're kind of busy doing this month as well so this is a whole system it pretty simple for what it what it does you don't have to like mix it up with a lot of different contracts in that sense okay so there are enough opportunities we found out here we found out that like

a mixture of molecular with no C safe it you can do so much like so much that you can't even imagine there are like safe modules you can have a grantees funding that has limited spend there so that someone else can go buy nfts or do something else or payment streams like pay someone over a month we can delegate is something we've been talking about with I mean is Dao social recovery so a dow can responsible for recovering your funds after your death or after you're arrested or some other methods um these are like opportunities that we can just play around and find out um but also another thing that I really want to know more on the sociological side is like how you do you measure non-profit Dow impact we noticed we made

a lot of smiles can we add that to our okr like probably or I don't know how to measure that or even jobs created because it's teaching about solidity there is a lot of people having like jobs that they could do before so that's one of the things I'm interested if anyone wants to talk about it um I'm happy to take it offline after there were like a lot of technical challenges legal challenges aside I'm not even touching those right now uh monitor UI would realize it's a bit buggy on the edges thanks for thanks to the Dow house team to fix for fixing these um l2s and other EVMS right now we're on ethereum mainnet we can't really move around because no safe address is on ethereum in it and we can have the same

address on the other l2s and one of the things you notice like that the app logins they usually want to sign a message where a dow treasury managed by us we're no see safe managed by a Dao so we can have a profile just write what our profile name is which is like maybe an EIP for that can solve it um oh yeah and more nfds that we bought I really like these and also that one has music I can't play it here we have some upcoming grants we're going another round of nfts because this was fun please please we started directly changing people's lives internal freedom for around round three and one thing we're focused on is eth

conference scholarship to expose Iranian developers to the ethereum community and the other around I'm more interested the other way around because I know a lot of like really smart Iranian devs and we want to focus on Def connect Istanbul because let's close the logistics work and another one is summer boot camp that we're focusing on and so in that case I just want to say like you don't Unchained we did a US NGO to make sure you as persons can donate to Iran legally if Europeans want to donate they can but it still goes to our 500 000 a year limit and we've been talking to git coin about some git code econolic Vision git coin MB that like it's used a similar structure to be a better Grant platform

um and yeah for Defcon and each Global this is kind of call to action if anyone's doing hack your houses there any events there get in touch with me get in touch with me so we can maybe distribute the Iranian devs around different hacker houses for higher impact um and I think I missed one no yeah oh yeah so that's mainly it like please check out the website donate or share the link and we can all say women life Freedom together if women life Freedom all right thank you any questions

all right thank you [Applause] [Music]