S5. Ep. 2 - MACI And EasyRetroPGF with Hodlon & Alessandro

Transcript

welcome to the green pill. network podcast you are listening to season five this summer of retro rounds which is hosted by SEL and La now Mau this season we'll explore retroactive funding in web 3 and each episode features a different ecosystem unpacking their experience in implementing the retr funding mechanism we'll explore how they're tailoring retroactive funding to their unique ecosystem along with the challenges they've faced in ways of overcoming that this season is co-hosted by SEL and laau and the next voices you'll hear on this episode are from [Music] enjoy hi everyone I'm SEL one of your co-hosts for season five which is Summer of retro rounds today I don't have laamu

with me she is my co-host for the season because she is our guest today yes that's right so laamu is also part of eia Mexico and in this episode we talk about etheria Mexico running a local retroactive funding round with Macy so we have PSC team talking about how they enabled Macy for running a retro round and then we will talk about how a local community like etheria Mexico chose this mechanism and on top of that they chose Macy so it's going to be a great episode and I'm really excited for you to you know listen to it and leave your

feedback and yeah hope you enjoy it welcome today we have Macy team with us and we have laamu from eia Mexico I would quickly ask everyone to introduce themselves so hlon maybe you want to go first sure I'm hoton I uh work with the psse Privacy scaling and Explorations and specifically right now with the Macy team helping to support Macy team from a non-technical perspective more of a community outreach Integrations and um product perspective hi everyone I'm alandro I'm also from PC and I work in MA as well I'm more on the technical

side and helping out as well projects that use Macy and once around rounds with it or just integrates it hi I'm Lao I'm wearing a different hat today in the podcast I I'm part of the ethereum Mexico pgf team which is small initiative that came out from ethereum Mexico in which we're experimenting with different funding mechanisms for public goods at a local level so we're looking at how do we Implement these things that we've tried out at a more Global web three digital communal Community level and how can we look at this from a different lens from local communities in a very

specific geographical region thank you so much and I think this is uh quite interesting you know we have not really seen like a local community round and you know collaborating with the de team right usually it's the EOS systems that do that so uh maybe La I can start with you tell us a little bit more about ethia Mexico how it started and you know like what was the origin of it and the work that is happening there that kind of probably you know and then later you know we'll be able to better understand what actually led to you know this round definitely so ether Mexico kicked off in 202 22 we started working the idea came I think in like early 2022 there were some of us that had been traveling to a

different hackathons had participated in different conferences and we were aware that the eth global team was hosting a hackathon in Mexico in I think it was September August of 2022 right before like on the road to Defcon as we were preparing for bota and we thought this is the perfect opportunity as we're preparing for for East Global hackathon for the East Global hackathon not a lot of people had participated in hackathon before so we wanted to make sure how can those that have been in this type of events help the community and sort of like get everyone ready to participate in this type of hackathons and then start prepping the community as we were

looking towards ston supporting some of the members in the community to attend identify what the roles could be in the larger ethereum community and we we launched ethereum Mexico as a that time it was like a small event we uh hosted some side events more geared towards Builders like how do you participate as a PM and in a hackathon we had identified initially there weren't that many developers on the ground so how do we prep the whole Community to participate in this like Builder mode and then as that developed throughout time for 2023 we hosted an event in Mexico City that was one day long in

which we talked about different layer twos optimism was also one of our sponsors we explored some on ramps and off ramps and we focused as well on looking into public goods we'd identify that there were several communities uh Beyond ether Mexico and that's also one of the things that we've been pushing for we are aware that one Community like if your Mexico does not represent all of the barriers and the challenges that our community members across the country face it's very different when we look at it at state level uh depending on what are what kind of access to education people have so all of these different things and so our goal has always been

to empower more local communities at a state level or a municipal level and with this idea we started connecting with this communities since 2023 and looking towards 2024 one of the things that we wanted to ident identify is how do we extend their life of these communities as we know communities uh need funding to survive so how do we make it easier for them to do the job that they know how to do well they know the communities well how can we Empower them and this is how ethereum Mexico pgf came to be public goods funding so that we could give the funds to those that are generating the impact at the edges

and who know well better than us in a centralized way what the community needs wow huge congratulations on this great initiative I think I'm really attached to local communities because you know of green pill Network and you know that was exactly the idea when we started green pill Network and I can imagine I still remember the post where we talked about how we bring the capital allocation mechanisms on local level and this is already happening and happening at a very like next level I would say because of this collaboration so um yeah I'm really excited to you know dive deeper before you know we touch upon the collaboration and get for on the round I would love for hon and Alexander to expand or share more about what is PSC for our audience who may not know right

and U yeah and specifically about the you know Mai project and the BC team within it yes so psse which is privacy scaling Explorations is a team that's funded by the ethereum foundation and with a focus on as the name suggests uh privacy and other kind of ethereum and ethereum ecosystem and even wider cryptographic uh Explorations we build everything PC builds everything works on everything from uh you know cryptographic research working on Primitives um protocols like Macy all the way to dabbling and end user applications as well and everything in between awesome how big is the deem psse has about several dozen projects there's

about a hundred people involved at psse over several dozen different projects great thanks for sharing that Macy was is a um private volume protocol uh stem from a idea from vitalic like 2019 maybe and since then it's been iterated a few times uh not only by PSC but we have our own implementation of it at the core is is built to reduce collos in v and it can be easily applied to public good funding as people get to vote on what the money is distributed to and they get to do it in a much safer manner enabling much more democratic uh processes for

that thanks for sharing that Alexander I know like maybe I'm just getting ahead of myself but uh so Macy is right now used with quadratic funding right like is there and of course it's now we'll talk about R drag right that's correct yes correct yeah so it can be used in a different flavors right at the core is voting right any type of voting whether it's qu voting or normal voting M can be used for that and then building on top of it there will be the quadr funding and the rpdf initiatives there's more that we haven't explore yet like working with or like local uh elections but that is something for the future and I can

chime in there as well because this is one of the things that for us was very interesting and very important like this is why we sought out to to use the Macy technology I done some research before on like how comfortable communities felt with each other participating without being the ability to be anonymous in certain of the conversations that they have and one of the results that came out at a community level especially like in again in geographical locations for web three communities was that people did feel this pressure on how they interacted with one another and what others would think of them and I think in a comparison at a from a digital level in which is maybe you participate

in a digital web three community and of course there's different things that can happen and how that could affect your professional life but when we're thinking of a local level like where you are literally leaving next or like the other person in your communities two blocks away that can have bigger repercussions which is one of the things that we were thinking as well when we thought of this round is how do we promote people to really focus on voting with the goal of rewarding the communities that have greater impact for our larger etheria Mexico Community rather than feeling that they will be able to see how I voted if I vote in a

different way maybe I'll be ostracized I won't be able to attend the events in the next month in the next week I won't be able to hang out with my friends around this topic that I enjoy so for us at ethereum Mexico this is one of the first things that we thought of when we were looking at designing this round is how do we ensure the Privacy for the people voting and also how can we use this as a platform to show there were some discussions that happened at the end of 2023 with our uh Senate and they were talking about how could we use blockchain for local elections and we were like well if we are able to show

them this is an implementation of how you can use anonymity within a voting process it might not be an election but it's already a voting process it's already happened this will also make it easier for us as a community to push with our government to look at this technology not only as a theoretical possibility but something that we've already implemented yeah and this I believe is something that both the Macy team and Mexico uh a goal that we're aligned on like Macy is designed to scale to you know uh hold uh voting in elections the size of a Nation right and so being able to prove on a smaller

scale that it can work right and introduce this technology which uses cryptography and which uses you know distributed uh technology um to make things safer and more trusted um was really exciting and then also to your point Lana about um privacy within a community I think it's also really interesting to see how you know sometimes when people think of privacy they think of you know Edward Snowden type you know we need to you know secure ourselves from the three-letter agencies but actually there's there are also social components as well even down to your local community where having a privacy by default actually helps maintain the social Fabric and help

communities be stronger in an example like running a quadratic funding round where you are essentially voting on your communities you know how to distribute funds within your community Alexander do you want to add anything no not much really I mean I want to say that you know whatever um L almost said was actually very nice to hear and you know it's great to be working with people that share the same ideologies and want to make a good impact and it's it's great the Amic get to be used for this it just makes me happy to to hear that and see that thanks for sh sharing that LA and La I did not know that it has such a strong um you know like foundation and you know the set of beliefs that you started this with and uh I must say you all have answered a

lot of my questions but maybe just go back a little bit where La I want to ask that what made you choose you know retro active you know mechanism like why retro right we could have done qf as well I know you talked about incentivizing you know community members but yeah just would love to know a little bit thinking of yours other than the fact that yes you are an expert in that but you know what led you to choose this yeah so there was actually a lot of thought put into the the design of the round um this is something that we started exploring in 2023 initially we thought of just running a regular qf round which was like the most common

thing that I think has been happening for some of the eth local events and as we start looking into that like I noticed several things that we could actually use this round for that serve the communities as well and that would move us away from the popularity contest which is something that became more and more visible with certain qf rounds so first was seeing the experiment with optimism on what rer rounds were and what the idea of holding a r round on based on impact like wanting to ensure that all of these communities that had

been doing a lot of work for quite some time like months and years like how do we contribute back to that instead of thinking prospectively like oh maybe they hosted like we know that people have this recency bias as well it's like oh so maybe they just launched they hosted one event and they asked people to vote for them and we're going to forget about those communities that have been on the ground doing the hard work for months or years so how do we actually reward them how do we build these incentives as well towards what do we want to see more of in the community so we chose four different categories for the round one of them is gender

Equity so how do we push more communities as well to focus on bringing in more women into the web 3 space how do we ensure that there's more refi projects more projects looking at how to work with agriculture communities and like different local communities that are not only focus on the technology side of things but again sort of like at the local level how do we improve the the place in which we're living so that was one of the things of choosing retro like a retro round H is thinking of the incentives thinking that this is hopefully not the only round that we're going to be running so how do we inside in the community this expectation of

there will be future rounds so if we continue doing work along this lines of what's needed for our community we will get rewarded in the future yeah that was great and you know I'd be interest I know the round is still going on right is that correct I think it's in the voting phase yes so right now we're we're in the voting phase um it's been really interesting like as we used this new mechanism a lot of people are not very familiar with retro so for example that was also one of the things that we needed to do a lot of emphasis on it's like we're looking at past impact uh we're not looking please sort of like asking the communities please don't just

vote for the community that you like the most please read through the application take a look at the evidence that communities have shared and this was actually one of the large things as well that we thought of in the design of the round and why we thought that the current build for the easy Rich pgf build was really good we identifi that there are some communities within Mexico it's a small number uh but there are some out there that do tap into General web three funding gitcoin rounds uh maybe some of the optimism retra rounds but it's very few of them and more often than not they don't have unchain evidence so for us this was also an

opportunity to bring this concept of generating onchain evidence of the work that the local communities are doing and rewarding that behavior sort of like you give pups to your community members you give them at the stations that they went to your event you onboard them through a wallet and that is what we're going to ask from you to participate on a round but this opens the door for you to participate in so many other rounds the web3 ecosystem so we're setting like I think one of our main goals as well was how do we set up our communities for Success beyond our local level but at a global web three level in which this

type of onchain evidence is going to become more and more needed in the ecosystem for them to get access to funding wow I love that it feels like uh more and more local communities need to uh need this kind of um you know vision and sort of guidance because there are so many right now which you know are trying to establish themselves and it would be good to have you know this as a case study for other local communities so yeah that's that's great I want to ask hon and Alexander like you know when um like how did this start like were you guys already working on making it part of retro as well or when this uh sort of this happened because etheria Mexico was

was planning to run this down right so where were you guys and how this whole thing started yeah and then would love to know a little bit about your experience from technical perspective for our technical audience that you know because it was part of like yes you you know it was for qf but what was different you know when this was getting into for retro right so complexities and a little bit of that so yeah be awesome to know that yeah I I'll take that all right just for context yeah Mac's been used in qf for years built on other like protocols like clear fund for instance and up until recently we didn't really have our own stack for running whether

it was quadratic funding we have some sort of stock but we've been mostly relying on clear fun and lately uh we got approached by um optimism and I think they just finished the first actually the second retroactive round and they wanted to explore how to add like uh privacy into the process and that's where we start thinking right it might be easier for us to actually build this ourselves rather than rely on clear fund as is quite specialized on the qu funding aspect you know to get things started pretty quickly we actually uh forked uh easy retro pgf uh from gitcoin uh that was a lovely code base uh that

really like made our life much easier than rather than starting from scratch we for that and basically added Macy on top of it so yeah like idea like we started thinking okay how can we make this even better and you know we could have gone like two two ways uh rather continue building our Fork kind of like further out from the original project or maybe try and integrate back ma into that but you know after some discussions and like technical feasibility we kind of decided to continue Contin on our own fork and then expand it even more and during that you know we got in contact with if Mexico and few other communities

and yeah they've been like our testers you know has off to them for testing a product it's been an interesting experience to do that but in terms of the difference uh like from a technical perspective I think actually uh the RPG staff is easier than the qu funding so basically the r pgf is voting but with like some sort of money that gets distributed at the end and the criterias can vary of course but on qu funding there's the the process of actually uh voters coming and contribute money to the port so there whole sort of like implications of having smart contract

handling taking money from a user and you know keeping a record in case they wanted the refund because they don't decide to vote and all sort of things and actually our pgf is just straight up easier uh as a voter you come you don't need to contribute any money there is a b of money there you just vote on I mean where you think the money should go to yeah I think that's kind of sums it up I want to give hats off to eth Mexico other communities that we're running rounds with right now kind of knowing that we don't have a a super polished finished product um knowing that going into this it was going to be a process of feedback and iteration it's been a wonderful experience like we've taken a

lot of the feedback even along the way um and kind of incorporated as we've gone I feel like it's been very mutually beneficial in that way um for us to be able to help contribute to you know the community's um R pgf rounds um while also getting feedback about how we can make that process better yeah and I think for us it was also it was a blessing because we from the get go we had wanted to use Mei and our first thought was like how hard is it going to be to implement it to a completely new platform um I know we had several conversations with the with the Macy team at the time where we're like okay but how much development time is it

going to be needed on our end if we're starting from scratch because like when we started the conversation it was this this wasn't um built out yet so we were kind of scared of like how ckx experts to our community members need to be if if they want to help us with developing this tool and so it was such a good news for us when the team was like Hey we're actually already developing it uh this is a platform that we are using in terms of front end would this be useful for you so it just made our lives so much easier and we've gotten such good support from the Macy team in terms of figuring out some facts that we don't

understand like what's happening there also getting feedback on in terms of like what could be confusing on the platform uh what are some of the barriers that we're facing I think similar to what Alexander is mentioning is we're really excited to see more communities use this so we know that every piece of feedback that we can share will hopefully be useful for the team as they are um continuing to develop this tool for more of the communities yeah now all the feedback is very much appreciated like uh all the found and you know just how to make it better for us it's super useful right is you wouldn't be able to improve without these experiments and hopefully we get to do more and I'm very confident next time it's just going to be easier and

easier and hopefully we get on board uh more and more people uh gross yeah I think to kind of the point we were talking about before of having a shared goal of this being a test round and like being able to do it successfully but then also you know building on being able to show say governments local governments or larger communities how actually this is it is easy to uh use this technology and it is easy to have kind of a privacy by default and an anti clusion component um built into your process of consensus and voting and stuff like that love it yeah uh something uh there is not a plan but I was wonder if you could add like I was

curious to hear about the um from lanu like the process of actually choosing the the voters right so because this round was uh gay kept and only few people could get uh to vote I'm just curious like you know how was this where they Chosen and um yeah definitely so uh for this round one of the things that we looked at was who are the communities in ether in Mexico since we're looking to reward past behavior and at the same time incentivize very specific behavior at a local level we wanted to make sure that the people voting knew that were participating in the round had either attended one of

their events so they would know firsthand what is the work that this communities have done there are some communities here in Mexico that have a greater advantage in terms of exposure to other latam countries so maybe their following is not just Mexican people or people living in me Mexico but they also have a following in Colombia or they have a following in Peru Argentina so this would also bring disadvantage to the communities that are just focused on a local level if we were to open it up for every anyone and everyone to be able to participate and then also in terms of how we looked at who was Voting and sort

of like from these communities who they were working with what stage were is their community ad in their web three Journey like for some of them maybe they are already def5 people and doing different things so uh they would also be much more familiar with the technology so one of the things that we were definitely looking at is how do we create this Fair competition among the communities so that we are still making it attractive for really new communities like the main problem there is not like oh large or from our perspective is large web three communities are already familiar

with the ecosystem but if we want to bring more of the local level communities communities that their focus is not on I'm going to build the next protocol of like the next defi protocol but I'm going to on board the next group of local Artisans how do we incentivize them to continue playing the game and that wouldn't happen if the first round that they participate in is obviously like heavily influenced by people that have been in the ecosystem for a long time so like one of the things that we had to scratch because of the timelines but initially we also wanted to have just non web through projects that were that had been contributing for democracy

or privacy that would have required this is why we scratched it but it's something that we want to do on one of the next rounds it requires more onboarding so it also again is thinking of how do we even the playing field so that they are interested in continuing to play the game with us and use this mechanism and so the way in which we went about it now it's like okay how do we actually get the voters um we had about 26 communities that we had already identified as we were working towards eor Mexico 2024 they had either hosted sessions on the road to etheral Mexico 2023 or we had given that like e Mexico had given them some small grants to host

events so it was like this is perfect like these are people that already have some familiarity with web 3 that is also how we ensure that this is not only a Mexico City thing which tends to happen in a lot of uh the laam countries where most of the things H are happening in the capital so how do we bring it down to the local level we engage this 26 communities and ask them do you have pups do you have ad stations do you have nfts anything that we can use to know who your community members are and that is how we ended up we actually ended up with a list of I think it's like 1,300 wallets that are allow listed to participate in the round we'll see how many of them convert into voters but that is how we ended up with the people

in the allow list yeah that's awesome yeah thank you for sharing that yeah I think that the you were talking about the the one component that you ended up dropping that you want to explore later I think is actually really interesting and really important an problem area of How It's Easy for say those who use ethereum and use cryptocurrency to participate in these rounds but there's actually a large barrier to entry for somebody who has never used a decentralized application never use blockchain don't know don't actually care how it works and so I think that that's that's actually just in general like a big problem space to solve for and will be a huge unlock for not just this not just quadratic funding R pgf um

but in in general um but very specifically for like how do we run rounds with people who have never used uh never interacted with ethereum before or blockchain yes and on our side it was also how do we showcase the mechanism right like this is a way in which NOS that are doing work here in Mexico can tap into other types of funding that is coming from a place of people that appreciate this research or work like Civic work that they are doing and for us it was it was something we really wanted to do but we realized that beyond the onboarding part of well we need to identify sort of like talk to the NOS make sure they could take crypto and it

wouldn't like mess up their taxes and finances uh get them to create a wallet support them through that process we also realize that on the design side of the round again to make sure that it's not oh they went through all of these hurdles to get the wallet get up there draft the application they didn't get any votes so we realized okay we also need some sort of like mechanism on the side of the voters to make sure that you we're able to push people to allocate say a certain number of votes per category which is something that again with the time constraints and like technical constraints it was like okay let's go for small EC

MVP on our side was also like this is the first platform thing that we're launching that is uh also like has a lot of development work from community members when we started the conversation with with the mey team it was like these are all of the things that we want to do and like these are the things and then I was like okay let's scope it down what is the first MVP that we can come up with and have this run uh successfully and then we can iterate and be like once we have something out there that worked then we'll be able to build on top of that but I totally agree with Hon like it's one of the things that we're also looking at how do we make it again sort of like how do we make it attractive for

people to want to play these games with us and use these mechanisms wow uh I'm curious like what kind of education went into it la like because uh I know we also recently ran you know Ma for Z you know it was a lot that was needed to be you know shared with the with the community on what it is you know what is the importance of it and benefits of it and you know guides and a lot of things right because not everyone gets it so uh yeah curious like uh if you could share a bit on that front that you know how it was introduced to the broader community that this is what we are doing and this is what it means or yeah uh this was one of the points in which um we got a lot

of good insights from some of the work that the the qfi I think like past qfi team where some of the the community rounds that the me team had run is they have really good case studies of some of the work that other communities had done in running their own qf rounds the importance of marketing and sharing with the community what was happening I think if uh I'm not sure if either hon or Alexandro want to share more a little bit of How It's also been to work with some of these other commun ities it definitely has required quite some educational work uh I do think that there are advantages to running it in parallel to an event which is something

that's not happening for a round but I think is the most common way in which some of the other communities have run it because then you have a captive audience and like you can just tell them about the thing at the event or like as they are coming in or maybe there are some talks for us we've been hosting several sessions that have been received in different ways have had different participation levels we hosted one that was just for the communities for them to learn how to apply on the platform and submit we've hosted several sessions as well just for voters but there's definitely a lot of work in terms of knowing where your audience is like we made some documents but the reality that

most people don't read so we shift it into videos and we'll see how that goes we're staying deeply in touch with the communities that are participating and it's an experiment so we'll make sure to share our learning so that others can also benefit from them yeah I agree with the point of it's very nice when like a round is running in parallel to an event just bringing back memories of like death on bota it's like you know people actually come there and it's like oh yeah how does this work and you know got their interest and and everything like it was it was a very nice experience experience to getting actually in touch with the people that uh wanted to apply for the round for the people that

actually wanted to vote and contribute the money and something that you might not get a sync yeah I guess any education in this pH is great like I think you know both gitcoin uh clearan Us and other communities are doing a great job of actually bringing this to the people CU it's still like and people like come with the question is like oh what is qu funding or why do I even care maybe about privacy why do I care about public goods you to some people even like what is a public good right it's not something that everyone is aware and every little uh that we do I think helps how to make it easier for people right I guess like this probably like maybe two School of

thoughts right is like do we just make it so similar to any other application that people don't even know don't need to care that is private but I do we still Focus on trying to Market somewhat different uh to maybe attract the people that care the most uh that's like I guess kind of difficult distinction to make and decision to make but yeah like at least from our perspective we do have a lot of plans on making this as easy as using any other application even like for people that are not uh crypto native hopefully in the next few months we'll be able to have people uh without a wallet be able to use it we could sponsor the transaction like kind

abstraction and what not but yeah I think like targeting like the masses and then like getting you know as we just talked about projects that are non Crypton native I think that's like the next logical step to actually get them uh involved into this I think this is a good retro Public Act R pgf rounds are like a really good I think kind of micro use case for this technology a lot of times people in this space like to kind of put the cart before the horse they say we have this really cool technology how do we get our technology into the hands of people but this is a case where it's kind of like well we actually have a a really fantastic way of redistributing funds and distributing funds into a community

on a community level how do we allow people to participate in that more and so that's also kind of an exciting component of this and and working on this problem is that it is a very practical use case of this technology um that we're building on I would also be super interested and curious to hear more about how it has been to work with some of the other communities that have been using the Macy implementation into R pgf like did you find that they were also like oh yes privacy first this is what we want or was there some work that you had to do in terms of selling it up

to why you the one that has mey and not the one that doesn't yeah I'm trying to think yeah I'm trying to think I'm personally not familiar with how we got into contact with the other two communities um but in terms of we still like on education side we still had to breach the Gap to the organizer themselves to like for them to understand like what is Macy and like what is private voting because some of the requests we ask is like oh yeah we're going to get the voters to share the ballot to make sure it's okay and I was like okay this clearly like we did not explain that you know the purpose of this is for it to be private um so sure

of course voters always had the choice of sharing how the V it like that's they can do up why not but you know it's not the point of this is to make it as private as possible uh so yeah that we have to do some of that work of explaining yeah of we've not been in contact with any of the voters themselves for the other projects oh sorry with the other communities rounds I think there's there's some inherent like U Technical and ux challenges that we have because of the things that Macy provides right anti collusion and the Privacy there are extra steps and extra components to the platform and to the um protocol that are necessary for that to

happen and so kind of going back to what we were just talking about is how can you or do you abstract that away to make it as easy as possible to use so that it's hidden but also at the same time is one of the major kind of benefits that it has all of these things so this kind of a a complex web to pull apart when you're talking about especially in the state that it's in a lot of the experimentation we're doing you know around running a coordinator around um the technical components that actually take a lot working to further optimize to make it as easy as possible um but are it's still complex to run you still need some some technical knowhow in order to run a Macy round I do think it's something that's going to be very

useful and interesting for as more and more communities start leveraging it I think most people and more most like Community organizers or passr operators they're used to qf and that's it and as we're going into having more mechanisms like not just rro but exploring more of the other mechanisms this is one way in which we're I think everyone is sort of like shaking this oh things can be done differently so how does that work like how does thinking it in a different way works I think is really really exciting and I'm really happy because uh I do believe like as I shared before the support that we've been getting from the

team has been incredible which makes our lives a lot easier as we're coming across some of the other challenges in terms of explaining as well to the community I think for not just operators but communities in general is relearning what funding mechanisms are and they that it's not just qf like there are other things out there yeah you know and we are also towards the end of the episode uh but like you said you know there are so many people are used to qf but there are other mechanisms and you know other use cases of Ma I just wanted to know like as you said you know there are different use cases and there are different mechanisms where we can use Mac so at what point do you suggest you know mechanism Builders to start

thinking of it right or come to you and be like you know hey uh this is something we're interested in right so to me it seems like is it like once the mechanism is matured or like at what stage right it is something that should be just inherent like you know we should be thinking of it right the beginning right it is so any suggestions for mechanism Builders out there because we are also building you know Alo ecosystem where we are getting developers in the ecosystem we want them to you know start thinking of mechanisms and building them right so at what point they should uh yeah think about this I want to say early stage like thinking like from a complexity perspective May is like is a

primitive is as low level as it gets and it's just easier to build something on top rather than adding it while you already like in the middle of your building let's say it's not un feasible of course but yeah I mean at least you know we're kind of biased on the privacy in the name so privacy first and yeah I would say like it's important for everyone to think about it and as it just made so much easier with like TK Technologies it's fair and it's reasonable to start thinking this early on and then basically take this complex uh primitive and like abstract it as you continue building make it easier and easier and I kind of remove that people

that use it at a point is like oh am I using something built on Macy that is private just using any other thing uh at least that's how I see it yeah and I think from like a design perspective when you're starting something and looking at it holistically again we're biased because you know privacy is literally in the name of the organization that we're with but it is really important to take uh privacy components into consideration especially when you don't know or think that you need them um to consider that and I think with the decisions that and the work that lamu and eth Mexico made is a really great example of thinking about why it is so it's easier to not use ZK

it's easier to not have to add an additional component of privacy but at eth Mexico you you actually thought about and understood and realized that just because we're not trying to to you know protect ourselves from a nation state or a cartel or anything actually privacy has a valid and legitimate use case to in order to you know run these rounds in our community and that was a value that they had and so they um they made sure that that was a high priority when they when they went to run the rounds and so yeah when you're thinking about uh building you know incorporating at least thinking about how could you know building privacy into this system um be beneficial on on all levels and on

all layers and is it worth doing or not and it's becoming easier all the time to alandra's point you know ZK technology is improving all the time um and that's something that um you know obviously we're working on and I'd like to also give a plug for us at the end here like if you are working on a project if you're curious about Macy if you have some novel use cases that you wanted to share or want help with the Macy team would love to from you love to collaborate and to talk about the different ways that we can you know support your community um or support these other projects uh with what with what we're working on and Alexandre do you want to give the email address maybe is it Macy P.D oh we got Discord as well

oh and join our Discord like And subscribe Discord like And subscribe yeah yeah um we'll make sure we have the email address in the discarding the show notes as well so anybody you know can who wants to connect and join can do that now any last thoughts on you know maybe share a little bit about what's next for uh if you're in Mexico or maybe some of the things that you're looking for as outcomes for the round and or maybe some analysis that you are interested in getting into as soon as the round ends definitely and I think just to add uh real quick to what hon was mentioning is for example one of the things that we've noticed with optimism

is that now we are looking at how do we build the Privacy component afterwards it's like we are concerned about uh collision between badge holders we are concerned about people not acting uh accordingly to their conflicts of interest we are concerned about how do we decentralize the rro pgf process so that others can can validate it see that people actually voted uh without leading to bribery for people from people to the badge holders so like this uh from in the question of like what comes first it's like it's definitely a thing of depending on the

resources that you have but if you're able to from the get-go start thinking about the Privacy part you'll identify that often like you'll need to patch those things afterwards and it might even be more work than if it's something that you think of from the very beginning and then in terms of what's next for E Mexico and eth Mexico pgf is right now we're in the voting phase we're excited to see what the results are how people are participating uh we're taking so many notes of everything that we're learning in terms of how voters have interacted with the platform how applicants have interacted with it and we're developing a blueprint and so that Comm other communities can use this

blueprint to run their own rounds not only from a technical perspective but we've realized that a lot of the learnings are coming both from a design perspective of how do we think of the designing these rounds like as I shared in in the podcast like all these considerations of like why privacy and like why these type of communities and like why these incentives um that is something that we like we really want to see other communities sort of like up their game and how we're thinking of using this magic internet money to advance certain good things that are happening in our communities so how do we give them the tools so that they are

able to do that both from a design perspective of how to think of this mechanism from an operational perspective how many people do you need like how far in advance do you need to tell the applicants the voters and then obviously from a technical perspective so this is one of the things I'm working on once we finalize round and have more of these learnings and then the year Mexico 2024 is happening in September 14th 13th and 14th of September we're gonna be hosting it in this beautiful beach called Beach town city called Merida close to Cancun in case people are familiar with Cancun but not Cancun so it's better um would be would love to

see some of the people that are listening to the podcast come to the event and we'll continue experimenting with this funding mechanism so that we are able to bring more of our community and Seed more initiatives of the things that we want to see happening in our Ean Mexico ecosystem and I think now if uh hland or Alexander you want to share like what's next for the Mei team like what are some of the other things that yeah so Macy like um we're excited to see through all these Community rounds first of all um got all the feedback I will be pestering laam Mo and the team uh on feedback and feedback and feedback she already been amazing giving us a lot

but we need more uh we' be asking everyone else and try and improve this platform and as mentioned as we started from a as a fork of e EAS pgf from gitcoin we expanded it to a level that is we think is a different product and hence call it now M platform and we're looking to expand more into different uh funding voting mechanisms and try to integrate everything into this as we said platform where yeah you'll be able to do any poting I don't know want even like anything stupid you can think of just you can use it but like voting on your favorite memes or whatnot uh

funding running qu funding rounds uh running pgf rounds and as we get to learn more of what the community wants as we manage to read through uh kwin aoki's book on of capital funding there a very large book that we have a task to read and try understand which other ways of voting and fun is there we'll hopefully get to implem some of those and um and yeah so on two fronts build the platform and make it as accessible as possible to read uh non crypto native projects so a can abstraction and everything else that we need on that and on the ma protocol side

to improve it of course this is far from perfect can be made more efficient uh we can remove some of the trust that the the central coordinator entity has and uh make it more secure so on these two fronts uh we plan to continue to uh work and we are like a public good uh with a community first or any feedback from everyone is always appreciated whether you want to submit an issue because you think we be doing is wrong just come in a Discord and talk to us opening GitHub you want to work on something you want to ask for a grant reach out there like we're looking for as much participation as possible and as well uh getcoin they

integrated am into the AL stack so we look to like helping them improve uh the integration like upgrade inions and just continue all together to make it easier for people to fund and to vot on things they care without having repercussions maybe that's a bold statement but eventually that's that's the goal maybe hold on uh and even Alexander you can share last bit that you know a lot of our um large part of our audience is also non-technical like how can they get involved or how is that you know they can contribute yeah what would you say this's the most impactful way that like a non-developer would be able to for example if somebody wants to run around

maybe or like use the platform in some way I think it would be really valuable to you know work together to do that so that we can get you know non-technical feedback around that totally yeah follow the guide then try and set it up be a participant vote and tell your friends about it that's also like the easiest uh contribution you can make maybe in the future translations as well like getting uh the content out of while audience and I think even just to plug the Discord again um coming into the psse Discord and the Macy Channel come in and ask questions there are no bad questions there are no dumb questions and just

engage in that way there's a big gap I think to be bridged between like the technical components and just even conveying those and understanding those so even asking questions helps us a lot it helps the team it helps the community right understand these things better helps us build better do documentation helps us build a better product um to know how people are experiencing and interacting with what we're building yeah we got a suggestion as well from design suggestions yeah I think yeah that's after all like the users whether they're Technic or not like they know what they like to use and yeah any feedback awesome this is great I must say that you know uh I'm excited for

Greenville Network to run MEC retro round like I think I really am you know inspired to do that and I would love to share this with the GRE B Network Community but I want to say thank you for being such amazing guests I think it was very you know like sort of fluid and organic and yeah thank you and we'll make sure all the details are in the show notes so that everyone checks that out thank you thanks everyone hope you like liked the episode you've just heard that how a local community like etheria Mexico is running a retroactive round in their community and they collaborated with PSC team to actually add a layer of privacy by you know integrating ma this

is um I feel like this is such a you know like the next big step for you know all the funding mechanisms that exist to start thinking about how we can add that privacy layer and I'm really excited to explore this combination with other ecosystems and in Greenville Network as well please leave your comments on you know what what is your learning do you like it did you not like it what else would you like to see to what extent do you want to get us deeper into some of these conversations and please reach out to PSC team if you're also interested in running something similar and yeah hope you like it thank you so much [Music]