Virtual Communities in a Physical World

Transcript

my name is david mahal i am a software engineer i live here in lisbon i was one of the organizers of this event so so awesome to see you guys all here in lisbon i've had a blast so far hope you guys have had fun too and today well first of all is a little change of schedule if you're looking for uh the talk about off chain city i'm going to get to that in the end but the the main thing i'm going to talk about is a website that i built well i'll start with a website i built called cryptofees.info uh and you guys know crypto fees couple people and you guys ever like uh send crypto fees to a friend that's

like interested in investing in coins it's way of yeah but for anyone who doesn't know the site this is the the site that i'm talking about so it's called crypto fees.info it's a super simple site like uh basically what it is is it's a list of crypto projects ranked by fee revenue um i'll give a little backstory on it i made this site back in the heart of defy summer i saw this tweet from hayden adams uh of uniswap where he was like check out like here's the you know ethereum is making six hundred thousand dollars a day bitcoin's making four hundred thousand dollars a day and uniswop is making sixty thousand dollars a day that's like

a lot and then all these other chains are making less than a bunch of hot dogs and i thought that was i'd never seen someone comparing applications against layer one chains but there's there's really no reason you can't so i thought it was a great metric i made a really simple site like this just for myself um it's crazy it doesn't even look that different than now it looks a little nicer um like a month after i made it i shared it for the first time i didn't think anyone would care but you know the site started sharing being shared a ton getting a ton of views people were sharing it on twitter using it in twitter arguments here's one of my favorite exchanges um mark

cuban of the dallas mavericks posted it in response to the founder of a different crypto project so the site was getting a ton of attention i started building other info sites to show other metrics this one's openorgs.info which shows dow treasuries l2 fees uh with my friends at l2b that that shows the cost of using layer twos uh money movers shows uh value settled um so i started making all these sites um and i noticed that these sites were kind of part of a bigger ecosystem of of info sites of sites that were providing important data to the community um i'll show a little

plug for some some other sites that i'm a fan of on the left here we've got defy lama and you guys know defy lama they're a site that shows total value locked in d5 protocols and on the right is l2b i've got a bunch of my friends from l2b where are you guys either way l2 beat shows data about ethereum layer twos the main metric they show is value locked but it also shows stuff like um the the trust you know what trust assumptions are built into these protocols how can you exit and stuff but one similarity between these sites between all my sites they're all completely open source so anybody can look at where the data is coming from they can they can fork and make their own site

and none of them are monetized i've talked to again the creators of both these sites and you know funding sites like this is a tough problem because well first of all it's easy to bump into conflicts of interest when you're monetizing data especially data that's like financial data here's one example i don't know if you guys saw this this is from coin market cap shortly after they got acquired by binance people noticed that all of a sudden bnb was the top defy coin uh seemed like there was a little conflict of interest there this only lasted for like a week or so but i think it's one example of how you know it's hard to monetize these sites

without you know when when people pay for something they want something in return so this is a a bit of a challenge to to have good trustworthy data because this data is a public good you know people are using especially in crypto people are using data to make investment decisions they're using it to decide you know where they feel comfortable keeping their money right like l2b tells you do i feel comfortable putting my life savings on you know these rollups um d5 pulse might sorry l2 uh yeah d5 poles or else defy lama might tell you oh do i feel comfortable using this d5 protocol or other people putting their money in it um so yeah it's a public good and public goods can be you know hard to monetize

hard to scale um but that's what we're good at in crypto is handling public goods so today i want to announce uh the next step of this project which is the launch of a dao uh called crypto stats and here's the kind of the goal of it the goal of crypto stats is to be one neutral source of crypto one neutral source of truth for cryptometrics uh that everybody can use and that is owned and managed by the community to give a kind of some over an overview of how these sites work how data sites work um we can kind of break it down into these four layers the first one is obviously the blockchains where where the actual activity happens so you have

uh you know the blockchains themselves like ethereum arbitram polygon just some examples and the applications that are running on those blockchains so that's where activity happens the next step is like the indexing layer uh and so that's taking kind of the the actual activity and parsing it kind of running the infrastructure to to take all these data points and create some aggregate numbers um you know i put the graph protocol here i made them nice and big because you know on crypto fees crypto stats like we use graph protocols for so many of our metrics it's an amazing resource and it's a you know the graph protocol itself is a you know or aims to be a trustless decentralized protocol for indexing data there's also centralized sources

centralized indexers like like coinmetrics and then the next column is where we come in is the the normalization stage and this is where you know i don't think there's a ton of um of activity a ton of other projects that are addressing the need to take data from a lot of different sources normalize them you know take the most trustworthy accurate data and provide it because of course the next step is to provide data to the presentation layer to provide it to sites like crypto fees openorgs and and others the goal of crypto stats is to kind of be the wikipedia for data if you think of wikipedia wikipedia is this source of truth about the world you

can search for anything and there's like a great wikipedia article that explains it and anyone can go in if they see a mistake they can go in make their contribution kind of make the world a better place by updating that data with cryptostats we want to do the same thing allowing anybody to kind of come in and make their contribution to data being available to all this is an example of the well this is a mock-up of the site that we're working on this was made by our ux designer mike doing an awesome job this looks a little bit like remix you guys probably know remix is the website that lets anybody go in and create their own smart contracts in their browser we're aiming to do something simpler

anybody can go in and create an adapter in their browser adapter is just a little bit of javascript code that lets you pull data from sub graphs from on chain from any data source normalize it and make that data available so the next step of course is if you're making a change if you're kind of asserting what you think the correct data is someone needs to approve that change and that's where this dao is going to come in i'll give a little bit of uh context on how this the dow will work at a technical level we're just going to have an on-chain registry of adapters uh by ipfshash so the idea is if i go in and there's a new d5 protocol that i think should be listed i can create an adapter i can submit it to the dow that

this adapter should be added to the registry and if the dao votes through whatever governance mechanism it chooses then that adapter can get occluded and the dow can support any number of types of metrics so you know i included fee revenue because that's like the the one that's gotten the most traction on my sites at least but we can look at treasury size like what we do on open orgs uh total value locked any metric that the community finds valuable we can create a list create adapters for it and make them available to all and there's a ton of demand to get good trustworthy data i put bloomberg up here because bloomberg's actually been pulling crypto fees data for like nine months or

something like that um but i'm talking to a number of other projects that are interested in making new sites to use data so one of them is the bankless dow i'm sure i'm sure a lot of people here know bankless but bankless dao is looking to build their own kind of uh stats and metrics site so we're looking to provide them data crypto testers is another great media site for crypto information and this last one i think is super cool this is fails i think talus i don't know how it's pronounced um it's a d5 project that's part of the synthetics ecosystem i think they're providing binary options and the team has kind of reached out that they're interested in using some of our data to be the source

of truth for their options so i think this is really cool because now the data is coming full circle that not only do we kind of index normalize aggregate this data it can get fed back in as an oracle right back into on-chain applications now one thing that sets us apart i think from other projects doing data providing data is that the goal is data should always be free um now i think this aligns a lot with the the ethos of the open source community and the crypto community that you know software should be free it doesn't cost anything to have a quote here quote from richard stallman that you know it doesn't cost anything to copy

and share software there's no cost at all so why are people selling software you know that was a pretty controversial idea for a long time now you know our whole industry is built on open source software and i think the same thing is true for open data like it doesn't cost anything for me to share data with another person so it should be open and free but that leads us to the problem of you know if the data is going to be open and free how do we fund it right we want to pay developers to build adapters we want to pay data analysts to come up with the metrics we even want to pay websites to show the data you know the crypto community's already done an awesome job at

finding ways of funding um open source software and public goods you know bitcoin is like the obvious example of a project that does work to fund uh public goods but i think crypto stats is positioned in a way that there's some some unique things we can offer uh that can provide additional revenue streams for the stout so these are some of the ideas i have you know we're going to launch this dow soon and and first thing is i'm going to propose these two revenue streams first one is a sponsorship model sponsorship is a really great tried and true method of funding public goods one example is this event here you know events like this are a public good you know we put these events on so everybody

can come have a good time like support the ecosystem but they're only possible with support of all the great sponsors that are in this other room companies like the graph and one inch and whatnot so we can apply that same model to dows uh and one great way i think to to format sponsorship is you know if you're sponsoring over time why not do payment over time using what is basically a streaming auction um i know fran from superfluid was talking about streaming auctions this morning so here's an example of uh you know how we would do a streaming auction you let people come in place bids on how much they want to pay per second and the top number of bids those get activated and money just gets streamed

from the sponsor into the treasury if you want to see an example of how a streaming auction like this will work you can actually check out the the live stream for uh for this event we're using a streaming auction to add a sponsorship to the like bottom corner of the live stream so if you want to check that out that's at stream.lizcon.org but coming back to this so the idea is we can stream money from sponsors into the treasury and then we can even have the websites that are presenting the data you know if they can say oh we're going to take the current sponsors display them on the website and then turn around and make a proposal to the dow and request that they get paid for promoting these sponsors

uh and so now we not only can kind of fund the crypto stats treasury but we can use this model to pay for sites like crypto fees like bank lists any site that wants to that thinks they have a cool way of presenting this data they can find a way of of funding it and and making that site sustainable and this is the other uh idea that that i think is really cool for how this dow can uh monetize itself is an index token um index tokens a number of daos have already used to earn revenue um like the bankless dow created the bed token we have some really cool data here uh you know about fees of different protocols imagine if you could buy

you know an index of crypto fees buying tokens that are weighted by how much are people paying to use them uh i've actually had a number of people request a token like that so um i think that's a great another thing we could offer so that's basically it for cryptostats the only thing we have left is i need help from all of you guys if anyone's a developer a data person and you want to get involved the easiest way is to join our discord you can scan this qr code or go to cryptostats.community discord or just reach out to me uh directly i'm do my hall on uh twitter and on telegram

and that's basically it on crypto stats before i run i'm gonna do one quick uh plug for the other project i'm involved with um come on up here if any of you guys are interested in moving to portugal i'm working with a project called off chain city i'm like gonzalo say just one quick word about it this is my partner gonzalo hey uh hey everyone so if you are interested in um real estate with the crypto exposure here in portugal uh we are launching a fund before the end of the year run as a dao we only have 60 spots um primarily for anyone who's interested in gold and visa european passports uh

if you're not interested in that we'll have another one on boarding next year uh off chain dot city otherwise there's a q a happening starting now in about five minutes just outside here in the lobby area thanks and thank you guys so much uh hope you enjoy the rest of the of the conference here and i'll see you guys all at the after party thank you thank you