Public Goods Podcast

2024 Public Goods Outlook & 2023 Recap

• Public Goods • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Proud to introduce the first Public Goods Podcast, a PotLock community initiative to bring conversations in the space to changemakers building public goods and funding mechanisms. 

In this inaugural episode, Web3Plug goes over 2023 trends and 2024 outlook for the Public Goods space.

Learn more at https://publicgoods.fm and follow at https://x.com/publicgoodsfm 

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Gitcoin Innovation ->

Crypto Altruism in 2023 Outlook

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Communities  ->

Funding Sources  ->

Happy New Year, Happy 2024. It's the Public Goods Plug, AKA Web3 Plug, core contributor of Potlock and I'm proud to announce the start of the Public Goods Podcast. And so what we're doing at the Public Goods Podcast, this isn't normally the format, this is the inaugural setup. A bunch of the core contributors at PotLock will basically be interviewing a bunch of change makers in the space, especially those building the public goods. you know and love and love to fund, and then also those building public goods funding mechanisms. And maybe Web 2 and maybe Web 3, we can learn something from everybody. So a lot of excited things that happened in 2024 and beyond, but since it is the start of the new year, I thought I would give kind of my predictions and outlooks into public goods into 2024, but also give a little recap in 2023, because a lot of amazing stuff did happen and... Although I'm predicting stuff, there's stuff that I want to see that we need to manifest. So I'm going to go a little bit into some PG manifestations, public good manifestations in just a second. But the main reason why I did this and started this podcast and why I want to create this media format is to not only go through my exploration and have a one-on-one and two-on-one and in-depth conversations with a lot of the changemakers in space. and learn this as I build public goods funding mechanisms while you guys join me. But I'm a fiend for this content. I'm a fiend for a lot of public goods content. Big shout out to Green Pill Network. Big shout out to Webbrief for Good with the kind of consistent weekly newsletters. Big shout out to Crypto Altruism. I love the content that you're doing there. Refi Podcast, the DeSci Podcast by Molecule. There's a lot of players in this space. that really inspire me and I take a lot of the lessons and implement them into the practice today. And one of the main reasons why I'm doing this is because Green Pill, shout out to Kevin Owocki OG, the Space, went from Tuesday, Thursday, every week for podcast content to literally five a quarter since he came back to Gitcoin. So I'm a fiend for this content. If you ain't gonna make it, then we're gonna make it ourselves. So shout out to everybody here and shout out to also all the places. and kind of the events that also really stimulated a lot of the ideas I'm having here. So one of the models that we have here at the Public Goods podcast is to innovate, make it impact, then iterate. And so I hope a lot of builders and founders here or people maybe even sitting on the sidelines learn a lot of these concepts, you know, let that hit that my cellular network as a walk it likes to say, and actually put that into practice or hit me up. And yeah, we can find an avenue for you to actually build that. So I'm gonna go a little bit recap in 2023. A lot of dope stuff happened. It's also like beginning 2023 was kind of like down bad. I remember back in November, I was coming off from Breakpoint. Shout out to the family over on Solana. Everyone knows I'd be repping that near, building near public goods infrastructure, but I love my homies at Solana. And I was at Breakpoint and literally all that FT, I was at like a FTX party one day and then like the next day, crash and. And yeah, it's crazy to see the whole ecosystem, especially as Celsius and like Three Arrows, and then we thought it might be contagion with, you know, Grayscale But there's a lot of things that happened in the beginning of the year, and then there was like the banks and Silicon Valley Bank, and then there was like the depeg of USDC, which I lost a lot of money. I really thought things were going to crash. in the crypto game. If you've been in the game, you know that anything can happen. Although, you know, we're now having industry adoption. You know, especially being in America, there's a lot of regulations that get happened, like not only could you lose all your money, but you could lose your freedom with this game, but making the impact is worth it. So when things like this happens sometimes, you know, a lot of us were the conception that, all right, USDC eliminated. All right, maybe Solana is eliminated. But shout out to Solana. absolutely killing it actually doing more value than ETH and all the L2s combined right now So shout out to Solana the builders, Chui Glass is actually building dope products at the beginning of the year We really thought we was down bow. We really thought we was getting eliminated. We was really in the bear so Shout out to all y'all sticking through it still building We got a bull coming up and we about to ride that up on the impact wave But throughout that whole year where we're getting down bad, spacked on the left, and spacked on the right. There was actually people in the impact space consistently making progress. So I gotta give a big salute to all my peers. I'm gonna start out with the OGs and the OGs. Big shout out to Gitcoin. So Gitcoin did a lot of major things, shifting to kind of just an Ethereum-based thing to adding different layers, but also announcing the Allo stack. So initially when Gitcoin was built, it wasn't built with composability in mind. And I'll go over that in 2024. And also manifestations build with composability at hand. Although you founders are shipping pretty fast, you got to make sure that when you guys blow up, manifest that when people are adopting you, people can easily integrate you into their stack. But what Allo protocol is, is for Allo V2, so you have Gitcoin, which is really three products when you look at it. They got a Gitcoin passport Gitcoins coming off of quadratic funding as one of their primary products. They also had bounties in the past. But with quadratic funding, you're having these people who are sponsors who have these matching pools. And then based on unique users and unique contributions, they get matched even more from that pool. So if you have a bunch of different wallets who are basically gaming the system, you can result in a lot of unfair outcomes. So... A lot of y'all building Quadratic Funding, you know you gotta essentially build simple resistance tools on top of that. This is something I'm learning as well, building QF in the near ecosystem. But, like, one of the things that they launched with Allo, which is the set of the underlying contracts for Quadratic Funding, and also they're adding things like direct grants it's already there, and then RetroPGF, which is in Beta, they launched their V2 back in the fall, and they've actually been implementing it with a bunch of players in the space. So they have the universal impact pool with Endaoment I'm gonna go a little bit into that, because Endaoment, I absolutely love your product. I use it. Big shout out to y'all. I'm gonna just save that for a little later. They also implemented it within other experiments like Quadratic Lensstirs, which uses quadratic funding with tipping on lens. Shout out to Raid Guild who built that. So they're really experimenting with actually integrating Allo. Giveith, shout out to Giveith, they integrated also. quadratic funding with two rounds. I think one in East Barcelona, which was at the suburb, and another one for the giving season. And you really see, and this happened with the UNICEF round that Gikkoi did as well, this inflection point where the matched round is being exceeded by donations. And like, so if you have a $20,000 pool, people actually donate any $20,000 as well. So especially from the perspective of the sponsor, it's becoming a really good and compelling narrative that... you might actually incentivize not only new projects getting onboarded, but also more contributions that you're putting up. And so it's crazy to see this inflection point. And also big shout out to, you know, the former head of impact Azeem at Gitcoin did a lot of big strides on really adopting big names in the space to do quadratic flooding routes. He did one with Shell, they got some blowback, but I got a different philosophy about that. Did, as I say, UNICEF, American Cancer Society. and a bunch of other big names in the pipeline. So big shout out. You know, we're usually looking at like, Polygon for doing these big level BD deals. But at the end of the day, like, the way that Impact does deals and all boards these big enterprises and these big corporate corporations into the space is way different than Polygon, who's like, or any other kind of L1, which essentially subsidize integrations, they don't normally lead to actually sticky this into the ecosystem. I think what's happening with actually using Impact as a way to onboard organizations is first of all, they know we're not scamming and off the hype and they can actually see kind of tangible results and we're not directly paying them, they're paying us. And so I see that 2024 outlook actually Impact as being the one of the major drivers for... onboarding major BD deals. I'll go a little bit into that. I'll be a little back and forth with the dates in terms of 2023 and how it translates to 2024. But I still got to go with Gitcoin because I'm going to have a whole little segue. But Gitcoin they also had a bunch of Schelling Point series, a bunch of dope conversations, and they actually had the first one in Asia. I'm really bullish on Asia, actually. That's also one of my 2024 outlooks. Funding the Commons had their first thing in Taipei, shout out to DA0 a lot of people out there building open source communities. But they had the first, shout out to Asia, it was beautiful to see, had the privilege of going there. They also launched their own, well not their own, with a coalition of people in the impact space, they launched Public Goods Network, which is built on the OP stack, which is a layer two. that sequencer fees goes entirely towards public goods funding. And so this has me transition to giving a shout out to one of the biggest OGs in the space and the precedent that you're studying for the rest of us in the industry. So for y'all though, don't know what retro-PGF is. It stands for retroactive public goods funding. And it is initiative in the optimism ecosystem that rewards people who've already done work and already have shown an impact with OP tokens. based on the OP governance. And they're on season 3 right now. I think literally OP, Retro PgF season 3 is being done right now. They're giving out 30 million OP tokens at the time of this recording. I think OP is around $3.70, so that's around like $110 million, which is pretty huge to go towards public goods funding mechanisms. And every version they actually hacked is... I was trying to get an answer on how they actually implemented it. And so shout out to Alo because they're integrating RetroPGF, which is essentially giving badges to people and then delegating funds accordingly that into their Alo stack. So other people in the EVM ecosystem can integrate that. That's in beta. I'll link it in the show notes on how you get involved in that. But what RetroPGF is inherently doing is they're basically setting a precedent that if you have an ecosystem that actually rewards... builders and founders for building stuff that is useful and they know that they can actually gain a sufficient amount of income from just building and the ecosystem will reward, you're essentially driving more people into your ecosystem and inherently into your own stack. And so not only did you see the rise of people building on like optimism because of retro adopting the OP stack. And so public-based network is just one example of that. But this is a pretty, especially looking from ecosystems like Nier and other L1s, it's like, this is pretty huge. Not only was PGN building on it, you had people like Zora or Mantle Network, which is one of the largest DAOs in Web 3 building on an OP stack. You have Base, which is huge. And now you have the base engineering team contributors to the OP stack. And the secrets or fees are like... The fees that are generated from base, now they actually made a deal. Well, from the start they made a deal that those go directly towards RetroPGF. So you have people building on the stack and naturally building because they know they're going to get these rewards. Big deals coming in, like base is now bringing in like... Literally the biggest brands on the ecosystem they're coming to your chain. And now like for example, FriendsTech is on base which is on the OP stack. Even Endaoment is on base. So you kind of see like this kind of alignment with the OP stack, especially for people in the impact space, people getting funding from it, people building their stack on it and this inherently driving additional deals. And then those fees generated from the networks actually going back towards public goods funding. So... From other L1s perspective and other Ecosystems perspective, it's like this gives a very compelling argument to fund public goods and build your economy so that builders will build and people will build on your stack and even businesses and big brands, which makes it way easier for people to convince their boards to build on your stack. So there's really a flywheel effect, you know, coming from the OP stack. which I attribute a lot into RetroPGF and shout out to RetroPGF, they actually saved Gitcoin at one point I wouldn't say saved, but they really they really saving these projects who don't have like direct funding sources, so big shout out to Deb big shout out to everyone participating in these rounds and yeah, check out RetroPGF 3 so I kinda was alluding to it, but Endaoment yo, shout out to Endaoment, so if y'all don't know what Endaoment is Endaoment's honestly like I was talking, I ran into the guys at Barcelona and the product wasn't where it was at. It was dope. In terms of Web3, one of the things that we have is the friction of actually onboarding people especially when a product like Endaoment where essentially you're donating to verified 501c3 charities and getting a tax write-off on one of it which is a huge market, over half a trillion in the United States. A lot of that now just transitioning into online giving and then crypto giving. I think crypto people who give crypto give like 100x of traditional donors. The actual argument for why nonprofits should adopt crypto is very compelling. Endaoment is one of those tools that make it extremely easy to do so. I think a lot of stuff happened in the fall. One of the things that happened in the fall were... Endaoment launch endowment for everyone and so basically looking into their product is so in America say I make like 50k and I can write off like for around like 4k of that in right off if I donate to charities and so Usually I have this problem of like hey, I Need to donate to a bunch of charities like it's December. I need to get it in for the tax year And I kind of have to donate to the charities figure out if they accept the asset and then essentially like give all then. They leverage something called a donor advised fund which is essentially like a, it's like a fund but the moment you donate to it, any type of asset, it may be stocks, it may be crypto, it may be anything, you can put anything in a donor advised fund, you can put, if you have goats, you can put goats in there. And if you have, so you can write off it immediately. So it separates the decision of, hey. I'm going to get the write-off now. I don't know which nonprofit I'm going to donate to or which series of nonprofits, but I'm going to get the write-off now. It sits in the donor revised fund and essentially you can then delegate to verify charities as a grant giving organization. And so normally this is the status quo and this is why I love endowment because they're really solving a problem in this space directly. If I want to start a donor revised fund, I was looking to do it because building public goods platforms is like I got to essentially go to like... There are three providers like Schwab Fidelity and then I think some else. It's like 5K, or 25K to start one of these funds. But essentially, you can do it for free on Endaoment. And with Endaoment for everyone, they basically added Web3Auth, so you could essentially with your email have an account on base. And then you can donate crypto, whether it's OTC through exchanges or directly on the native chain. or cash through any type of like Fiat or Bank or Stripe integration or stocks. So you can go on email, donate any type of asset into your own donor-advised fund where and you can also even apply for public donor-advised funds where people can donate to your fund but you can essentially get that kind of tax write-off, donate any type of asset, don't need to save your private keys and then later in the year you can or at any time you could essentially be a grant giving organization that delegate those funds to verify nonprofits which they pull from the IRS list and then they have this verification process where it's even if they don't have the account they can verify later and you saw this a lot with the like retro PGS is like even the projects they kind of delegated and gave rewards to they actually had to hit up to claim these rewards and this is one problem we have in the industry it's like Either they don't have a profile and we can't donate to them, we have to onboard. That's like kind of what's happening when we're building like PotLock and also a Git Coid or even a Givet. It's like, I can't really donate to projects that are audit or you essentially make a profile and on behalf of the user and you have a claim process, which is also what Drip.network is doing with GitHub claim. We've shut out to them. And this is something in terms of manifestations and what I'm going to see in 2024. And what I really want people to build is clearer claim and verification systems and verification APIs we could use across a bunch of different trades. And so in conversations about building that too, but like that is a big issue. So what Endaoment does is essentially let you put money in this fund, give out grants at any time of the year. And say you put Dogecoin in this fund, if it goes up, you don't have to pay the capital gains because you already got your right off. So essentially, you're kind of like the manager of a fund and you can give out grants like any traditional foundation to nonprofits. How I mentioned this before with Gitcoin and how they implemented the Allostack, they actually had this impact pool and then they're given like 30 or 40k like every month or couple of weeks at a 200k. So normally so what I hate about Gitcoin is the onboard experience, to be honest like And this is one of the things that we definitely need to prioritize and I manifested into 2024. We have to build products that have UX built in. We don't need to have these 24-hour calls where we're onboarding people. We need that actual product to explain the product itself and build with this in mind, which is one of the things I see the theory because it's not there yet. But what Endaoment allows you to do is, if you donate So they have this 200k matching around powered by aloe on the back end. But if you donate to a non-profit, which is like, you may have signed up with your email, you may have donated a stock, you may have donated crypto, you may have donated like fiat, based on what you donated, they basically match the matching pool on that. So you have a way of doing quadratic funding where you don't have to go through passport, you can just go through an email and you can use fiat, which is pretty revolutionary. So shout out to GitCord. endowment on the collaboration. Also, I love now. I mentioned drips, but I'm gonna talk about nows right now. So if y'all don't know what nows is, nows is they're basically selling a nows every day for the past like 800 days and it goes for like 10k and then it's like an auction and then every day all that money goes to the treasury and then people who are the holders basically vote on the proposals that expand the nows brand. So the nows, you might have seen the noggles, they're one of the bullish pfp collections. but they are CC0, Creative Commons 0 So they are an open source brand, anyone could use and anyone could proliferate, and they fund things that support this. So they funded like Zora in the past for building a announce builder across different trades. So you can easily build these kind of NFT based regular auction interval treasury dows and in funding things like Prop House, where you could kind of have smaller grants, things like that. So there was a recent proposal for... now it's the gift to endowment. So I love seeing this NFT ecosystem crossover collaboration. And that's 2024 inside. I see a lot of NFT ecosystems actually directly contributing to their rewards to these public good funding mechanisms. And for even public good funding mechanisms to build in a lot of primitives, like taking in meme tokens, maybe even using Uniswap routers or in here we have ref routers to auto swap it. actually sell them to USDC and stuff like that because companies need to actually use these funds and not necessarily hold these meme coins. But I really see an intersection between NFTs and public goods funding as well, especially when you see a lot of people in the bull run. And you can see this when more people get rich in the ecosystem, they tend to donate more. And when more people have inherent assets in that ecosystem, they tend to... like actually buy NFTs and things like that. So I see this really, this flywheel effect, but big shout out to Nouns and Endaoment. Love the both of y'all. So yeah, shout out to the collab on there. And shout out to Endaoment for being one of the most seamless experiences that I've seen in the space as well. And so I mentioned DRIPS. And so, okay, so I'm also gonna talk about donor-advised funds. This is one of the things that I see as another trend because At the end of the day, we're only capturing such a small bit of the ecosystem, which is non-profit funding and online giving. We're not even like... I saw an estimate somewhere like 4 billion, but I don't know. I was adding up all of the different ecosystems. I'll go into it later, because I haven't given you all my shout-outs yet. But... Drips.Network If y'all don't know what Drips.Network is, they actually launched recently. I thought they launched before, but they were showing me the product. Taipei and I really I really love this idea and so just now we came from like the rad works type of crew if Yada with radical is it's like decentralized get and so what drips network is it's the ability to fund software and Stream funding to software and its critical dependencies so I can say hey I am building this app on I'm building PotLock for example, and we use near API.js. We may use you know I am human, and you see repo for civil resistance, I can be like, hey, for every dollar you give me, I'm going to take 60%. As a core contributor, I'm going to give 10% to that repo and 20% to this repo. And then essentially, they can set up their own stream. So they can say, hey, when I fund me, you go to my underlying dependencies. So you're basically funding your dependencies upstream, and you have the user define that. And if a person does not have a GitHub, like they don't have... an account for their repo, you can actually configure on GitHub a way to claim this and reward your contributors there. So it's really this idea of being able to fund your dependencies and define those dependencies as well. And this is also a big trend. I see more primitives happening for funding open source dependencies. There's also Tea.xyz which is essentially doing something similar. This built by the guy who built Homebrew Package Manager on Mac. but essentially a way to reward dependencies automatically based on their usage. And so the idea of like, not just, hey, I'm someone who sees this impact, I'm going to delegate to you or have to vote my dollars. Actually seeing, especially in software, what is dependent on each other is really huge because we're generating billions of dollars on the open source software side for these corporations. And... Outside of these corporations directly maintaining this, there really isn't a steady stream for devs to know that they'll earn. GitHub has sponsorships, but they're not actually learning real value. So shout out to DRIPS Network. They also streamed a few million to dependencies they have when they're actually building their software. So shout out to them. And speaking of DRIP and DRIPS to DRIPS, or DRIP and funding to DRIPS, I don't know, I think they call it DRIPS. Big shout out to Octin. So Octin is another trend. I'm also giving a shout out to Metapool because I'm over on the near side. Metapool is one of the first liquid staking providers near. They actually put all of their rewards into their DAO. They actually give that to people expanding their mission. But they expanded to ETH because they got more money on the ETH side. So shout out to them. And they actually give all of their rewards directly to Gitcoin. rounds in the LATAM and it's pretty cool to see a lot of these like DeFi infrastructure using kind of staking rewards and giving it directly to public goods infrastructure. So big shout out to Metapool and similar to Octane which completely, to me it came out the left field but like what you guys gotta realize is like these layer 2s are new. There's been layer 1s before Ethereum, there are new layer 1s now and they have billions of dollars in their ecosystem and... They want new ways to allocate that. And so when you see the RetroPGF and you see the other players in the ecosystem make an impact this way, and actually even drive value for their ecosystem, it really changes the narrative. So you might see, and this is one of my 2024 predictions, MoreLayer was building and incentivizing public goods outside of their ecosystem in general, and coming out the woodwork because... Crypto space is big and there's a lot of people with buddy and one of the people that threw me off of the left field was essentially Octant.build and So my bad. I'm running on breath. I'm like out here pacing back and forth excited about 2024 But what Octant.build is it's essentially So there was if y'all know about Golem Network, it's like this decentralized GPU stuff back in like 2016 or 2017 I remember copping (buying) that and it was like essentially they had an ICO on Ethereum and essentially they have a bunch of Ethereum and they're using a thing like basically they built this thing called Octant well it's like a spin out where they allocate some of their ETH rewards and to and then they have this Octant app where people who are staking Golem or GNT or whatever it's called can actually delegate which public goods funding to give those rewards to, in the most simplistic terms. So they're actually funding things, not in building on Golang, which most layer ones in different ecosystems do, but general public goods infrastructure. So they had a round in Shifai recently, they funded the Coppits, they funded DRIPS, they funded Gitcoin, and I think it was the tune of like 300, it was like 400K in their first epoch. So they're doing this every epoch. And kind of the incentive is like, hey, we're getting a... We're getting more people to use Golem as a use case to delegate to funding public goods, which is pretty amazing to see. One of the things that we realized in the ecosystem is that we need to get off all of the chain maximism. And that's what I love about the impact space is that we're able to, you know, parlay where more people would be in their sec, learn from each other, and even fund each other and have these plural funding mechanisms that Kevin Owocki is talking about. Because at the end of the day, like, I don't think people care whether it's quadratic funding or direct or grad, but the fact that I can build in the ecosystem and people will recognize my rewards and contribute to me from multiple funding sources and that is competitive towards working a corporate salary where I can just build open source, I can build impact and not worry about it is a huge statement so it's a beautiful thing to see different players come into this space and start to fund each other outside of different ecosystems. So big shout out to Octant and Octant.build go show out. I think Epoch 2 is coming out, you know. So big shout out to them. Man, I'm running out of breath. There's so much 2023 shout outs. But one thing, like, if you don't know me, I don't got no home or nothing. I'm crypto homeless. I'd be out here on these streets wherever that impact is popping. And I had a huge privilege to go to a lot of these events and be shaped. My thoughts shaped by a lot of conversations being had outside of just podcasts. And so a big shout out to Funding the Commons Y'all better check it out. I'm gonna talk about AI in a second, because we're doing a Funding the Commons with NEAR in San Francisco with Berkeley, and going over... it's gonna be very AI webtoothed, but an FTC like you never saw before, but if y'all don't know what Funding the Commons is, is there a... they're spin out of protocol ads, but they're essentially a shutting point for people building public goods and Commons in this space. And I came back in Paris, EthCC with a... smash like that was my favorite event. It just had the most people actually building and caring about the ecosystem I've ever been to and I've been to every all five one of the comments around the world since because I'm a fiend for that everywhere there's an FTC I'm an FTC groupie so big shout out to them so they came back in Paris you know 2023 they had a Berlin residency program where they actually bring people into a dope environment to build for a month and with DeSci Berlin, that was pretty dope, and big shout out to everyone at the DeSci space, I'm gonna give y'all a shout out, 2023, y'all make it moves. And then they had, I think, FTC Turkey, and they're starting to partner with more kind of local organizations, so shout out to D-PACT, everyone out there. They also had a shelling point, like back to back there, so shout out to Gitcoin, they did a vet score out over there, and then there was another one. Pretty sure there was five. Paris, Berlin, Istanbul, I think Taipei. Pretty sure Taipei. I don't know. I felt like I went to five. Yeah, there was one in Taipei, which is the end. Like I was saying, big shout out to DA0 which is pretty cool to see different government officials come about. But they also had a hackathon before their residency, so you see just like an original really bringing people from different shades into the space and an opportunity for us to actually meet each other, but actually emerge into web 2, traditional government, now AI, now hackathons, now with a residency. So big shout out to David and the crew of Plenty of the Commons and all the work that you guys are doing there. It's been a big impact on me personally, that I highly advise everyone to go in SF. I think it's on the 13th and the 14th at Berkeley. And so speaking of... you know, different events and stuff like that. I think all of y'all probably heard of Zuzalu you know, this kind of Vitalik funded event out in Montenegro, this network state where kind of the best builders came into the space. It set up a movement about network states and big shout out to Balaji, network state podcast, network state conference happening before break point. I see a lot of emergence of people, especially like crypto, like where you say like, you know, a lot of crypto guys originally like, yeah. We're about it, you know? We trippy, we about it, we move around, we're very fluid. If you wanna tax us, you know, we go to a different country. I'm just joking. But you have this really nomadic culture and wanting to go to the places where impact is needed. And I think network states really come to that. So one of the biggest problems with being a nomad is you don't really know people, you're pretty much alone. So having not only people who are building an innovative space come to one place. but actually building tools and infrastructure to support this ecosystem and to begin to get recognized by externalities and then have this kind of pop up everywhere is a huge deal. So, Zuzalu, they even just the Zuzalu pocket thing, there's been inspiration stuff going on everywhere else. They had ZuHacks in Singapore, went to that, it was dope. And then a lot of talented devs as well. And then they had like... ZuConnect in Turkey, they had a little residency thing and they had a hackathon tool and they built stuff like ZuPass there's ZK identity solutions that you have, people actually building infra to support these as well. That's one of my predictions in 2024. Not only the proliferation of networked states and networked state infrastructure, but actually penetration into developing countries by setting this blueprint. having a lot of us start different cells in different places and really have network states where they need it the most. Rather than kind of just resorts that are popping up and stuff like that, we actually are intentful about the tools and technologies that we're building. We empower the community and we build more longer term, sustainable living in the places that need it the most. But you had a lot of people inspired by that too. You had like in Chiang Mai in Thailand, it was MuChiangmai Like shout out to 4Seas in the community out there if that's I you have even right now Well, I don't think right like a few days of the Vitalia I'm gonna leave all this in the show notes. So y'all get a follow a vlog, but you have the Vitalia which is like a biohack a type of city happening to in I think Roatan under us which is one of the economic zones that they're mentioning in their work states and Shout out and check out the network state conference There's not only people who are building this infrastructure, starting this community, big shout out to Cabin DAO all the suppers been doing everywhere. But, like you have people essentially building modular homes, building charter cities, building currencies that economy is there. So, I think outside we're stuck in a crypto bubble, but you can look at like Dubai as a network state, as Singapore as a network state. And it's really powerful to see Balaji like... bring a lot of players in the room and have a stick bigger outside of Web 3 and really make an impact and drive the civilizations the new age of civilization so that's pretty good and dope stuff that's going on. I mentioned DeSci I mentioned biohacking shout out to De-Sci-World, shout out to Athena-Dow, shout out to HairDAO shout out to Molecule shout out to IPNFTs I think IPNFTs are going to be a huge splash. I think a lot of onboarding of traditional scientists and people in the space and even maybe some major publications or having the norms for a lot of these platforms be built for research are going to take precedence in 2024. I think a lot of underfunded things that the normal pharmaceutical you know corporations don't want to fund are going to be funded through these decide research and I also am hoping and want to manifest alternative I don't want to call alternative medicines because this has been the medicine for a while but like a lot of this you know natural remedies and solutions and research around that actually be funded through DeSci So, you know, hopefully one day I can maybe like one quarter or two I can run a DeSci route, but I'm really bullish on what's going on in the DeSci space. Also, shout out to the ReFi DAO. I mentioned y'all, but shout out to Green Pill Shout out to Chapters everywhere, ReFi DAO , DeSci World I really see a lot of these community-based and these localized groups as also shouting points for people. to come together. So start your Green Pill chapter, start your Refi chapter. Also we're going to be doing PotLock potlucks where we bring different dishes together. We kind of talk about public good food too. So shout out to everyone in the event space. There's so much that we learn from exchanging ideas. Keep it going. Love to see it. I see it attributing to a lot of the conversation that even the products and the impact and the straight up money that's coming into different L1s are watching. Big shout out to Solana. I gotta mention Cubic.so so I don't know where they're at but they're building Quadratic Funding as well. They're under construction right now but I see a lot of funding mechanisms literally like going towards like new L1s and I don't see anything in Cosmos yet. I don't see anything in like Algorand or Stellar. I mean Stellar has the Stellar Community. They're actually building stuff out there and even like Ripple or stuff like that. There are people with a lot of money and They're funding corporations and not public goods and open source infrastructure, things like that. So if you're a builder and you're building all of these stacks, I would heavily advise you to start innovating today because we have limited engineering capacities. Like, Gitcoin has limited engineering capacities. Like, build these on the layer ones or even volunteer your efforts to build that within Gitcoin stack or with our stack too. And build with composability and buy. But I don't know, did I shout at everyone? I think I shot I'll be running out of breath but like another shout out I got to give is the attestation and the impact There's some buzzwords going on also crypto altruism gave a 2024 recap Or 2023 outlook in the 2024 recap and so did a walking I'm gonna link that in the show those two But if you want to use buzzwords from but I'm not from the web to space, but if you want to use buzzwords like measurable MRV measure record and verify or something like that Yeah, like digital MRVs is a big trend. I think like attestations, odd-shaded testations, tracking impact is going to be huge. The adoption of Ethereum attestation services was huge. Go to attest.sh and you see people like Coinbase using this on OP to verify KYC. You can see solutions like Karma HQ using EAS to basically measure progress reports from projects in... Gitcoin as well and then you see things like hyper search emerging to tokenize that hopefully make markets That's what the 2024 outlooks also big shout out to open source observer. They're doing some pretty cool stuff This is what a lot of people the retro Pgs or the optimism ecosystem use to basically track Get a repose and their contracts to see you know their dependencies how much usage they have and things like that So we know the actual impact that they're making so one of my predictions coming off of this is like new kind of robust schemas, it'd be a test station space. Outside of just like carbon credits, I really see they're having more robust impact credits across different schemas and across different verticals and really streamlining the tracking of this using AI to help discern this and also like dynamically having this translated to a flow of funds. And I think for ZuConnect what are the things that... Owocki did was he made this thank you chart of the big funders, the funding distribution mechanisms of the projects, which is pretty dynamic enough off a spreadsheet. But one of the things that even we're working on in the NEAR Ecosystem is how to make that more dynamic and build this with tracking and attestation services. So I see, hopefully, a flow in a world where we can generally track all that. And then, right now, retroactive PGF is based on people voting, but hopefully... like autonomously like airdrop based on this impact and detect using AI any like simple attacks to exploit this so we can have more dynamic, retroactive funding and then build a lot of these primitives, these rewards programs for people to use. But I went over a lot, man. I'm running out of breath. This is going along as I thought it. The 2024 tools, I kind of sprinkled most of my outlooks already there, but... I see more services for nonprofit verification. Like I was saying, this is something, if you go to like use Google nonprofit, there's something called Ten Percent powered by percent. It's like tools like that I wanna see for verified charities. I wanna see also integration into web two platforms. Normally we need to build with composability in mind. Okay, this is a manifestation. I don't know if this is gonna happen. This is a manifestation. We need web two companies to adopt, hey, this profile. Firstly, we need to streamline usability in onboarding. So when you create a profile, for example, on Lenster it automatically imports for Twitter. And this profile is reused across Gitcoin and Givet. It's crazy that we're building all these siloed implementations. So firstly, like integration into web 2 applications, especially social, and like the idea of actually using decentralized social outside of like just kind of experience. And that's something that we're using on PotLock for like The Accelerator platform and our registry is also on your social, but hopefully we can streamline this and make it work with every type of platform. So, projects aren't making the same profile over yet. And it's obviously just a streamline claim from existing services like GitHub or Twitter, things like that. But that takes people actually building the verification services from day one. I also, one of the things that I want to see is more dafts. And then also, more native kind of nonprofit structure localized based on where you're at. Because I think we focus heavily on America, especially that is a big market because of the taxes and because of the, the wealth generation and the crypto ecosystem whatsoever. But I think we need more localized or services that localize these tax benefits. I see a lot of community-based tax cuts coming specialized for impact. So we saw this ZuHacks we saw ZuConnect we saw RefiHacks pop up, we saw FTC. So please do more hackathons. We even did a civic hackathon in New York, but like it is tailored to like impact, open data, things like that. There's already existing organizations at Web2 that have the same ethos. We just have to fill in the gaps. I see more communities. I didn't even mention Rija as you died. Big shout out to Rija as you died. So I see way more communities. And yeah, like big shout out to everyone there. I also, oh, this is something that Kevin Owocki has been talking about that. trying to manifest, but hopefully it's seen this way. And the way I see this kind of play out is the idea of retroactive VCs. So normally VCs don't have an incentive to basically give grants to people building public goods and infra, but at the end of the day, I think the best way to arm more of these people is, especially people who invest in native ecosystems and tools that build on their infrastructure, I think it's important that they fund this and that we kind of keep track of this and that fund them retroactively so their gains aren't based on equity but rather than supporting public goods that they're inherently dependent on so they kind of get that double upside of their ecosystem going up and then also getting rewards directly from there and then really kind of opening that traditional VC arm into an avenue for getting additional sponsorships and support. I also want to see more NFT and impact based DAOs. I think NFTs are honestly... I think a lot, especially with IPNFTs and the Proliferation AI Art, many integration into social are going to be huge. And I want to see more kind of DAO tooling built into traditional social frameworks outside of just being a DAO application. I want to see voting in the DAO as easy as doing in a poll. I want to see experimentation with things like friends.tech and impact where essentially you get a token for making a pull request for, or like a key, like for getting, making a pull request from one of your kind of most prolific GitHub builders or maybe, yeah, there's, I just want to see more experimentation on that side of things and then more, more kind of decision making coordinated in the tools that we use every day. I also want to, man, I'm getting tired man. I want to see the rise of more primitives and infra being built in. This is one of the things I predict for 2024. I see more robust, simple identity infrastructure, it tying into UBI. But UBI not just being native stable coins, but being a collection of the NFTs, the meme coins, a bunch of ways to streamline ecosystem rewards. into these public goods funding mechanisms to verify qubits through these Sybil identity solutions like get coin passport, good dollars, dot this, world coin is doing this, but in a more streamlined way and an AI really helping with detecting any kind of people doing Sybil or bad actors and bots. I also see the, like, and there's something we're got in the ecosystem is like account aggregation and linking different accounts and unifying it under kind of one blockchain experience. so that we can easily map an account and make an account on behalf of other chains and transact on other chains under one identity mixed in with these identity solutions. So another thing I want, yeah, and so speaking of airdrops and meme drops I'm going to manifest this too and hopefully I see this. It's like we have a lot of token launch pads and things like that. We need to build like composably like public goods funding mechanisms directly into the payouts and into the tokenomics of these. launch pads. I also see a lot of kind of sad but I see a lot of like well L1 is emerging but I'm just say that, it would be less sad, possible though, but I see a lot of wars coming about. We have conflict everywhere going. I think this is tragic but I think this gives a huge opportunity for us to actually use the technology. Often in web 3, it's very hard to onboard, except Endaoment, y'all killed it. But it's very hard to get people to, first of all, internet. Progressive web apps are not it. No one's going to be going for their computer or clicking. We need native mobile applications. We need to build products that have good UI and UX inherently. But we need to essentially, at the end of the day, most of these applications are very hard to onboard people. We need to make it easier than web 2. But the fact of the matter is it's easier to donate to traditional infrastructure, traditional applications, traditional donor apps, and it doesn't really make sense for people to make less money using these applications that are harder to onboard on, which is the state of where we're at back today. We really need to build these friendly user applications. But one of the value props that we do have is censorship resistance. When you have whole people being censored by war, genocide, all that type of, you know, what's going on. I think, you know, posting the truth, using decentralized social and really getting funding to where it needs to be is going to be really showcased in war. And we've seen this in the past with Ukraine and things like that, but I want to see more applications there. I think people are doing a really good job in the journalism space. I know my homies are Refound, VoiceDeck DAO working on solutions out there, but I really think solutions between war and journalism are going to be huge. Yeah, and so one of the things I also see is like, oh, stream on legal wrappers That's one thing too. It's like, shout out to Open Collective. I really like what they do with giving kind of fiscal sponsorship to open source software. They take a C out of that. But I think they really go over a hundred million for open source software to essentially have this legal rapper. And so I see a lot of kind of impact DAO based legal ways for people coming together and making these coordinations to kind of streamline with kind of no funds these legal identities and not have a culpability for or like liability that is. I also want to see people doing stuff every day like that's one of the things in the ecosystem that we have like people donate at the end of the year on endowment, people donate during these rounds, they have these gig void spaces but like this doesn't incentivize And that's one of the things I don't like about Web3, the space, like, you ask any Ethereum emoji, like, what do you do every day? Or you ask any what is Solana Ecosystem would do every day. It's mostly degenerate. But like, if you ask somebody to eat, it's like, really, like, people aren't using the blockchain and touching it every day. But I'm using my every, like, I'm using, I'm using apps every day in the Web2 space. Shout out to Web2. I'm just getting hip to Web2. But Web2 is killing it. And so, you can do anything on Web2. It's crazy. But I really want to see applications emerge where you use it every day. and to where incentivize the people to make impact every day. That's where I see the impact of Web3 and social being really huge. I see even like, for example, in NEAR Ecosystem we got Sweatcoin where it's a Web2 app that onboarded Web3. Oh, shout out to account abstraction. ERC4337, we have account abstraction built in on NEAR , account aggregation. Like, having the ability to easily make accounts on behalf of users and then onboard them after or traditional. kind of wallets of service providers and SDKs that allow you to just use email. It's going to be huge for a lot of the onboarding experiences and you're seeing a lot of people integrate that like endowment. But like with these traditional applications like Sweqwood, it's like you walk every day, like it incentivizes you. We like use social every day. I honestly, I'm not, I've used like YouTube every day, but honestly, I don't think those killer apps are going to be sustainable on web 3, but we have to make it so that. we gamify the experiences of making an impact, that we're curating impact, that we're having fun ways of measuring impact and earning rewards, learning and sharing information, and coordinating events and things like that. I think a lot of this will come packed together from these Network State solutions, but we have to make it so that people are using these applications every day, not just donating what's off. And it actually feels like... I am integrating with my tribe and really getting inserted by... Shout out to RegenTribe by the way. AI. Like I said, we got some AI stuff popping in April. But I think one of the things that I think we're going to onboard a lot of AI communities is funding people who are on the safety element side of things. I think from a product perspective, we're going to have AI integrated into products. I don't think we're going to be able to train LLM and things like that at this point effectively in 2024. I might be wrong, but I think that one of the also major impacts outside of onboarding research institutions that players in the space to make sure that singularities don't take over is the actual impact the individual developer has. You saw this with Etherscan you see this on drips.network where actually the main contributor is only one guy. The ability to... for an individual developer to build something that is very impactful and then get these plural funding mechanisms where they know that they can make more than they do in traditional web 2 for building what they love is going to be huge. So we're going to see more individual devs building real products and building it knowing that they'll get compensated and with the assistance of AI. I don't really know about stablecoins, I don't really know about RWAs and things like that, but this is kind of, I think I went over... more of my like, you know, all my 2024 kind of like outlooks. I want some manifestations again, usable products, integration in the web to products. I need dedicated impact BD. Like we need retroactive like Gitcoin citizens. We need retroactive BD networks. And this is something that we're building at the pod log, especially with our decentralized fundraiser network and kind of earning seeds for closing quadratic flooding routes and allowing that to dynamically. happen and displaying it with a Hyperboards inspired like dynamic funding sponsorship section but we need to have kind of decentralized BD networks that get compensated for impacting a lot of these games into all of our protocols so really want to manifest that and see that happen deep penetration developing nations I'm tired of like literally all of the people in impact space being white guys we need to build the next leaders in the place where they're impacted the most. We need to build these network states. Let's please go to developing nations. If you're a developing nation, you want to start something, again, I have no home. I'm down to pull up. I'll come to the trenches. So, yeah, let's pop up. Let's network state. Let's set people up. I see, again, more layer ones, like manifest, y'all. Like, build public goods infrastructure. We don't mess with y'all if y'all don't. I see less scams. trying to manifest less scams and get rich quick schemes And then, yeah, that's pretty much most. Yeah, hopefully you guys enjoyed this. You got some impact. Again, everything in the show notes, we got some exciting stuff in 2024. Hit me up to build, hit me up to talk. Yeah, love yall happy 2024.

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