Kevin Owocki | Layer Zero

Kevin Owocki is the leader behind the Gitcoin project, but he is also a husband, a father, an ultimate frisbee player, and a self-described hippie. As one of the most compelling individuals in the space, for Kevin it all boils down to coordination. In this episode of Layer Zero, we focus on Slaying Moloch, Incentivizing Public Goods, the Solarpunk aesthetic, and much more. Dive in and find out why we're optimistic about the future of society. ------ 📣 TracerDAO | Perpetual Pools are now Live on Aribtrum! https://bankless.cc/Tracer ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:00 Kevin Owocki & Gitcoin 9:12 Public Goods 13:05 Open-Source Business Model 19:59 Kevin’s Start 28:02 Who is Kevin? 35:00 Running on the Shoulders of Giants 42:00 Solarpunk 50:00 Nightmare Fuel & Branding 54:58 Ethereum vs Moloch 1:00:55 Regen Finance 1:06:24 Optimistic about the Future ------ Resources: Kevin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/owocki?s=20 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Ethereum is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the Ethereum community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks knew that the code that they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today, I'm talking with Kevin Owoke, the leading mind behind the whole Gitcoin project, and one of the biggest, most vibrant proponents of public goods that I know of. And I obviously have a ton of respect for Kevin Owoke as one of the guys that has really helped me formulate my mental models and ideas about

• 0:49David Hoffman?

  like what this whole crypto thing is and why it's meaningful and why it allows you to be bullish on humanity. Bankless listeners will remember Kevin from our Slang Moloch episode, which is referenced in the show a few times, and if you like the conversation that I'm having here with Kevin, that is definitely a fantastic follow-up episode to you to listen to to get more of the same type of conversations. Kevin is a guy who wears many, many hats. He is a software developer, he is an entrepreneur, he's a business leader, and then he also reminds me during the show that he's also a community manager, in addition to a father and a husband and a bike rider and a Coloradian. But I focus on the first

• 1:34David Hoffman?

  four that I listed, because Kevin has built so much in this space, not only with what he's been building at Bitcoin, but just being a general contributor, both to the discourse and conversation around Ethereum, as well as contributor of actual software that we use in the open source world. So immense respect for Kevin. Kevin, thanks for coming on the show. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get right into the show. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys. Not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallet. Which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the Ledger ecosystem is more than just a secure hardware wallet.

• 2:16David Hoffman?

  Ledger is the combination of the Ledger hardware wallet and the Ledger Live app. And if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite D apps all in one place, Ledger is where you want to be. Not only does Ledger let you buy crypto assets straight from the app, but it also hooks into decentralized exchange aggregators like Paraswap, which makes sure that you are getting the best prices on your trades without your assets ever leaving your control. DeFi never stops growing and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it. So click the link in the show notes to see all the DeFi apps that Ledger Live has. And stay tuned as more and more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab your Ledger, download Ledger Live and get all of your D apps all in one place.

• 3:02David Hoffman?

  Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use DeFi. If you've been using Ethereum for the past 12 months, you've probably noticed the high gas fees and the slow confirmation times that have been plaguing DeFi. Too many people want to use Ethereum and it doesn't have enough capacity for all of us. That's where Arbitrum comes in. Arbitrum is a Layer 2 to Ethereum, which means Arbitrum can increase Ethereum's throughput by orders of magnitude at a fraction of the cost of what we are used to paying. When interacting with Arbitrum, you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into Ethereum's level of security and decentralization. This is why people are calling this Ethereum's broadband moment, where we get to add performance onto decentralization and security. If you're a developer and you want to save on gas costs

• 3:46David Hoffman?

  and make an overall better experience for your users, go to developer off chain labs.com to get started building on Arbitrum. If you're a user, keep an eye out for your favorite DeFi apps building on Arbitrum. Arbitrum has been working with over 300 teams, including Ethereum's top infrastructure projects, and will be opening up to all users shortly. There are so many apps coming online to Arbitrum, so you may want to pack your bags in preparation for the great migration to the Arbitrum Layer 2. To keep up to speed with Arbitrum, follow them on Twitter at Arbitrum and join their Discord. Hey Kevin, what's up?

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Hey David, thanks for having me.

• 4:24David Hoffman?

  Oh, glad to have you here, man. What do you want to talk about today?

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Layer 2, this podcast is called Layer 2, right?

• 4:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we're focused on scaling, scaling only.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think the name of this podcast, Layer 2, is really interesting. Layer 0 is the humans of Ethereum, is that right?

• 4:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right, yeah, it's humans all the way down. And I've always had mad respect for what you're doing because to me, the whole like funding public goods side of Ethereum is like almost everything else, like DeFi, speculation, NFT, JPEGs, it's like kind of a means to an end, just to like spin up the flywheel that ultimately becomes funding public goods.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah, yeah, it's been really exciting. So Gitcoin's mission is to build open source software, to build and fund the open web. And it's been a lot of fun to help builders get into the space and then once they're in the space, make sure that they can get coins for their work in the space. And when I was at ECC, I think I saw you at ECC maybe once or twice, I had maybe a dozen or two dozen people came up to me and say, "Hey, thanks for creating Gitcoin, it created my first opportunity in the space," or "It affected my career in this or that way." So in a way, Layer 0 is where Gitcoin is focused, it's on helping builders find places to work for public goods and get paid for that work.

• 5:48David Hoffman?

  Hey, like both me and Ryan, before Bankless was Bankless, both me and Ryan were getting Gitcoin grants. And this is always how I tell people, it's like the Gitcoin grant model was like the first way that I was actually able to receive input from the market that my work was valued and that I could actually turn that into something that I could like actually generate like a livelihood with. And I wouldn't have had that opportunity had it not been Gitcoin funding people, people funding other people.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, and I got into this space sort of aiming to help software engineers be able to quit their corporate jobs and work on open source software. And then also, to some extent, be able to work on public goods and stuff that didn't have a business model instead of ICOs in 2017. But it was kind of a happy accident to see media people like yourself and like SaaS and ETHUB all start to use Gitcoin grants. And I think that it was kind of a happy accident that we pioneered, well, Vitalik pioneered quadratic funding, we just implemented it, but that it works for open source, which is a public good, but also journalism, which is a public good for the space.

• 6:56David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah, it seemed to be kind of like a breakthrough moment where maybe you can elaborate on this, but like you said, that it was a happy accident, as in Gitcoin didn't intend or think to really fund anything that wasn't like developer and coding and software focused, but instead, just like at some point, people just used this thing to, the market just chose the outcome of this thing. And all of a sudden, like, it turned Gitcoin into a, not just a software funding platform, but just a funding platform for anything.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Well, I mean, the genesis story of this is that I've been a software engineer all of my career. And the idea behind Gitcoin was, hey, what if we can use this crypto economics thing to fund open source software? Right now, open source software doesn't have a business model, creates $500 billion per year in economic value. And, and there's no business model if you're an open source software developer. And so it just felt like an asymmetry between value created and value captured. And the fact that there was billions of dollars of capital, now trillions of dollars of capital sloshing around in this, in this financial system that's open source, meant that instead of that money going to some back office on Wall Street to do IT stuff, that it would go to open source software. And so that was

• 8:11Speaker 01

  sort of the idea behind Gitcoin. And, you know, I think journalism is great. And I think that there's a lot of really other good public goods. Privacy is another digital age private good that, public good that I care a lot about. And we had nothing against those niches. It just, we really wanted to focus on software development. And Yeah, the pivot, it's not really a pivot because we support both audiences, but I think came from Gitcoin grants, maybe around three or four. I think that Vitalik realized that, oh, my gosh, we can get more people talking about Gitcoin grants and therefore more funding for open source software if we support all these bloggers and people who are creating public goods in the sort of journalism space in Ethereum.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  And so it's kind of a happy, happy marriage where I think like having L2 clients and ETH2 clients on one end sort of legitimizes the journalism and the journalism brings more eyeballs into the funding of the open source software. So it's been, it's been, in that sense, it was a happy accident.

• 9:11David Hoffman?

  So Kevin, here's, here's a question for you. Did you care about public goods before Ethereum? Or like, when was the first moment where you were like, oh, public goods? I like those things and I want to help those things grow.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not like a real natural thing, I think, for people to come to a moment like that unless they're studying economics, maybe. But for me, there was, I've been a technology entrepreneur basically since, since I was 23 and I went through Techstars, learned how to run a engineering shop there and, and ran an online dating website, basically for the first five years of my career. And every time I wanted to do something new for that online dating website, if I wanted to install a database server, I didn't write my own database server. I used an open source one, it was MySQL. And then when I wanted to build a web server, I didn't write my own, I used Apache or later Nginx. And so I think with open source software, we're kind of standing on the shoulders of

• 10:09Speaker 01

  giants insofar as there's so much value created by open source software developers. And as a technology entrepreneur, I was just deriving so much value for open source and really understood the power of it as open source came to prominence, as GitHub came to prominence. This is before Gitcoin. And over the last 10 years, I just kind of jumped from technology to technology startup to a technology startup. And everywhere I went, open source software was something that was used. It was something that we recruited on. It was something that we virtue signaled about, but we never really gave back at any of those startups. And so it was open source software and the sort of like visceral experience of having that, of working on open source software.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Through the last 10 years, and then the idea of an open source financial ecosystem combined that was the genesis of Gitcoin. And so I just have that that sort of personal experience with open source software. And that was the first public good that I really, really appreciated. It was later conversations with Vitalik and other economist nerds in the space that sort of turned me on to the wider world of public goods, things like journalism, which is really important for making an informed public, or clean air, which is really important if you don't want to have lung cancer. There's just so many public goods in the world. And it was that was sort of how it all snowballed for me.

• 11:24David Hoffman?

  So when you were developing your dating website, which I definitely want to unpack that later, and then and then all the other like things you were doing with software development, when you would go and tap into public goods, were you like cognitive, were you like consciously aware of what was going on as like, oh, I wouldn't be able to do this because of this open source software. Thank you, developers that came before me. Or was it just like, oh, I'll just go to, I don't know where you go to the library of open source software and just pull out a book and like, was it a cognitive thing? Like, oh, thank God that this is here. Or was it more just a mindless thing where you didn't really realize, you know, how awesome this thing is?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, my first startup, the dating site, I was like 23 year old CTO and like, you have no business being chief anything at the age of 23. And I was just trying to keep up with everyone else. And I was trying to get good at shipping software. And so you spend a lot of time on Hacker News, you go to meetups with other technology entrepreneurs, and you try to learn from them. And they were all leveraging open source software. And yeah, GitHub is kind of like a library. You pull a book off the shelf and you install it in your repo, and you don't think much more about it. You don't think about the maintainer behind that software until you have to file a bug and then they don't respond to it. And so that was kind of the experience with open source. But when you're a technology entrepreneur, like, we had, we had like

• 12:47Speaker 01

  three months of runway left at some points in that company. And I wasn't thinking about supporting public goods at that point. I just wanted to ship. And I wanted my CEO to be happy so that our investors could be happy and so we could survive. And so that was the job to be done for a technology entrepreneur that leverages open source, but maybe doesn't give back.

• 13:05David Hoffman?

  You've always said that open source doesn't have a business model and that, I mean, I understood it. But now what you just said makes me understood it like a lot more in the sense that like, oh yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:16David Hoffman?

  Like we have all these people touching this product, which is free. And then there is a maintainer, or maybe not, maybe it's just been abandoned. I always liked this question, when, if you can envision a world in which like Gitcoin is maximally successful, or just a like business models for open source is maximally successful. Like, what would that world look like?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, if you go to gitcoin.co/results, you can see our live results page. And I'm super proud that we've always been metrics driven and KPI driven. We've delivered $32 million worth of funding to open source software, which, you know, when we crossed a million, I was like, yo, this is legit, we're gonna make an impact on the world. But then I quote that stat of how $500 billion per year in economic value is created by open source. And just do some math, there's maybe three orders of magnitude, 1,000 X per here, from here until, until we're maximally successful. And I think that what that world looks like is people coming out of school and just working for the open internet. People quitting their jobs at JP Morgan Chase and working for the open internet.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  And hopefully, systemically, more people are building infrastructure, digital infrastructure, and less people are going to projects that extract value. So I think more ETH2 clients and less avatar PFP projects coming out of the Ethereum space. So that's what, that's what I think a world of Gitcoin being maximally successful looks like. And then the secondary effect of more people working on our digital infrastructure is a more solid digital infrastructure. So no more bugs in open SSL that cause the secure contents of all these servers to be dumped to the open internet. The, there's this, this maintainer of an NPM package that just got burnt out and was tired of all the support requests. And so they're like, they posted on their forum, hey, I'm gonna give up this package, who wants to maintain it?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  And they found someone who wanted to maintain it. Well, that person ended up injecting malware into that NPM package and every downstream site that used it. And so, stuff like that will not happen anymore. Black swan events where open source maintainers get burnt out would not happen anymore if Gitcoin was maximally successful.

• 15:22David Hoffman?

  So if, if like we vision, if you Git, GitHub as like a library.

• 15:29David Hoffman?

  I'm kind of also getting like a kind of Lego's vibe too, right? So like if we have all these open source packages of software, books of software, and then if there's a lot like, and there's some of them, and some of them have been created very much out of just demand. And someone's like, all right, we all developers have this problem. I'll fix the problem, post it to GitHub. Now other people can use it and then boom, now we have something open source. Without that, whatever level of that that we have now is a function of having that before we have a business model behind open source software. And so like, once we unlock a business model behind open source software, like we can actually incentivize the creation of these like software Legos.

• 16:09David Hoffman?

  And then like, perhaps like illustrate, it begs the question, like, is the internet even close to be remotely close to being like a done, which it never is. But like, imagine how much progress the internet itself and all of the things on top of the internet have gotten off of not having public goods funding for open source software.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah. Yeah, the motivations to contribute to open source are basically you're doing it for exposure. You're giving it to give back. And sometimes you can find a job that will, you know, maybe Google is at the scale where 0.1% of their their person OpEx can go back to contributing to open source. But even then, it's just a virtue signal for them. Oh, one other thing about this world where Gitcoin is maximally successful, probably software repositories will not be hosted on GitHub. They'll be hosted on something peer to peer like Radical. R A D I C L E is a name of a tool in the Ethereum ecosystem called Radical. And it's actually a peer to peer GitHub. So they're trying to build the collaboration layer for software that isn't owned by Microsoft.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  And a lot of people say, hey, Kevin, are you trying to disrupt GitHub? And I'm actually not. We're trying to build an incentive system for open source software. We're not trying to replace the collaboration layer. And it just so happens that I met these other entrepreneurs, Ellie and Abby at Radical that are trying to build that. And so I think the interoperability between Gitcoin and Radical is something that you'll see in that world as well. And hopefully, most of the software designers are not going to be using a centralized service like GitHub in that world. They'll be using something like Radical.

• 17:41David Hoffman?

  Very cool, very cool. I would imagine just like the another conversation to have about like what happens when we can finally figure out how to like increase the order, increase like the availability of open source, quality, open source software by orders of magnitude. Like, once that happens, like the the cost of producing something on the internet like drops significantly and the ease of either the ease of implementing it goes down. And like, maybe it actually gets to the point where like the technical knowledge to create something really, really cool on the internet like drops away from actually even needing to code. Right? Like at some point, like the internet can be created by like drag and drop like systems. Or which is not, don't take that literally, but like just illustrative of what could happen when just like

• 18:26David Hoffman?

  cost, cost and complexity keep on getting dropped because we keep on building open source things on top of open source things.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Totally. And and progress becomes exponential. So basically, every new money Lego that gets added to the Ethereum open source world means that there's a new possibility that I can build when I walk into a hackathon. I like to say that you walk into an Ethereum hackathon today and you can get enough software off the shelf to build something during the weekend as three hackers that some bank 10 years ago would have to have 100 people and $20 million worth of budget to build with closed source because there's this exponential ability to just pull new Legos off the shelf and every new Lego creates a new permutation of something that can be built. And so I think we're going to see exponential. This is, this is why I think the open source financial system is going to beat the closed source one is because

• 19:16Speaker 01

  progress is just exponential in it. You can build things so much faster with with open source libraries than you ever were able to in the old financial system. So that's what makes me almost certain that DeFi is going to beat out TradFi eventually.

• 19:30David Hoffman?

  Cool, cool. And I mean, I think everyone listening can probably like understand that. Like, we talk about DeFi money Legos all the time. And that's just like the economic financial side of open source software. Like, that's not even just like all the other parts of the internet too. But like now that we have the open source financial side, that's probably what we needed to unlock the business modeling of like the rest of the internet.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think so.

• 19:58David Hoffman?

  Cool. So now I want to get into like tech stars. Can you tell us your tech star story?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so um, I, let's see, so my entrepreneurial journey kind of started when I was in, when I was in high school. I was working as a cashier at a supermarket. And this is like when I was like 16 or 17. And I had this friend who was running a web hosting company and making like $400 a day, which in your 17 in, or the early 2000s is a lot of money. And I was like, yo, you gotta cut me in on this. I, I can, like, I can program. I was always kind of a programmer-y kind of kid. And he did. And my friend, his name was Mike, he was on my street hockey team. And he showed me the ropes of how to basically rent servers from RackSpace, or it was called RackShack back

• 20:45Speaker 01

  then. And we would pay like $100 per month for servers. And then we would just sell web hosting to people across the world for something like $50 per year. So like you hit a break even point where you've, you've sold a certain amount of web hosting. And, and I was, and I got to the point with it where I quit my, my job at the supermarket.

• 21:05David Hoffman?

  Is it just reselling, just purchasing, marking up and reselling?

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, putting a brand on it. Yeah. And, and like, by the way, I'm competing with all these web hosting companies that have like a staff of 30. And I was just like some kid by parents' house. So I've like, I've like no cost, I could undercut everyone. And, and there were, there were shifts at the supermarket where I would, I would make twice as much online during my shift than I would at the supermarket. And I was like, you know, F this noise, I'm quitting. And, and I just, and, and I kind of ran that. And I was 17 and I didn't know anything. I ran it into the ground. And, and so I kind of gave up on that. And, and I got my computer science degree from University of Delaware. And after that, the corporate career services just ushered us into corporate America. This is Delaware and like, all these banks are located in Delaware. And so they're

• 21:50Speaker 01

  just trying to hit their KPI of graduates that they place. And I'm a computer science major. And so I'm an easy mark to just go place at a bank, you know. And so I, I go work at a bank. And when I'm 23, this is like, I graduated with the, with the degree in computer science in 2006.

• 22:04David Hoffman?

  Wow, you're the, you're the second guest on Layer Zero that worked at a bank.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there's, there's, and now I'm on a podcast called Bankless. There we go. But. Anyway, so I was so miserable at my corporate job. I mean, imagine going from being 22 and hanging out with your ultimate frisbee friends, going to tournaments on the weekends, and then all of a sudden you have to spend your your Tuesday morning at the coffee maker, talking to some 47 year old about their kids in like soccer practice and stuff. I was just, the culture was not right. I hated how hierarchical it was. I hated the technology and I was looking for anything else. And so around then, the Facebook platform came out, the Facebook API. It was like when Facebook apps launched and, and, and I ended up launching this like flash games website.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  And again, was making more money off of flash games than I was off of my, off of my corporate job. And it's like, oh, I gotta like, this is a sign. I have to get out. I have to do something else. And this is, this is 2006.

• 23:03David Hoffman?

  What was the business model for the flash game? Like advertisements?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Just ads. Everywhere ads, everywhere I could foot like find pickles, I would put ads. And you know, I was like 23, I didn't know how to build a scalable business, but I did know how to get eyeballs in, in, in, and stuff like that. So, so that got ran into the ground again. And I was like, there was a sign to me that I needed to do something else. And this is 2006. This is before I think things are really like, it was still the nuclear winter after the, the, the dot com boom. Anyway, so I'm getting to it. I'm, I'm sending my resume out to anywhere I can. I'm looking for anything besides corporate America. And I find these two guys from New York City who are looking to run an online dating website, which I think is a little bit scummy at first, but you know, it was a ticket out of corporate America and they had just gotten into tech stars, which was this, this seed stage accelerator

• 23:49Speaker 01

  program for, for up and coming entrepreneurs. And their CTO had just dropped out. And so I was like, oh, this is my golden ticket, like Willy Wonka style. This is, this is how I'm going to do it. And I went from being in corporate America, wearing a suit and tie every day to just wearing a T-shirt and hanging out with Brad Feld and David Cohen and trying to build this online dating website. And it was just one of the two inflection points in my career. One was getting out of corporate America and into startups. And the second is out of startups and into crypto. And that was a huge one. That dating site was not successful, but I learned a lot about how to run technology startups from that.

• 24:24David Hoffman?

  Wait, so how, where, where did tech stars come into that?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  So Techstars was the startup that I got a job offer from. They had already been accepted into Techstars, but they needed a CTO and I was looking for any path out of corporate America.

• 24:39David Hoffman?

  Oh, okay, okay. Wait, I thought Techstars, am I wrong in thinking that Techstars is like American Idol, but for tech startups?

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Um, it didn't do any singing. Um, no, it's like, it's no, they take, they take 10 startups per cohort per season and they basically put them through, uh, month one is like, what is your business? What are you trying to build? Month two is building and then month three is they put you in front of a bunch of investors, VCs and angel investors, and then you, you pitch and then you graduate. So it's kind of like an MBA in a summer for tech startups.

• 25:14David Hoffman?

  Oh, wait, is this not like a reality TV show?

• 25:18Speaker 01

  No, there's no.

• 25:19David Hoffman?

  Oh, because you told me this story forever ago and I thought that this was like some sort of like, yeah, you would build a T, like a tech products, but you would also like be interviewed by people like on camera or something. Is that not at all the right way to vision it?

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's a Texas, I think they consider themselves to be on the, in the echelon of Y Combinator.

• 25:38David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God, I thought this was in entertainment.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, but they later did launch a reality TV show about tech startups, which I don't think did all that well, but their main business was, the way it works was that they gave you $6,000 for a summer and you gave them like 6% of your equity and then they only made money on you if your startup was successful, which was their way of aligning incentives. And so I learned everything that I know from the Techstars network and I'm super thankful to them for giving me my start.

• 26:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's, that sounds like a kid who figured out how to make money via developing software and tinkering on the internet twice. A dream come true. Yeah.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And this is before startups were cool. Like before 2008, I would describe finances being cool. And then we had the implosion within 2008 and I think the geek became chic again with that and the rise of web 2.0.

• 26:31David Hoffman?

  Okay. So between Techstars and Ethereum, what happened in that gap of time?

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Ran the online dating website for five years.

• 26:40David Hoffman?

  Oh, five years, okay.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I stuck around. We raised VC money, but we didn't figure out how to monetize it, and it all just imploded in spectacular fashion. I mean, I was aquihired. My resume says I was aquihired.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  And I just worked as kind of like a director or VP of engineering at different techstars companies for 10 years and ran engineering teams. And so it was through that experience of, I think I hired like something like 40 or 45 engineers through those 10 years at these startups. And I just found out how broken recruiting is. I mean, basically, the median recruiter on LinkedIn is just like a $99 LinkedIn subscription plus a bunch of spam in both directions. And then they charge you like 25K when they place an engineer at your company. So me learning to recruit software engineers by just like being outgoing and friendly to them was like Neo in The Matrix. I was like, oh, my gosh, I don't have to pay a recruiter 30K

• 27:36Speaker 01

  to like bring them onto my team. I can just run a funnel myself. And so realizing that sort of arbitrage was another part of the Gitcoin genesis story. Like, people really care about having engineering candidate flow into their organizations. And I would describe that as what we do for the Ethereum ecosystem. We help engineers find their next opportunity in the Ethereum ecosystem. And without my experience of learning how to recruit engineers at these startups, I don't think Gitcoin would exist.

• 28:02David Hoffman?

  So Kevin, I see three different things of who you are. One is a software developer. One is a entrepreneur who likes to find business models and make money. And then the third is a manager, CEO, leader. Which one of those do you think? A, which one of those do you like? Three questions, actually. Which one of those three do you like the most? Which one of those three do you do the most in terms of time? And what do you most personally identify with? I guess that last question was the same as the first, but take that as you will.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  So I mean, I think that, you know, all of us have multiple layers to their identity. In addition to being a developer, an entrepreneur, and a manager, I'm also a husband and a father, and I play ultimate frisbee, and I go to bluegrass concerts. Like, you know, we've all got like different parts of our identity that we just like display in different times.

• 28:58David Hoffman?

  But now we're contained inside of the professional lens of Kevin.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, true. I mean, maybe, yeah. I think that it really ends, maybe this is, maybe this is a non-answer, but I mean, I think it just really depends on what I'm, what I'm doing. You know, if I'm in the mood to build and I want to do deep work, then I like software engineer, creative Kevin, more than anything. And I actually think when I did web 2.0 stuff, the CTO, like the engineer, was just like the quirky guy that you like hid in the back. It was like the drummer in the band. And, and I think it's really cool that in web 3, that I can be the CEO instead of just like, you know, like the guy that the VCs don't talk to. And you know, geek is really chic in web 3. And so I think that that's really cool. I spend the most time-

• 29:44David Hoffman?

  Geek is really chic in web 3. That's not the first time you've ever said that before, right?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not sure. It could be, but-

• 29:50David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  But, you know, it's, it's just like, it's just so neat because I never thought that I would do CEO stuff. I thought I would like lead engineering teams for the rest of my career. And, and when Gitcoin raised its round, and I was kind of like hanging with multiple VCs, like hanging out on, on Sand Hill Road, and, and they were into Gitcoin. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is, this is really neat that this world exists where someone who's nerdy and kind of not as charismatic and can, can like do these things. And I actually think it's a prerequisite, because if you don't understand the technology, then you really can't be an effective blockchain software. They move so fast that if you're not keeping up with the latest trends, then you're, then you're not effective. But, so when it, when it first started, Gitcoin, I was building all the software, and I was

• 30:33Speaker 01

  just kind of rage building a lot of our software, and the manager stuff would be on the side. But now it's kind of flipped. Like now I'm, I'm doing financial models and spreadsheets and managing and coaching people and, and, and-

• 30:48Speaker 01

  I spend most of my day in meetings, but it's still that that acumen, that being able to hang with software engineers that I think informs our roadmap and helps keep us grounded. And so they're they're complimentary, all three of those, I think.

• 31:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And we definitely know that, well, A, we know that this crypto industry is inherently multidisciplinary, right? And especially in the like bootstrapping phase of this crypto industry in the first, you know, first 12 years of Bitcoin and the first like six years of Ethereum, like it's there's such a supply glut of talent and labor that like Ethereum will suck up all the talent and labor possible. And so it really, really incentivizes and rewards people that can just wear multiple hats, right? Because like there's multiple hats that that need to be worn.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and I think you actually missed one hat within the the professional sphere of of Kevin Owocki is that I learned how to community manage, community build when I moved out to Boulder, Colorado, and Andrew Hyde, he's at Unicorn on Twitter, and he really is a unicorn at community building. He invited me to be an organizer at Boulder Startup Week, which is this one week celebration of entrepreneurship and technology every May in Boulder, or at least it was every May before the pandemic. And the way that worked was that you got to run a track. I would run the data science track or the engineering track at Boulder Startup Week, and I would just invite these prominent people to come speak about whatever they were doing.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  And and that, to me, putting together an event, the hospitality associated with that, getting 100 people in a room to understand some later later trend in technology, making them feel welcome, looking them in the eye and shaking their hand as they walked in, making sure they had a good time, and then hanging out and vibing with them afterwards. I think that's a really important skill in Web three. And Andrew Hyde, like, if you're out there, thank you so much for he's like the Yoda to my Obi-Wan when it comes to community building. And so I think that's a really important skill for a Web three entrepreneur or just person to have.

• 32:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And then I guess like the meta skill is just like straight up, like, Intellectual curiosity, probably, like, or curiosity and just like a desire to, and yeah, a general generalized desire to build. Cause I think that's what we find across almost everyone, no matter like what domain of crypto they find themselves in is like, everyone's really curious. Everyone likes to learn and everyone likes to build shit.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And I think that it's, it's, it's, it's almost like a space that through natural selection will weed you out if you don't have those traits because it moves so fast that you're just never going to keep up if you're just punching the clock and, and you're not really intellectually curious about all the things that are, that are happening. But the way I look at it is it's hard not to be intellectually, we're reinventing the internet of finance. It's incredible. It's an incredibly huge opportunity. I mean, can you imagine going back to like 1997 when the internet was just getting started and, and not trying to learn everything you could and gain every little alpha that you could? The opportunity to reinvent how humanity transfers information was just so large and

• 33:50Speaker 01

  you gotta, you really gotta seize that. And I see, I think the opportunity with blockchains could be that big with web three. And so that, that's why I spend a lot of time thinking about, about blockchain and, and uh, God bless my wife because she, whenever she wants to go on a double date with someone and the, and the other guy is like a sports guy. I'm like, no, find me a crypto guy. We can, we can vibe with.

• 34:12David Hoffman?

  Hey guys. In the second half of the show, we continue the conversation about an increasing rate of change that we are experiencing in Ethereum, in DeFi, and with the power of open source tools. And we also bring up some of the conversations that bankless listeners might have remembered from our Kathy Wood episode about how so many different industries are all hitting new levels of rate of progress innovation. And then I asked and talked to Kevin about what happens when we add a Gitcoin type financial innovation, financial collaboration, or capital coordination layer all to all these other industries that aren't just about crypto. We also bring up conversations like the regenerative finance movement, which Kevin started, Kevin coined

• 34:55David Hoffman?

  in the 2020 food token era, as well as some other conversations about how and why Kevin is bullish on. Humanity, as am I. But before we get into that second half of the show, we have to take a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. When you shop for plane tickets, you probably use Kayak, Expedia, or Google to compare ticket prices. So why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto? When you make your trades, you want to make sure that you're getting the best possible price on your trade and that you aren't paying high gas costs that you could have otherwise avoided. That's why you should be using Matcha. Matcha routes your orders across all the various DeFi exchanges on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and gives you the best possible prices without taking any commissions.

• 35:38David Hoffman?

  Matcha has smart order routing that splits your order across multiple liquidity sources if Matcha sees that it gets you better pricing. Trading on Matcha is super easy because it pools the liquidity for me into a single, easy-to-use platform. Matcha also allows for you to make limit orders on change, so you can set and forget your DeFi trades and they will go through automatically while you're away. New to Matcha is an integrated fiat on-ramp, so you can purchase crypto directly with your credit or debit card and have that fiat be instantly traded for any token that has liquidity. When you're making a trade, head over to matcha.xyz/banklist and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. Banklist is proud to be supported by Uniswap.

• 36:21David Hoffman?

  Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DAOs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO, apply for a grant to Uniswap.

• 37:02David Hoffman?

  Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something? of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO. No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. We were talking about like increasing the rate of innovation by making like software and tools more accessible and applying that to both crypto and Ethereum. And then we have our, you know, software outside of crypto. And then we're also talking about how like, how you just said, like, if you,

• 37:46David Hoffman?

  this industry weeds you out if you aren't like intrinsically interested in it because you're not going to keep up with it. And so like, and there's also this, the idea of like, we had like the proof of work fair launch. You know, the reference of the euthanasia roller coaster to all of these like crypto phenomenons that happen.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  I actually don't. Can you explain?

• 38:05David Hoffman?

  Do you know, do you know the euthanasia roller coaster?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  No, I don't.

• 38:09David Hoffman?

  Oh, gosh. Okay. So it's a roller coaster that with multiple loop-de-loops. And it goes up really, really, really, really, really high. And then it drops you on the first loop-de-loop. And then you do like 17 more loopy loops afterwards, and they get tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter. And because they get tighter and tighter, the G-forces that you get kill you because you have too much G-forces for too long. It's euthanasia roller coaster. And so like, and so the phenomenon is like, is like a fractals, a fractals, forks of forks of forks of forks, right? When we saw the 2013 fair launch phenomenon, like it was a, it was like, just like the 2020 DeFi food token summer, which is then just like, like the 2021 profile picture, NFT avatar movement. It's just like some, somebody unlocks something. And then like the whole entire crypto industry goes on forks of forks of forks of forks of forks

• 38:54David Hoffman?

  until like, we just bleed out all of the possible energy of that one little phenomenon. And so like, okay, so the point of that was, we were talking about how like this industry weeds people out who aren't like able to keep up. Then we just recently had the whole loot phenomenon, right? And so like loot launched, everyone like had this aha moment. And then we had forks of forks of forks of forks of forks. And the thing is, one of the reasons, here's the, here's the point I'm trying to get to. One of the reasons why the space moves so fast is because the space moves as fast as the fastest person in it. Whoever's moving the fastest and like, like for example, Dom, the guy that did the loot, uh, the loot thing, or Robert Leschner with Compound, or like Will Price and Dan Elitzer and with, with Yams.

• 39:39David Hoffman?

  They, it's always, it's like, it's like a, there's, there's that gif of caterpillars that are, are crawling over each other as they go forward. So like some, some caterpillars going on the ground, but some caterpillars crawling on top of that. So as a unit, they are all collectively traveling faster together, right? And so, and so this space moves so fast because we all, maybe, maybe a better metaphor is a peloton, right? Like, you know, 20 cyclists all in a line, they're all dragging on each other. And then the last person who's taken the most rest then speeds up to the front and sets the new pace. And then it takes turns. And so each, all these developers with all these open source tools are all taking turns going faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. It's like, that's why a lot of people I think are so inherently like subconsciously bullish on this space is because like,

• 40:24David Hoffman?

  the rate of change isn't going slower, it's going faster. And it's because we have like a open source tools and now open source incentivization to pay for all these things.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And, and I think that there's, there's even more multiple levels. Like it's not just caterpillars on caterpillars. I think it's caterpillars on caterpillars on caterpillars. Like, you know, we're all built, if you, if you look at the seven layer stack, it's, you know, all the networking foundation and the chips and all that kind of stuff. We just kind of take for granted. You know, I, I took computer engineering in, in college and I'm not good at low level programming. So thank goodness I don't have to do assembly language stuff. But there's, there's just so much progress that, and we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. I think it's really, it's really incredible. We, we, uh, Gitcoin and, and Gitcoin DAO is a fork of uni, which is a fork of Compound. And so I like to think of what we did is like Robert Leschner sort of.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  pioneered the delegation system in Compound. And I think that Hayden and Uniswap, in a lot of ways pioneered or made popular retroactive distributions. And then what Gitcoin did was we did a retroactive distribution and we made it so that you had to delegate when you did your claim of your tokens. And that was important because a lot of people don't actually even use their governance tokens. We wanted 100% of the consent of the governed. We wanted 100% of people to delegate to someone in the Gitcoin community when they got their airdrop, which is when we had the captive audience. And so I'd like to think that we're all sort of standing on the shoulders of giants and pushing the space forward a very little bit on top of that, which hopefully enables the next cycle of innovation.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  And, you know, I would never compare what we did to like what Dom did or what Yam did. But I think the space is expanding in many different directions at different magnitudes at a time. And it's always exciting when that, when there's that new punctuated equilibrium where you see a new idea in a, in a new light. And it enables that cascading bit of innovation.

• 42:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it feels like there's always that like slime mold metaphor, right? Like you've seen like slime mold, like try and find new food in like sped up terms. Like it's, it's searching in like 50 directions at once, then it finds food. And all the directions it wasn't searching in are redirected to that new food source. And then it goes again, again, from there. And it's kind of like the natural way to have like maximize, maximize progress.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're a big biomimicry guy. I'm realizing as we're having this conversation, lots of natural metaphors to the web space, web three space sort of expanding in this new design space.

• 42:53David Hoffman?

  Oh yeah, that's my shtick. Yeah, no, well, A metaphors are like scaffolding for learning and understanding and therefore conversation.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Do you have a metaphor about a metaphor?

• 43:05David Hoffman?

  Yes, I did. That's a really good point. Yes, I did. Yeah. Um, yeah, well, it also allows for conversation to happen faster and more precisely, right? Like, just like, oh my God, this is great. Just like how, like rather than having to build something for scratch, I can just go into the library of your own brain and pull out a metaphor of like a Peloton. So I don't have to explain as much stuff. It's the same thing. If we can make the conversation move faster.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. I'm a pretty verbose guy, so I'm gonna take a page out of your book. But I also just really like nature. I mean, I am out in Colorado and I have to show Colorado really quick, just the beautiful sun and sunshine and the way the natural ecosystem out here. It's just, it's, it's, there's something refreshing to your soul about spending time in nature. And so I think it's a source of inspiration on multiple levels to draw from that.

• 43:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, civilization or like the order imposed by nation states is like, hey, there's that nature thing, but like, we're gonna find a way to, for you, so you don't have to live in it, right? Like, we're gonna give you like asphalt, pavement, streets and like lights that light up at night. But yeah, Colorado, Washington, the all the like the outdoorsy cities or outdoorsy places. It's just like, it feels like it's just easier to live more harmoniously with nature.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  I actually, um, so I have to tell you, I've been on Bankless Podcasts maybe four or five times, and I think it's at this point that I have to reveal to you all my secret, which is that I'm not much of a, I'm not much of a cyberpunk. I consider myself to be a little bit more of a solar punk than a cyberpunk, and it's because I am just really inspired by the solar punk art and the philosophy of humanity evolving past its contemporary challenges, whether that be climate change or misinformation or cancer and all these different things that exist out there. And so the cyberpunk ethos, which is like very like anti-nation state and, and about the independence of, of cyberspace, you know, I vibe with that on a software engineer level.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  And there are things about it that I appreciate and I think are really interesting, but I would consider myself to be a solar punk more than a cyberpunk. And it's because I think we need these, we need some sort of web-scale coordination and we need to work together as, as humanity and as a planet in order to move past these global, these global public goods problems that we have one day. So I hope I'll still get invited back if I don't identify as much as a cyberpunk.

• 45:26David Hoffman?

  Well, can you define for me and the listeners what a solar punk is? Cause this is the first I've heard of it.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. So I've actually been tweeting a little bit about solar punk. It's an art movement that envisions how the future of humanity would look if we solve major, major contemporary challenges, like with an emphasis on sustainability stuff like climate change and pollution. And so basically like integration with nature and, and, and sustainability for the planet and for, for people is kind of the, the vibe of the movement. But if you Google solar punk, you will see a lot of really beautiful art that has humanity integrated with the environment that they, they are in.

• 46:09David Hoffman?

  This is insane. Yeah. Okay. So this is like that, that meme about like if society is like society, if like this was like that, right? Like society, if I can't remember a good one, but like there's, there's that one society meme, society meme template, right? Society if, oh, I don't know that meme.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, that's right. Society if we have solved, if we had solved public goods.

• 46:34David Hoffman?

  Sure. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly what I'm going for. But yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, I will. As a guy who like plants, who likes plants and architecture, this is exactly what my vibe is.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  I just, I just solar punk pilled you, David. I forgot how much of a plant guy you are. I can't believe we haven't talked about this.

• 46:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I know. This is really cool. This is exactly what I want society to look like.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Did that website just call it Hope Punk?

• 46:58David Hoffman?

  Oh, I did not. Which one?

• 47:00Speaker 01

  That's pretty, that's pretty funny. I'm not sure. It's what you just clicked through. I think that that's a funny name for it. But.

• 47:05David Hoffman?

  Hope Punk. Yeah, it did. Wow. That's great. Hope Punk.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:09David Hoffman?

  It's harder to say.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  You know, like I'm a little bit of a hippie. I'll just, I'll just come out and say it. And so, you know, I do think that there are, there are places. Yeah. Well, and, and I think there are times in which the nation state is, there are people in the nation state that are genuinely trying to solve global coordination failures or nationwide coordination failures. And it's just such a shame that.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  There are other people that are trying to use the nation state to oppress people and to corrupt people and to basically milk the system for government contracts and feed them to their friends and cronies. And so, you know, like, wouldn't it be great if there was a transparent, immutable, programmable, incorruptible basis for finance and for governance that we could actually trust its ability to coordinate? Because we could inspect the code. Like, the solution is not less coordination. It's coordination on a more solid foundation so that we can solve these contemporary problems. And that's not always against nation states, but sometimes, and maybe many times, it is.

• 48:10David Hoffman?

  Sure. Yeah, I would summarize like the biggest, the big problems of the nation state is like, it's fantastic coordination infrastructure. And it's because it's fantastic coordination infrastructure, the entity that is most likely to leverage that fact is going to leverage it for personal profit or for oppression or power or control. And then that drowns out the people that want to leverage that, the coordinating power of the nation state for public goods.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I'd say that like, you know, it's good coordination infrastructure. If you're someone who's well-connected and can pull the levers. But if you're someone who's poor, then there's an information asymmetry because it's not transparent. There's no open source code that you can, that you can take a look at. So there's an information asymmetry that comes out of that. And then there's also just like, it's not incorruptible. So basically, you know, and this is the problem with like web two companies, right? So like Travis, I forget his last name, the Uber CEO, basically can go into a city, can give all of the drivers really great wages, can give all the consumers discount to attract them. And then they had a network effect where every new driver that joins the Uber network makes it better for every rider. And every rider makes it better for every driver.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  And the cycle just circles itself. That's called network effects. And then they get inevitable and they stop trying to attract the drivers and the riders. And they start extracting from them so that they can, they can pull more profits out of the system. So that's a corruptible system. And what's great about web three is that we can build incorruptible systems. Where like, if Kevin Iwaki turns evil one day, then Gitcoin can still be fulfilling its mission. Because, well, we're still working on decentralizing. But, you know, eventually we'll be on this like decentralized, immutable sort of substrate for our coordination. And so you won't have to rely, it's, it's, it's can't be evil instead of don't be evil. And I think that's a, that's a huge part of it.

• 50:00David Hoffman?

  So with, earlier I asked you, like, what's the maximally successful version of the world where like open source software is funded in uncorruptible ways and all the good thing that happens? What's the thing that keeps you up at night that's like nightmare fuel for like why that will never happen?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Um, I'm pretty... Well, running a startup is, what does Elon Musk say? It's like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. Eventually, you stop, you never stop staring, but eventually the chewing doesn't hurt so much. I'm butchering that quote, but that's how I kind of feel about, about running something as big and ambitious as Gitcoin. But the thing that keeps me up at the end of the night is like even if I do a really great job running Gitcoin, then I don't know where the regulatory regime in the United States is gonna land. And there's so much gray area that it really, really keeps me up at night. And so I don't know where we're gonna land on that, but I hope that, that Wall Street

• 50:57Speaker 01

  and Washington see that DeFi and crypto is something to embrace instead of trying to fight the future. So that's something that keeps me up at night. And, and I really want to be a part of changing the story about what crypto is. I think that people see these stories about volatility and they see about, about gambling. And I don't think that they realize that we could solve our web-scale coordination problems with, with crypto, because it's such a more solid foundation for that. And I have some, I have a couple aces up my sleeve about telling that story to the general public that we may, we may see in the next couple of years. But I think public opinion about crypto and telling them about public goods and coordination is, is a role that I would hopefully like to see Gitcoin play in the long term. Hopefully, but leading by example.

• 51:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's weird that like everyone in crypto who, everyone who's in crypto is like by proxy crypto's marketing division. Like crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum, they don't have marketing divisions. They have people like, you know, Anthony at the Daily Guay or Bankless or like what Bitcoin did. Like that's, or all of the like individual zealots like, like you who just say, hey, there's this Ethereum thing, it's really cool. And like, it's weird that like everyone in crypto is like, yeah, this crypto thing is dope. And then everyone like and yet somehow the narrative is like it's for drugs and criminals. You're gonna lose all your money like crypto has the simultaneous brand of like it's going to make you rich and it's going to make you broke.

• 52:23David Hoffman?

  Except one is always true and one is like, well, yeah, you you ape into like something stupid and you got all and you got an exploit, right? Like and and so like we haven't been able to like control our own narrative or the narrative of what crypto is still comes from the outside in. And like that that is my concern that I have.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I was and I remember when I was in the 90s and like the joke was always that the internet was just for porn. You know, and so and and people who were who were spinning that narrative were either entrenched interests or they were just. They were just ignorant about what the internet had to offer and eventually you don't hear people say that anymore. And so I I think that it's inevitable that we'll move past those type of narratives, but it it certainly is there. It it is misinformed and and I don't know how how to really bridge that gap because. Well, I'm a computer scientist, not a not a communications and marketing person, but I hope that someone figures it out.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  I'm I'm really thankful for the work that that Coin Center is doing in helping inform our lawmakers about crypto. And you know, that's a public good for all of crypto lobbying the the government.

• 53:32David Hoffman?

  Totally, yeah, not to not to say too much more on the nightmare fuel thing, but like. The internet didn't have the problem of like invading the world of finance and like the banking system. Like there's no, there's no more entrenched player than like the banking system, right? It's like, oh, the internet is just for porn and then.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:50David Hoffman?

  All dudes in the world are like, oh, really? Nice, but then that was a joke. But then like it's different when like crypto comes along and is like crypto, all it's good for is like, you know, disrupting Wall Street and banks. And all the, you know, the money of the world is like, oh, I don't like that. And so that is a different history rhymes doesn't doesn't exactly repeat and that is a big difference.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's like, try to take yourself back 30 years. I don't actually know if you could do that, David.

• 54:20David Hoffman?

  No, I couldn't.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Because I'm an elder millennial. But like newspapers were the way people got their information. And so it was not even cable news back then. And so you had a lot of entrenched interests that were forming public opinion back then too. Maybe on a slower, slower speed and scale. But the world has changed a lot in 30 years. And I think a lot of technology is inevitable. And so you fight it at your own, at your own peril. I'm remembering the record industry of America suing all of its customers because its business model is being eroded as a counter example of what to do. And they caused a lot of pain to a lot of people in the short term. But in the long term, they, they certainly lost out.

• 54:57David Hoffman?

  Sure, sure, sure. Kevin, can you rate Ethereum over the last? This is going to be a terribly imprecise question. Rate Ethereum over the, over his lifetime, over his last six years. I'd say how well it could have made Moloch retreat versus how well it actually did that.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Should we explain to your listeners what Moloch is before I answer that question?

• 55:19David Hoffman?

  Sure. You want me to? You want, you want to go?

• 55:21Speaker 01

  We could vibe back and forth. Why don't you start though?

• 55:23David Hoffman?

  Okay. Moloch is the god of coordination failure. But he's basically the simple example as to why humans can't have nice things. And the reason why humans can't have nice things is because we do it to ourselves. Because the more, more a bunch of people all agree that we're going to do something that is beneficial for all of us, the more it rewards a single defector to go against that, that alignment, right? And then as soon as one person says like, well, I'm going to let all of the other people agree and not do the thing that harms us collectively, but instead benefits the individual. I'm just going to be the only individual that does that thing. And then somebody sees him do that or her do that. And they're like, well, they're doing it, so I'm going to do it.

• 56:07David Hoffman?

  And then that just repeats until we're all back at the same state that we started on. So it's basically why we can't have agreement and alignment towards working towards systems or things or outcomes that we would all want. Such as climate change.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think like the example I think of when I think of Moloch is cancer. So basically, you've got a bunch of cells that are harmoniously working for the whole in your body. And one of them decides to defect instead of coordinate with all the other cells. It starts becoming cancerous and that just basically means that it's consuming resources and it's it's reproducing itself more than the others. And it eventually chokes off resources to the cells that are coordinating. And that's why cancer is is so nefarious is that is is is is sort of the resource consumption game and the misaligned incentives associated with that.

• 56:51David Hoffman?

  Right, so there's like a holistic body and then all these cells are aligned and working towards a common goal. And then one cell is like, fuck you guys, I'm gonna, I'm gonna reprioritize for myself and I'm gonna get myself as large as possible and probably only myself.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And, you know, it's possible to like make this into a moral thing and like on some level it is, but like, I don't know, I I I flew an airplane to ETC and like hung out with you. So, you know, I was polluting the environment by doing that. And so, you know, that I I I'm someone who buys carbon credits. And I think that that's an important thing to do is to try to stay as carbon neutral as possible. But I think that, you know, it's it's really hard on a global scale to get people to to remedy their their their sort of like defections from the whole. And and one of the things that's really powerful about Ethereum is that you can, you have transparency at the base layer. You've got a mutability at the base layer. And a lot of people are really excited about the idea that we can build better coordination systems,

• 57:53Speaker 01

  identify defectors sooner and just build less externalities into the financial system, which will help slay Moloch. Me, you, Amin Soleimani and Ryan did a podcast called Slaying Moloch, which you all should check out on Bankless if you want to know more background on the on the question. But yes, so what was the question? How good has Ethereum been at slaying Moloch so far?

• 58:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, like basically how on a scale of zero, as in we didn't do anything, and 10 is in we did all of the things that we could have done and we could have like been very proud about what we did. Where do we fall on that spectrum?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Um, I think that the much of the Moloch slaying energy of the Ethereum network blockchain or at large is in the form of potential energy thus far and not kinetic energy, which is a little, little physics reference there, which is just saying it's like the spring is coiled and it could, it could happen, but only if we choose to, because all coordination is a choice. I am really encouraged to see lots of people in the Ethereum space, support public goods on Get Coins, support open source software, and we've got something like $10 million in the Get Coin Treasury for public goods and $50 million if you think that Akita coins have, have value, which is like a whole nother thing. But I'm, I'm really encouraged

• 59:10Speaker 01

  that people want to give back to the, the Ethereum public goods. We've got multiple, EPNS is an example, Ethereum Push Notification Service. They started off in Get Coin Kernel. They raised money with a Get Coin grant and then they raised VC money several months later, and now they're giving back to Get Coins matching pool. So like full cycle of like the virtuous cycle of Ethereum.

• 59:33David Hoffman?

  Have they given back more than they've, than they had donated?

• 59:36Speaker 01

  I think they have. I don't know the exact number, but I think they have. Um, and so, so like, this is actually the meme that came out of, you know, speaking of the, of the infinite caterpillar or whatever you said, like when Yam Finance launched and, and this whole DGEN wave started happening with vegetable farming, I started memeing with a couple other people about, about how DGEN was a thing and now we need to make Regen a thing. So what if we had Regen Finance, a financial system that sort of gets better over time? And I'm really happy to say that we're seeing multiple projects, Coordinate, CLR Fund, Optimism, Get Coin, Doing Good, Regen Network. There's just a bunch of people under the radar that are working

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  on Regen stuff and, and are like legit builders that are doing it. And so I'm really excited for, you know, we, we had ICOs and then we had DAOs and then we had NFTs and like we'll probably have Web3 social networks and then we'll have DAOs again and then we'll have NFTs again, but like will we get? To the level where people are aping into public goods. That is, that is when we've met the full potential. So I don't know if I answered your question, but I think most of the potential is ahead of us.

• 1:00:46David Hoffman?

  Well, the, the point of the question was to trigger an argument or excuse, trigger a conversation. I didn't really care about a number or anything. So, so yes, you did. But like, I also want you to open up and explain regen, regen finance a little bit more because.

• 1:01:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it just go into further details as to what that actually is.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. So basically, I mean, it's just a meme and you know, a lot of memeing is trying to take what's in the zeitgeist and to repurpose it for something that you can just, you can just vibe on. But I guess like the best way that I can explain it is through this idea that I learned from Yancey Strickler. He's the founder of Kickstarter and I'm going to share my screen real quick and just to show you what I'm talking about. There's this thing called basically Bentoism. And the idea is that instead of just making decisions that are good for you now, instant gratification. What if we extended those incentives into a Bento box of incentives? And the first axis is self-interest to others' interests.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  So basically, what if we made decisions that instead were just good, instead of just being good for now me, are good for now us? So like, making decisions that are good for me and you, David, and Ethereum at writ large, and then extending that out to the world itself. And then the other axis is time. So what if we created more anti-fragility by instead of having our incentives be about now me, but also being future me, three months from now me, three years from now me. I'm going to take a drag of a cigarette because it might give me a little buzz for the next 10 minutes. But what does that do for future me and for, for future us? And so to me, Dgen Finance is just thinking about instant gratification and only thinking about yourself. And then Regen Finance is building a Bento box financial system

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  that rewards people with a long-term time horizon and rewards them for coordinating with each other. And that's what I hope that with a transparent, immutable, programmable system that we, that we evolve past the decentralized casino stage, like that's just the boot loader. And then we eventually build a regenerative finance system that doesn't externalize, that, that has a long-term time horizon.

• 1:03:00David Hoffman?

  So when I heard you explain to me Regen Finance, I got an image of like people aping into like DeFi apps, right? This came around during like the Food Farm Fork Mania, right? And then part of the social contract of a lot of those like new DeFi food app farms, whatevers, was to actually repurpose money back into Gitcoin, right? Like, we would commit X amount of money towards funds, right? And this is like part of like the inevitable ways that Ethereum can like slay Moloch, right? Like, if we can keep on funding A ourselves and then only actually allow for funding to go into places that fund of their public goods, we can repurpose the energy, the energy of, to ape

• 1:03:44David Hoffman?

  and like have that to ape into like good things, right? And this is like one of the fundamental shifts that Ethereum we all hope brings to the world is like, you can act in your self-interest and by definition, you are acting in this, in the self-interest of everyone else and their future selves in moving into the forward and committing to that as well.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. It's been really promising to see that. And I'm super thankful to Andre from Urin Finance for starting that wave. I remember there was a couple vegetable forks that were gonna do it and their community really revolted when they were, they were like, you know, we're not giving that 2% to public goods. And then Andre from Urin did it and all of a sudden it was the cool thing to do. And so, you know, it's, it's been a thing that's ebbed and flowed in the ecosystem. And I'm lucky to say, right now, we have eight Gitcoin grants rounds future funded. So if the market turns bear, then we want to be the pilot light that keeps the market, the ecosystem alive through the next market cycle. And couldn't have done it without the community supporting that, yeah.

• 1:04:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Somehow there's a connection here to going back to what we were saying about like the accelerating rate of innovation and progress, right? Like, if we can, if we have this flywheel going where like we can allow for products to get funding and then those products become profitable and then those products send money back to Gitcoin to fund more projects and then all of a sudden like this flywheel turns and Turns and turns boom, we have like a self sustaining economy with self sustaining funding for developers to build more of the tools. We just came out of the podcast with Kathy Wood. We're recording this on the Monday with that Kathy Wood episode dropped. If you didn't listen to it, the gist of it is that like there are so many different technologies hitting their

• 1:05:29David Hoffman?

  like their peaks of their S curve of adoption. Right? We got AI crypto, like gene editing, like energy storage. I'm missing one, but like all of these things are hitting their biggest points of like progress and innovation, their speediest points, all at the same time. And like these things can all interact with each other, right? And so it's compounding progress upon compounding progress. And it's kind of why I'm like with Kathy Wood in the sense that like the future is like, there's so much left to be built. Like, we don't have autonomous cars yet, but it is still so close. There's so many things that are so futuristic that we don't have it all today, and it's only a few years away.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's really, it's really pretty incredible. I was worried for a second you were gonna bring up the metaverse and then I was gonna freeze because I don't know what that is. But I think that, you know, the crazy thing is that it's only gonna be obvious in retrospect. You can't predict, like, you can use first principles and try to think into the future a little bit, and you can create allegories, but like, who would have predicted Google in 1990? Like, the idea of a search engine that could search all of the world's information back then was totally foreign. And this, this sort of point in which we're gonna pass where AI and virtual reality and blockchain and gene editing and all this stuff goes forward is I just think that we're gonna look back in 2050 and say, oh, my gosh, they didn't know what they had coming in

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  2021, because it's accelerating exponentially rate of change.

• 1:07:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And like, not only are all of these things having, going through like their own like massive acceleration of innovation, but like, think about all the different surface areas behind all of these technologies, right? Like, combine crypto and AI, combine AI and energy storage, like, can put an incentive. Intensification layer, which is crypto, behind all of these technologies. They're like, one of the reasons I'm cautiously optimistic, but really, really bullish and optimistic about the future. Is that like, not only are each of these industries like their own like massive like job engine growth, economic engine growth like sectors. Like the intersections of all of these things also generate their own permutations of possible things to build or teams to fund or innovation to be had.

• 1:07:48David Hoffman?

  And I think if Gitcoin can play its cards right, it can play the role of helping facilitate and capital coordinate, capital coordinate to help all of these intersections and all of these industries be built out.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I hope so. I published a post a few weeks ago about what Gitcoin could be one day. And I, and I think that, you know, one of the, one of the sort of possible eventualities I, I call the EPCOT of the metaverse. Which is like, EPCOT stands for Experimental Community of Tomorrow. And, you know, when I hear of it as a US citizen in 2020, I think of EPCOT, which is the Disney one that was just built in the 50s, in their vision of tomorrow. But if you think about Experimental Community of Tomorrow as of 2021, if you get a bunch of builders and a bunch of capital and you put them all together, then hopefully you get prototypes of what the future will be. And it's like, and I want to bring this back to layer zero.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  And because I do think that a world in which that is all being done for the public good is much different from one in which it's just the ultra-rich that have access to those technologies. And, and this is kind of like the ultimate vision of Gitcoin is, is to create middle-class jobs for software engineers by giving them access to bleeding-edge technologies and opportunities at that. But also having the whole system be governed by the people that it serves. So it's not just this extractive thing that, that the, that like only Silicon Valley or Wall Street can, can really get the, the gains of. And so hopefully if we're right, we'll create this virtuous cycle in which we're helping builders find all of these technologies. Their career, advance the planet, create a more solar punk future.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  And like you named this podcast perfectly, it's layer zero. It's all, it's about the people. It's about the everyday people, not just the rich people. And, and I think that that's, it's just like it. The future could be so beautiful, but we have to coordinate towards that. And I think that that's what keeps me up and gets me working on Ethereum every day. And keeps me working on Bitcoin through, through all the chewing glass and, and staring into the abyss. Is that we can really create a better future with this technology, but we have to choose to do it. We have to coordinate in order to do it.

• 1:10:05David Hoffman?

  And Kevin, I think with that, that is a fantastic place to end this particular episode of Layer Zero.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, David.

• 1:10:12David Hoffman?

  Thanks for coming on, man. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders,

• 1:10:55David Hoffman?

  Ask Me Anythings and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless nation.