Introduction

• Five years on, DeFi (financial applications) now defines Ethereum, which is great, but finance isn't the only thing Ethereum is trying to solve
• Finance is the most popular application because it is the centralised system with the most frictions and the most pain points to solve (versus, say, emails). However, finance is not the only centralised system that needs solving.
• Further, transaction fees have been really high so there are scaling solutions being developed to solve that problem
• The current focus on finance has the confusing effect of driving a misconception of focus on price rather than utility
• Goals in moving beyond DeFi
  1. Alignment with values: community needs to get behind doing it
  2. Alignment with needs: needs to be useful for people to do

Things we already have

• NFTs
  • Lots of media publicity about NFTs this year
  • Don't forget, ENS names are also NFTs
• Social media
  • Widespread belief that existing platforms suck and we need better ones
    • Centralised and arbitrary censorship and manipulation
    • Low quality of discourse
    • Engagement is very misaligned with quality
  • Crypto tech is well-suited to solve these problems
    • Credible neutrality: system not favouring any one specific group of people
    • Censorship resistance
    • Shared "open state" allows for less monolithic architectures
    • Built-in economic layer makes it easier to do mechanism design
  • Examples
    • Bitclout
    • Steem / Hive / Voice
  • Directions to explore
    • Decentralised content: anyone can build different 'views' that filter it
    • Prediction market like mechanisms: encourage posts that look good one year from now, not just today (not the goal of virality today)
    • Decentralised sybil resistance: create a system that makes it difficult to create an unlimited number of accounts, to reduce spam
• Ethereum login
  • Using Ethereum wallet to sign in to things, alongside Google, Apple, etc (Eauth)
  • Today's centralised login providers own your identity, so there is risk of arbitrary de-platforming and no privacy
  • Better account recovery
  • Anti-sybil protection because economics makes it expensive to create thousands of spam accounts
  • Stepping stone to social media applications
• Building the attestation ecosystem
  • Cryptographically provable everything
• Retroactive public goods funding

  • Instead of an organisation that funds projects based on what it thinks will be successful or valuable, setup a DAO ("results oracle") that funds projects that were valuable to a community's goals, after the fact. Incentivises people to fund projects that they think will get funding in the future, creating essentially a type of prediction market that encourages up-front funding and contribution.

  • Encourages work and funding on entrepreneurial public goods (public goods widely seen as important only after they are built) - markets fail at these because of the free rider problem, and governments fail at these because they are either too exclusionary or too conformist

  • Decentralised decision making is much better at retrospective decisions than at prospective ones

  • Retroactive funding preserves a role for leadership and individual vision, and rewards quality