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Masa Foundation 6

Speaker A: Hey, guys, welcome to our episode after the episode with Brian Armstrong and Patrick Joyce on decentralized science.

Speaker B: You know, David, it's just called Joyce.

Speaker A: Yeah, Joyce. Yeah, Brian just called him Joyce. That's cool.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I start calling you Hoffman. Call me Adams.

Speaker B: Oh, no, we're not in high school, buddy.

Speaker A: Ooh, was that a slate on Brian Armstrong?

Speaker B: But no, people called me Hoffman in high school. I was like, oh, did they really? Yeah. Yeah. How about the Hoffmande d Hoff? They called me Dhoff.

Speaker A: David Hasselhoff. David Hoffman. I'm sure you got this. Did you get Baywatch reference? David?

Speaker B: David. David Hasselhoffman was also one. But no, it was mostly d hoff that stuck.

Speaker A: Oh, man, that's great. I had no nickname in high school. You'd be happy to know.

Speaker B: Yeah. You had to give yourself a nickname. You had to add Shawn to your name.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's. I definitely. In real life, I just go by Ryan Adams, but on the Internet, there's a lot of those weird. It's like, I know, way too short. Anyway, let's talk about the subject matter at hands. I never thought we would have an episode with Brian Armstrong where we talked about science. We talked about science, right. We didn't talk about Coinbase.

Speaker B: Yeah. Not until the very end. And it was about. Was like, yo, how are you splitting your time? And he's basically just like. He's an advisor of research hub, who probably is a very activist investor, too. And that's probably how he got, like, co founders.

Speaker A: Yeah, he's not doing the Elon Musk thing, you think, where he's actually, like, running all of these things and finding.

Speaker B: 120 hours of work as Elon Musk.

Speaker A: No, few are.

Speaker B: No one is probably same number of hours of work, but just with a little bit more of a Zen head on his shoulders. So I think DSi and this concept of deci is when I got into crypto in 2017, and we were doing the whole ICo mania phenomenon, and we had, like, crazy ideas. We had, like, supply chain blockchains, and we had, like, Internet service provider ICO tokens, centralized new blockchain, I think. And that was on the pessimism to optimism arc. 2017 was like, it broke the optimism limits is the limits of what you could imagine with crypto and how it can change the world and what it would do and what the future could entail. It was so incredibly optimistic because we were just not grounded in reality. And I'm seeing that was 2017. That was how many years ago? Coming up on ten years ago, like, seven years ago, I'm seeing with Desi an emergence of that same level of optimism, this time without the mania and the froth, and this, this time with fundamentals and structure and platforms. And it's getting into crypto, you see, like, okay, we have bitcoin. Let's rethink money. Oh, we have ethereum. Let's rethink finance. Oh, wait a second. We have private keys. Let's perhaps start to think about identity, and your imagination should be allowed to continue. And I think Deci, I think, is not just, I hope, the well and best for Deci, but I think one of the best things Deci can do is show the world it's not just crypto. It's not just finance. It actually is about human coordination across all systems. It is about incentives and incentive mechanisms. And so Deci is a concept. The fact that this is taking off, and by the way, for bank listeners who are listening to this for the first time, Deci is not new. It's two plus years old now. Like, it's been running in parallel. You don't hear about it because there's no meme coins, because it's, like, serious. There's, like, research. People who wear ties and, like, go to, you know, research.

Speaker A: Oh, just you wait, David. We will find a way to speculate on Deci. All right? It's pure right now. It won't.

Speaker B: When that phase of this bull market comes, I'm selling.

Speaker A: You're leaving.

Speaker B: I'll come back in a couple of years. But, like, as soon as DSI enters, like, the traders here, I'm like, okay, this is. We're frothy here. It's important that we are taking the principles of crypto and applying them in completely different contexts, because I think it shows how expansive crypto can be. Because, like, I don't know, when do we get decentralized? I don't know, food production or something. I don't know, something else. Some other architecture of defood. Yeah. Like, some other architecture of society that we deconstruct, take out all the corruption in middlemen, and put it back together using highly coordinated rails that is crypto. And so I'm just happy, as an optimist to see crypto principles being applied in completely new contexts because it kind of returns me to the nostalgia that I had in 2017, where I'm like, we're going to rebuild humanity, which I still believe. I just now is like, okay, but like, decades, not in three years, I guess.

Speaker A: A couple of reflections. So, you know, first of all, I agree with that. You know, one thing I'll say is, as far as, from where is crypto actually being used? Like, where is block space being consumed sort of thing. This kind of app that they're building with research hub. And I think many of the Desi projects are a bit like Web 2.5, I would say, in that, like, it's a web app. Research hub is a web app, right? It's just using some crypto coordination technology, specifically crypto governance style governance, and also a token for incentivization. And so that's what makes it the. That's the dot five on the 2.5. But I would say kind of the rest of the app is like, you know, kind of a standard web two app. Now. That's. That's where, like, from a technical perspective, it's kind of like using crypto from an ethos perspective, I think it is very crypto aligned and, like, even like, broader in terms. Like, just very aligned in terms of its values, right? Because what we have here is a system that is not corruption resistant, right? That, like, the scientific consensus mechanism of finding truth, it's been gamed. These are Patrick's words, essentially, right? There's, like, mev. There's, like, front running. There's just, like, gamification of the thing. There's corruption that seeped in. Whether it's like. I mean, hear about this. All of this, all of the studies and the research. How do you get research done if you're a pharma company? You just buy it. It's pretty easy. And you can get it peer reviewed, and you can get it, like, through the system. It is not a censorship, like, trust resistant technology. The mechanism, it sounds like is broken down as well, because there's no slashing, like, mechanism, right? Because the incentives are just for positive things. And buy only. Yeah, it's buy only. There's no short. So it's. It's kind of a bit of a broken market. And what that leads to is bad science, capital inefficiency. And why is that important? Because, like, God, science is everything. Science is the reason we're actually, like, doing anything above, you know, kind of the animal kingdom, right? This is what's really propelled humanity and what makes the world kind of a better place, right? Life extension. And, like, the type of, like, modern medicine, all of the things that we take for granted today, this podcast, like, all of the learning opportunities, everything is kind of based on science. So from that perspective, there's a moloch to slay. There's a coordination technology to develop. There's a bunch of banker middlemen that you want to kind of dis intermediate, and they're all like, you know, I love the scientific method because it reminds me very much of a validator. Do you know, like, how you can verify a block and, like, know that this is true? Well, you can conduct an experiment for any kind of scientific proof, and if you can replicate that experiment, you know it's true. And so you are scientists are validators, right? And so anyway, it has all of these spiritual, I guess, like, ways of letting, but it doesn't use that much blockchain, actual tech, aside from, like, tokens and, like, you know, some open source principles, I would say, yeah.

Speaker B: Like, the only on chain footprint really is like, the economics of, like, for this particular project, specifically research hub, like, the trading of the token, the passing of the token, the payment of the tokenization. But also, it can also get more expansive than that. Filecoin is actually not even adjacent to deci. Filecoin and desi could, in theory, be built on top of filecoin. And filecoin is just like, you put data in there, you can access data. It wants to be the library of human knowledge. And so all of a sudden, you can kind of get the money Legos of Defi with the foundation of. With the context of deci. And so, like, it can get even more expansive from there. But, like, we're now we're talking about, like, crazy kind of imaginations that are pretty far out into the future.

Speaker A: Do you see this? Like, well, as you were talking, I was looking up the price of research coin showing anything.

Speaker B: It's pumped bigly.

Speaker A: Like, what is this? I mean, you said the speculators aren't here, but I don't know. I'm looking at this chart. Yeah, this is RSC price.

Speaker B: I wonder what happened right when it went vertical.

Speaker A: Okay, so we should describe what we're looking at.

Speaker B: So when was it? November 9 and 10th. Wow.

Speaker A: There's not much liquidity here, though.

Speaker B: There can't be.

Speaker A: There's almost.

Speaker B: No. Okay, so fully diluted valuation, $375 million. It used to be. Wow.

Speaker A: But look at the market cap.

Speaker B: Used to be $1.3 million. Wow. Yeah, $1.3 million in November of this year, and then it jumped up to $60 million. But, like, I wonder how much was trading. It couldn't have been much, right? And so, like, that's not like somebody didn't sit on, like, a ten x gain or something, but, like, there's definitely a story there.

Speaker A: There's a little bit, but there's not.

Speaker B: Oh, my God. It's time to swap. That's great.

Speaker A: I. Who knows? It could pump as a result of this episode. Really? I mean, like, I don't know.

Speaker B: I hope not.

Speaker A: That's one thing we didn't get into.

Speaker B: Well, I'm sorry, I'm not going to talk about research coin on a podcast with Brian.

Speaker A: Yeah, don't sell it. We just talked. We just talked about how. How great it is that we're not. But there's a token and so you know what's coming and Brian Armstrong is behind it. And like, Brian Armstrong, founder of Coinbase. Yeah.

Speaker B: Win research coin with hatred.

Speaker A: Oh, God. Anyway, so what do you think about the approach that. Okay, so open science, you talk to somebody else from like kind of the deci community. Here's research hub. Brian Armstrong clearly thinks it's worth his attention. They built something here. It's got hundreds of thousands of scientific papers that they are indexing. I feel like there's something here, right? And I think their intuition that if you combine sort of a consensus mechanism like system to find, to kind of like rate papers and be like more performant than modern scientific journals, and you combine that with like a capital allocation system where you get rid of the intermediaries like university IP offices and that kind of thing, and you go direct to the scientists. It feels like there's a great disruption story here. It feels like a really cool startup and it feels like something that would be net positive for humanity. Yeah. What's your take?

Speaker B: Yes, this was a little bit why I was asking Patrick and Brian in the episode about like, yo, we have this new blank slate, but it's blanken. And I bet you in the developmental arc of this platform, if we are applying a similar comparison to Ethereum, it's probably like 2016. 2017 Ethereum, where we thought proof of stake was right around the corner and we didn't even know mev was existing. The great thing about the story is that they've started the race, they're in the game, the progress is happening, but they haven't discovered mev, as in there's a big overarching problem that they don't even know exists. And they first a, need to identify that exists, and then b, develop systems and solutions to route around that problem. So probably what I'm talking about is the Ethereum magicians equivalent forum of the research hub project. How do they, what has the Ethereum foundation been doing? They've been making sure that the Ethereum system is balance and self maintaining and self regulation regulating from now until infinity. And that's probably, I'm assuming not where this research hub project is. It's still probably extremely manual. And so there's, if we really want this to be a self perpetuating, globally scaling financial scientific system, there needs to be the meta science about research hub. Like how do we, what, what other mechanisms do we need to make this whole economy work? Like how do we balance the economics of the system so that it doesn't get like, you know, there's not a leak somewhere in incentives and so there's, there's probably a very long developmental arc of this whole project itself. And this is just one project of Deci projects.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's, there's a lot of cool problems to solve here. And if they can solve them, I think this could be really powerful. Like even just the simple idea of using a safe, right, so simple agreement for future equity. That was I believe kind of like a standard contract that I think it's like y combinator created for startups. Right before that it was like bespoke like legal and kind of they were like, you know what startups at that stage where they're so early at inception phase, they just need a super simple like debt based financing tool with a standard contract. Here it is, template, right? Like do that for science, make cool, right. What I do sort of wonder though is, and this might be like the public good side of things, like how much science can be commercialized in that way and how much just needs to be a public good. Some of these papers have got to be so early that they are like decades away from any commercial application if ever. What is the study of black holes? How do you commercialize hawking radiation off of black holes or some theory of dark matter? Like how do you commercialize that? Exactly. And so this might sort of sort for scientific papers and ideas that are a bit closer to commercialization and aren't as public goodsy. But I don't know, I guess we'll have to see how it emerges.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And kind of going back to what I was saying where like, well first we had defi, then now we're getting deci. What about d I don't know, like food d whatever. D something do we new other institution of humanities arc like we have the Ethereum magicians of Ethereum. We're getting the Ethereum magicians of research hub like we are we about to recruit like the researchers of all industries to come and re engineer and re architect all of every version, every pillar of society that gets a d in front of it, because to me, that's just like, again, kind of like the daydream imagination that I came into crypto with.

Speaker A: I mean, that was awesome, right?

Speaker B: Why else are we in crypto? I'm here in crypto to re architect the way that humanity is built so that it's built with better foundations and we can move faster. I guess that makes me an accelerationist.

Speaker A: It's kind of hard, though, right? So, like, even in crypto, where we have all these tools, if you contribute to Ethereum research, that's kind of a similar type of venue as something like this, this research hub, right? You know, the Ethereum research forums. I, as an individual contributor and, like, posting something about some future Ethereum improvement proposal or some sort of cryptographic breakthrough that Ethereum can apply. The people who post there don't get monetary compensation, right? Unless they hold eth or something in some abstract way. And their idea gets, like, they don't. It's more about like, social cred or it's more about like, public giving back. I mean, we do hold Ethereum researchers in very high esteem, you know, so, like, they become kind of like the best ones become kind of legends in their own right. So I guess that's some social status. But I guess what I'm saying is, it's hard. We haven't even solved it in crypto. I mean, should there be a percent of ETH reserved for our ethereum researchers who are generating these ideas? They don't see it. They're doing it from kind of like the goodness of their own heart, quote, unquote. At least some of them are, anyway. There's a lot of hard problems, I think, to solve when it comes to you getting the incentives correct around this.

Speaker B: But you can start, I mean, every single thing, crypto, deci, d food, whatever, included d health. I guess that's deci. It all boils down to the same problem, which is governance, which is humanity's greatest problem. It is. The problem of humanity is governance. And there's no silver bullet for fixing governance. We can have the Internet to produce forums to help talk more. We can produce Ethereum and permissionless payments to pay easier. And this can facilitate governance in a roundabout, adjacent way. But there's no technology that is like governance technology. There's only tools.

Speaker A: Yeah, you're right. And another kind of term for governance, more abstractly, is what is government governance? It's who has control over capital allocation decisions, like who has yeah. And who gets the proceeds of, like, the resources, who gets the return on that and very, very difficult to solve. The injection of markets makes me optimistic. Like, can you do something with prediction markets in kind of Deci, like, you bet on outcomes of papers? There's certainly something there, but I just, you know, there's a more general use case that we didn't get into, which is I kind of wonder whether Deci can tell me, like, all right, so Covid vaccines, right? I don't want to get into any controversial territory, but like, as a layman, I have actual, like, no idea what kind of the real, like, the actual science. And, you know, people say, is it.

Speaker B: Bullshit or is it not bullshit? Someone just tell me.

Speaker A: I don't know. It's probably a little bit like, there's probably a little bit of both. There's probably some risk here that's kind of like, could a platform like this answer that question? Because I don't have a good resource.

Speaker B: Because chat, CBT is not going to.

Speaker A: Help you because, well, and then people tell me, like, all of the pro vaccine like studies are, you know, pharma funded. Is that true? I don't know. Can a platform help me answer that question? Cause that would be great. It'd be good for, you know, like all kind of citizens, all people of the Internet, people of the world, to be able to have a more trusted, like, scientific process. I don't know if this can provide that, but if it can, that would be incredibly optimistic.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, very, very much agree.

Speaker A: Anyway, it's nice to have content that's not crypto, actually.

Speaker B: That was a breath of fresh air, I'd say.

Speaker A: Well, cool. We're scientists now, David. We're on the journey of always. We're always worried just higher in the stack, you know. Now we're going to our roots here.

Speaker B: Well, that is the bull case of deci, is that it democratizes access to doing science.

Speaker A: Oh, you could be a science scientist.

Speaker B: You be your own bank, be your own scientist, same thing.

Speaker A: Be your own scientist. As long as you have verification of the block, you can repeat the experiment. That's what we need. It's real science. Right, right. We're all science validators here.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: All right, this has been the debrief. Thanks, guys. We'll see you later.

Speaker B: Thanks, guys. Bye.