Author: chunzhen Source: ChainFeeds

"Finite games are for winning, infinite games are for continuing the game. "Inspired by American scholar James P. Carse, Ethereum Foundation Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi proposed the vision of Ethereum's "Infinite Garden". Ethereum is not just a technology, but a diverse garden of individuals and organizations. As a gardener in the garden, the Ethereum Foundation assumes the role of nurturing and promoting production but not controlling it. People build and grow in an open and unlimited garden, allowing the garden to continue to flourish organically.

During the four-day trip to Devcon SEA (Devcon 7), I saw the concretization of Ethereum's "Infinite Garden" vision.

When we talk about public goods

During Devcon, I mainly interviewed some representative public goods projects, including Gitcoin, Protocol Guild, Octant, etc., which is a pity. The Optimism team was not found. The following is a summary of the views:

Gitcoin Lianchuang Kevin Owocki talked about how technologies such as account abstraction make Web3 closer to Web2 products in terms of user experience. This is what Gitcoin lacks. Gitcoin is essentially a platform built for Web3 developers. It assumes that everyone has a wallet and knows how to trade by default. However, if you want to provide solutions for non-blockchain use cases, user experience is a problem that must be solved.

Previously, Gitcoin launched an experimental Layer2Public Goods Network, which aimed to use sorting fees to build and fund public goods. PGN was discontinued in June this year operations. Regarding the reasons for the closure of PGN, Owocki said that PGN was a good attempt, but the adoption rate in actual operation was still too low. No one was really using it, so the project was shut down. But he is very much in favor of the idea of ​​​​PGN and welcomes any team that wants to restart/fork the project.

As a relatively mysterious Protocol Guild, this Devcon also interviewed PrCheeky, one of the otocol Guild members, here are some interesting points:

1) Regarding the diversity of Protocol Guild members, Asians (about 2) and women (about 6) are only in single digits, but this is not only a problem unique to the Ethereum ecosystem, the Protocol Guild will also always pay attention to and help more women enter the ecosystem;

2) Protocol Guild does not have a marketing team, so it simply asks Layer 2 directly for coins (but most of the time it is directly rejected by Layer 2). In the first quarter of next year, Protocol Guild will strengthen brand building. The ideal situation is for projects to donate directly without communicating with team members;

3) The essence of Protocol Guild is that Layer 2 provides funds to enable outstanding developers to stay in Layer 1 for construction. This may sound paradoxical, but Cheeky It said that Ethereum still has a long way to go, and Ethereum Layer 2 also inherits the security of Ethereum. Only by building Ethereum first can other Layer 2s develop significantly. This is a relatively easy-to-understand point of view, so I hope that all Layer2 can contribute in the future;

4) Regarding the issue of orthodoxy, is there a possibility? Protocol Guild has grown into another EF, and the project team donates tokens to show loyalty (legitimacy) in disguise? It can be heard that Protocol Guild has such ambitions, but it has not yet figured out how to do it. Finally, Protocol Guild welcomes all comers, even if they donate Memecoin tokens to get a PR, they are happy to see it.

Octant, as an emerging public goods fundraising platform, uses the proceeds from the 100,000 ETH pledged by the Golem Foundation as a source of public goods funds. Its public relations director Wlodek Gogloza Said that Octant is a sustainable funding platform, and the Golem Foundation, as a Solo Staker, pledges its own ETH and then uses part of the return to fund public goods (not necessarily public goods in the Web3 industry). At the same time, due to security considerations, Octant will not consider liquidity staking options, although this may bring higher returns.

I noticed that in the Epoch 5 funding round that Octant just completed, "big funders" such as Protocol Guild and Revoke still occupy the top of the funding list. This raises the question of whether this is a drawback of quadratic financing, because people are more inclined to donate funds to these "popular, leading" projects. Wlodek said that a huge project like the Protocol Guild itself requires much greater funding than some independent projects with single-digit developers, while the needs of some small projects like some at the end of the list may simply be to host an offline event. Of course, there is indeed a "popularity competition" here, and it is indeed a problem worth considering and solving.

Wlodek also mentioned an interesting phenomenon. Although many funding programs are now using quadratic financing, in fact, the allocation of the original quadratic financing paper was The donation pool is not fixed. It will increase or decrease based on the actual donation of the donor. In reality, the matching donation pool for secondary financing is determined in advance, which may result in the final donation not truly reflecting public opinion. . As a result, Octant is considering a more primitive quadratic funding formula that does not determine the size of the matching pool in advance.

Thailand’s local projects

Thailand’s local projects have a low presence. I only encountered a few Thai local projects at side events. First of all, there are some local Meme/GameFi/Metaverse communities in Thailand on MemeWonder, but they are not large in scale. An unexpected one is that TokenUnlocks, my own commonly used recording token unlocking tool, is a purely local Thai team. They have now officially upgraded to Tokenomist, incorporating more on-chain and analytical elements. Other projects include the wallet application Rubie, which focuses on converting USDC into electronic Thai Baht (DTHB) for scan-code payment, and the cross-chain communication protocol Analog, etc. The Web3 project in Thailand gives me the feeling that it is still in the stage of wild growth, but the builders, funds and atmosphere required for development are already there, and it is an emerging market worthy of attention.

Close The day of the ceremony was Thailand’s Loy Krathong Festival, and the venue was decorated with water lanterns

Finally, IThe biggest feeling about Devcon is that Ethereum is an open and inclusive ecosystem. Here, people from any background can find topics to get involved in and like-minded people to build something new. The Ethereum Foundation has truly fulfilled the role of a gardener. Their presence is not that strong, but you can always find them when you need them. But at the same time, as Ethereum is such a huge ecosystem, resistance to change also exists objectively, especially when multiple interests are involved. Overall, Ethereum may not be an ecosystem that rewards the brave, but things of real value will eventually pay off.