Where do I start, loads! I've had lots of surprising things said to me over the years, some of which are not repeatable on camera. Many many things and I think you are taken back for a few seconds when either comments are made or you hear something or you read something. I'm a chief executive and my name is Sam. Sometimes I get misgendered quite a lot so the press will think I'm a man, I'm not a woman and that's really surprised me. Ymlaen ychydig i'w bwysig hon. Mae'r hyfforddhaethau yng nghymru yn y cyfrodoedd. Mae'r hyfforddhaethau yn gwneud y rhwngig. Roedd angen i'r brigwyr cyffreddoriaeth. Rwy'n roi'n gwybod y cael yn mynd bywyr i wingwyr ar gyfer y cyfrwng. Rwy'n roi'n gyrw'r decisions. Roeddwn i. Cynnydd y ffwrdd, ynwn iCorirau. Cymru yw'n thrif aggressively ar gyfer y cyfrwng. Mae'r hyfforddhaethau a fyddiaeth yn wneud. Fyddwn i'n rhyw gael. As long as you know what is right for your organisation, then you can be as tough as anybody else. My partner is a doctor and a woman and she would have often easier to do well for yourself, haven't you love? Things that are said to you sometimes drive you to even be more successful or to help other people more. Don't let the doubters detract. A number of people have questioned whether I can be promoted and be a mum. The councillor actually said to me when I was thinking about going for a chief execs role that actually a chief exec should always be a male. Those words were kind of shocking, but even more shocking is because those came from a female councillor.  Crying out loud is 2020.


Hello there. Welcome to today's webinar on how to access Web 3 funding for your projects. This session will help makers understand how to take their impact projects from idea to reality. We'll explore how makers can use the web mechanisms to build their projects like hackathons and accelerators and look at how to fund impact projects including grants, venture capital and initial coin offerings. My name is Billy Bickett and today I'll be your event host. First I want to introduce Azim Khan. I'm going to turn it over to Azim for a moment, but let me give you Azim's bio. He's a New York based entrepreneur who's worked in biotech, tech, entertainment, e-sports, gaming and blockchain. He's currently the head of Impact at Gitcoin, a DAO that's distributed over $72 million in grants to open source software developers since its inception. He's led raising tens of millions of dollars that was distributed to thousands of projects. He's also part of the World Economic Forum's Crypto Sustainability Coalition. He led UNICEF's experiment in quadratic funding and we are also joined by Ann Connolly. She's our subject matter expert for this learning series. She's been instrumental in shaping the design of this learning series and she's also going to be our Q&A facilitator at all of these events. So if you have questions about the nuts and bolts of blockchain or anything else, Ann will be here to support you finding answers. And so with that, I'm going to pass the mic to Azim. Thank you so much for joining us Azim. First off, thank you to Ann for helping bring this opportunity to me. It's super cool. I'm always looking for interesting ways that I feel like I can give back, especially with the work that I get to do at Gitcoin in particular. We tend to work with a lot of projects very needed to the crypto ecosystem and it's a really important thing to me to find ways to be able to offer other forms of actual real-world impact. Oftentimes, people in this space tend to live in a little bit of a bubble and it's nice to be able to do things like this. Thank you to TechSoup for having me as well. So yeah, today I want to chat with everyone about funding and development or impact. There are so many new and exciting opportunities and ways that people in this space have been getting access to funding and it's why the thing that we did with UNICEF, which was a grants round that I'm going to talk a little bit about later, was so important to me. One that was a little bit more controversial earlier this year was we closed a very big deal with Shell Oil that upset a lot of people but we ended up using half a million dollars that's going to be distributed over the next 12 months to fund really interesting projects doing amazing things in the Web-3 climate solution space. We have a deal with a nonprofit that's going to be announcing next week that I can't just say here but they're one of the large ones and it's amazing to be able to help facilitate some stuff like this. Back around again, I know Billy already introduced it a little bit. I've been in and out of the crypto space for about a decade now. This is a long time I started writing about Bitcoin in 2013 for the Huntington Post and a variety of things that I was doing when I say in and out is that there weren't really many full-time jobs that were available early on and many of the people who were doing a lot of the full-time jobs earliest on either are running companies like Coinbase now or they've since gone defunct and so I was always very interested in the idea of this whole concept of a decentralized currency without being launched in one centralized government and it brought me to the space. What exactly is money? How do we decide what money is and how do we collectively make that decision and then since there's been so many amazing things that have happened and continue to and some of the work that I've been able to do since I joined Bitcoin going on two years ago mounts between a year and a half and two years raised tens of millions of dollars. We've worked with thousands of projects. We for the most part focused on open-source software and Ethereum infrastructure like I mentioned a bunch in the climate space in 2022 we ended up hosting what ended up being the largest fundraising grants around for projects in the decentralized science space. That's one that's been very interesting and exciting because science is one of the places that there's very few places to get access to funding and if you don't get access from those few places there's nothing you can do and so the idea of being able to get funds in the hands of upstarts that are doing interesting things has been something really cool. We've even done diversity equity and inclusion rounds because there's so many interesting things that we really need to be doing there and Bitcoin's been an amazing platform to work with because we did some we current some numbers and based on projects that were once grantees of ours that have gone on to be successful companies with private venture funding valuations or token launches we were able to estimate or guesstimate that it's around like 28, 29 billion dollars in global financial impact that's been done as a result of this 72 million we've distributed which is amazing and some of these other things that I've gotten a chance to do a little bit more on what is yet coin it was founded in 2017 with the idea of using hackathons which I'll talk about a little bit and then bounties which are just essentially a job board for things that need to be done that we thought Kevin Walkie who's the founder thought would be a good way to get builders in this space fairly compensated for the work that they're doing in 2019 there was a report that came out from Glenn Weil, Vitalik Buterin Vitalik is one of the founders of Ethereum and it was this idea of quadratic funding I'll explain a little bit but the easiest way to explain it would be to say that it's a democratic form of funding where the community that's voting on where they feel capital should go gets to make the decision as opposed to it being get coin or some of the organizations that are doing the actual funding and we chose to fund what are considered public goods this tends to be a little bit of a contentious definition for people in how they choose to define it at least in the Web3 ecosystem the way that I see it as the infrastructure, the rails of the Web3 ecosystem the highways, the roads, bridges, tunnels sort of something like that if you were to use an analogy about so what is QF? it's a democratic form of capital allocation where it's a crowdfunding platform where donors come together and make individual donations usually we've seen on average of $12 per critical wallet but as low as $1 and those donations end up counting as votes and so this allows for sort of a bottom-up decision-making in how the capital ends up being distributed to projects that we're working with looking at this is just like a little bit of a sliding scale that we've created on how matching works and I'll explain what that means in a little bit it sounds a little bit like magic to be really honest with you because there have been times that for each $1 donated there have been projects who received an additional $100 in funding and so one of the reasons that we've found that so many of our community continue to come back to be able to donate is because of the feeling they get that they're actually making a change because normally they might feel like their $1 is just $1 and it's not actually contributing to anything really in the long run whereas the way that this works out is that their $1 can have an outsize impact as compared to what their donation is in particular which we've found and chatted with a lot of people about how it's just a much more empowering way to be able to vote on how they feel funds should be allocated in the communities that matter to them so why quadratic funding and this will get a little bit into it we've been doing top-down decision-making and everyone here has dealt with top-down decision-making for the way funds end up moving there's typically three to five people that are sitting in a room those three to five people get to make decisions those decisions end up impacting the people that are removed from the actual communities that the decision-maker tends to have anything to do with and so this idea for quadratic funding had essentially been if you can pool large portions of capital into what are called matching pools and for us we have raised these funds from all the largest companies in the crypto ecosystem someone in the chat earlier mentioned the Filecoin Foundation Filecoin and Protocol Labs have been very gracious over the years and having given us what's definitely somewhere in the seven-figure arranged date the Ethereum Foundation has given us a lot of money I mentioned Shell earlier, Coinbase, Polygon a lot of the names that anyone has heard of in this space have donated to us and what's honestly been really amazing about these donations is that they're not tax-deductible we've been working at ways to make them tax-deductible for the organizations that we work with but the reputation that Keycoins built has been one where people really just want to have the opportunity to give back in a way that will help the ecosystem flourish and continue the flywheel of innovation and it's been more so that than it has been what people are used to in the world of trying to sell the idea of CSR very often to these large organizations but how these grants round work is, I'll give an example I mentioned climate here, let's say we end up having a climate round our last round was August 14th to August 29th we had approximately 100 grantees in the climate round and we had $250,000 in the matching pool itself and when the grants round was taking place for the two weeks that it did people like you and me would go in to the grants round and we would go in to donate a minimum of $1 that $1 donation equates to a vote and in the example you can see here if there is a specific grant that gets $100 donation from one person and then there is a second grant that ends up getting multiple $10 donations that let's say still amounts to the same $100 while the first person gets $100 based on how the matching pool and quadratic funding works grant 2 ends up receiving more money from this $250,000 matching pool and what we've been essentially doing for years has been at least in this open source software and Ethereum infrastructure space has been a lot of very smart people who understand, know and care about the space come to the grants rounds that we've been doing once a quarter now since 2019 to be able to vote with their dollars as to where they feel money should go it's part of why we think our grants program has led to so many of the successful companies in the ecosystem it's people who understand and are subject matter experts in some capacity are coming in to be able to vote on where they feel money should go as opposed to it just being venture capitalists who tend to be former bankers or consultants no shocks it's something like that but it ends up being different to have 3-5 people in a room deciding where they feel money should go when investing in a technology versus being able to have it such that thousands of people are voting when we did our UNICEF round we had about 17,000 unique individual donors that came in to distribute an additional $100,000 I'll talk a little bit about that one later but you can just imagine that the idea of using a collective intelligence of a large group of people is going to end up very likely especially in specific verticals proving to be better when it comes to how that capital is efficiently moving this is a quick definition of public goods to be really honest having spent all this time here even still at Goodcoin I haven't found an amazing definition that I can use because it ends up really moving based on who you're talking to this idea of non-excludable or non-rival risk which I find to be way too technical and lingo had really just landed on clean air as a public good like everyone should have access to it open source software is one that we've found for Goodcoin why we've coined it that is that open source software at the moment and the way I see it is a little bit more of a business definition and some of my colleagues open source software is a business that's worth tens of billions of dollars on a yearly basis and in Web 3 our idea of how things should work is that it shouldn't be five, six or seven companies that essentially run and own in a centralized way all the financial transactions all of the search engines all the social media a lot of the things that we've come to associate to be run by centralized entities should be owned by the public in this way the code should be open source and so the way that I've seen a lot of it is that if we are doing that we're creating what should become a multiple of tens of billions of dollars a year which means hundreds of billions if not trillions at some point in a way that is open source for people for companies not doing what they're supposed to it shouldn't end up working the way that it does today where you're just stuck it should work that someone can essentially take the code and make their own newer and better version to out compete whichever of the companies it is using the exact same platform that they have Bitcoin Grants launched 2019 like I mentioned and it's been very successful year on year we've had a massive increase in the ability that we've been able to give out we've been very fortunate that many of our grantees have come back and gone on to funders of the program itself that's been something that's been honestly really amazing to see we call it a graduation of sorts and to see platforms coming back and then being able to give us funds is how much they appreciate what we've been able to do for them is honestly always great just a couple numbers on skim through these we've had close to four million unique donations in the last four years there's been many of these quadratic funding pools the market cap valuation that I was talking about over 28 billion close to 4,000 projects have been funded I quickly wanted to throw some case studies into here less so that we could get really deep into them now but so that when everyone ends up getting these slides that they could take a look and we can either talk about these during the Q&A today but next week we're going to be doing a longer Q&A and so I wanted to give a couple different examples of the types of case studies that we've had for projects just to be able to help prime people to ask any questions that they might have we did what was called the Oakland local round a couple years back and in doing this it was a small matching pool of only $15,000 but we took seven nonprofits who are completely not prep-donated in any way and we brought them on-chain and had them participate in their communities participate in what was a quadratic funding round and since then what we ended up finding was that in that area they have actually created it's such that the local farmer's market now takes stable coins and payments and to be able to get local farmer's market to be taking crypto-native payments is one of the things that we found ended up being an interesting example of work that we've done so far and seeing how we'd be able to help expand this effort over time the UNICEF round that we did was one that took a really long time to come together as you can imagine the United Nations or UNICEF doing work with a crypto-native company especially an obscure sounding obscure crypto company took a lot of red tape paperwork and everything but essentially we put together a $50,000 matching pool that they chose and they put 10 projects towards us that had been invested in by the UNICEF venture fund and they just wanted to get an example of how exactly this bottom up fundraising mechanism would end up working it ended up being extremely successful like I was mentioning we had close to 17,000 individual unique donation that happened over the course of 12 days and this ended up resulting in over $150,000 being distributed to these 10 projects that are working on a bunch of amazing things optimism this is a without getting too technical one of the much more successful and popular companies in the crypto ecosystem they make it cheaper and faster to be able to do things on Ethereum itself they joined us in the first Grants round they did not they they've since gone on to become a massively successful company they've generated billions of dollars in user fees from people using their platform there's billions of dollars in token itself and if you speak to anyone at the optimism team they will tell you just how helpful Bitcoin had been to their success and then one inch is another one of those examples it's a platform that essentially allows people to go in and swap tokens for other tokens in a way that doesn't require having any sort of centralized entity to be able to do it no names of some of the centralized places that people do trading but this would be an example of a centralized one but for traditional assets they're a bunch of them you can't really trade stocks for other stocks in any way without there being a centralized provider this platform one inch allows anyone to go on swap tokens for tokens and since launch they have done hundreds of billions in trading volume have a market cap that's usually sitting between 750 million and a billion dollars and the money that they received from Bitcoin ended up being one that the founder says had this not happened there would be no one inch today that there was a never mind I thought there was a slide in between here but now let's get into the actual sort of ideas as to how I've been thinking about and looking at what are some of the ways that non-profits like yourselves can take a look at being able to get involved in getting access to funds in their space and how I wrote it out was I wanted to say what are some of the benefits what are some of the drawbacks and then what are the actual relevance for the non-profits in each of these examples for anyone who's not familiar a hackathon is essentially where a bunch of developers get together sometimes it's over a day sometimes it's over a weekend sometimes a little bit longer tends to be a limited time frame now and there ends up being some sort of reward just in times cash sometimes other things like credits from Google Cloud or Google AdWords and things like that and people break up into teams and then in doing so they usually have some sort of prompt as to what they're supposed to build towards but they come together people group themselves and then in this time frame figure out the projects based on the prompt and end up building something for whatever that time frame is if it's a 72-hour time frame I ended up being the judge for a hackathon in San Francisco earlier this year and we had them build consumer crypto products and so as quickly as they could and oftentimes the people who were involved in this don't sleep much ended up building out some stuff and then after three days we ended up sitting down to really be able to judge who ended up, Desiree was almost I think it was $600,000 that we ended up giving away between Capsheed credits to different platforms so the benefits of doing something like this is that you get to crowdsource the solution to the issue that you have it's not just the people sitting in the room you get to be able to bring together people from all over to get to see how you might be able to solve this issue it means bringing together tech savvy people to sit down to figure out how they want to do it and in ways I think that it brings about awareness to the not only the mission but some of the problems that non-profits might be facing so let's say a non-profit was to host a hackathon this ends up being one where a bunch of developers would be able to come together they're the tech savvy people they see what some of the problems might be and they start figuring out how they might be able to look to solve some of those issues drawbacks to this you need to have some sort of technical oversight this is one of the ones that I've seen more and more is that they're IP considerations that you need to look at perhaps once the product is done who actually ends up owning it is something when it comes to some of the crypto ones I've seen the purpose is to be able to build a product that may end up being something that turns into a company later on many companies actually take hackathon ideas and say that they were successful in a hackathon and go on to try to raise capital for it or build a company around it and so I think that if it was solving problems for non-profits it would be interesting to have to think about exactly how that portion of things would work and it's also some of the problems that I imagine many of you face are not small problems and so figuring out what the timelines would be and being able to have developers put together solutions that would be able to solve for those problems because you don't have problems that are new you have problems that are been going on for quite some time and it could be naive to assume that those problems could be solved in 72 hours by even the smartest of people but it does end up being an opportunity to collaborate with the tech community and to find what could be innovative solutions to being able to figure out some of the mission-related challenges that some of you may face it's something that I've thought about quite a bit and we've been talking with some organizations that look like to be able to host it crypto-native ones that happen there is Eat Global Eat Global is an organization that hosts hackathons honestly maybe more than monthly at this point and they do them all over the world and they have their own prompts they have money that they're giving away all the companies get involved sometimes companies get involved because they have specific solutions that they need to be able to figure out internally developing as much as they can they figure out what exactly can we do or give away to be able to maybe get this problem solved from the outside Biddlebox is a white label solution to be able to do hackathons that's been successful with late and they've been one that have been working with a lot of organizations and making it easier to host the hackathon but as a result are also in the middle of making some of those hackathons happen and finally there's one named Zuzalo this was a really interesting one that came about a couple months back the founder of Ethereum decided that he wanted to bring together some of the smartest people in the world in crypto to be able to solve for different problems that we're looking at and so he essentially helped to fund what was a two month long stay in the country of Montenegro to be able to have a lot of these people come give talks build together and since then has turned into a hacker house series that the last one that I attended there was a big one in Singapore there was a big crypto conference in Singapore a few weeks back and they hosted one they're hosting one at the next larger crypto conference that's going to be happening in Turkey as well they haven't done anything that has been specific to nonprofits but they're very interested in the idea of public goods and I thought that could be an interesting one next concept is accelerators I'm not sure how many of you have heard of accelerators but they're programs that you applied to cohort based and they offer variety of things so there tends to be funding sometimes there's office space and then there's other resources in the form of people who were subject matter experts and can be mentors successful past entrepreneurs sometimes it's access to pre-legal advice one of the interesting things that can come about is being able to get access to the alumni network especially for some of the ones that have been more successful where you get to be in a position that you get to reach out to successful founders of companies that were at one point part of the accelerator and the alumni networks end up being one of the larger things these tend to involve being able to offer equity benefits of them obviously being able to take a short timeframe these tend to last for a few months they're not very long it'll be a couple months long and they have a really big focus on the growth and development of whatever project that is you get access to the mentors and the investors that are there and it tends to involve a demo day a demo day is basically at the end they ask you to have a pitch contest not a contest but a pitch with a variety of investors that they end up bringing into the room for you and so they're able to cherry a bunch of really good people that you'd be able to talk to about whatever the company is some of the drawbacks until it tends to involve being able to give equity I know that's something that is likely difficult there might be ways around it some of the things that I was thinking about in researching it does require a time at a really intense pace usually people who get into some of the more successful ones in this space move to a different state or a different country for the actual period that the accelerator is going on because they're working essentially non-stop during that time and making sure that the accelerator itself is mission aligned I think is going to probably be something that's worth thinking about for each of them so while there might be many of them making sure that some of the alumni, the mentors are the investors would be and even just the general brand and sentiment of the accelerator would line up with whatever you guys are looking at I think that this is a really interesting avenue that I haven't seen explored but I could be wrong is that being able to make hybrid structures of companies that could be like under a holding company nonprofit and again I don't know exactly how that fortune of things works but it ends up creating a position where perhaps there's companies that are created as a way to be able to solve some of the issues that these nonprofits are having and it's a way again to be able to bring technology solutions like innovative ways to be able to answer the problems that that are having. I'm biased toward these for obvious reasons but are ones that you're able to apply to specific reasons there's usually quite lengthy applications ours ends up being different but this is not something where you end up having to give any equity away so there's no dilution there's depending on the organizations you're working with there can be support over a long period of time most of the grants that I've seen in the crypto space don't give you all of the capital up front. Let's say you get a hundred thousand dollars they will set up two three four milestones and then work with you on being able to deliver those so that they can be able to give more tranches of money and I think that this ends up working more with the charitable mission in terms of like things work the drawbacks here obviously it's extremely competitive in crypto I would say that there's a little bit of an insider problem that also takes place in these is that there are so many applications that end up coming in that sometimes it's easier for people who already know people to get access to some of those funds and I'm also unsure at least for non crypto companies how reporting around this works in a tax perspective we found this to be one of the questions that people have had quite often for us crypto companies not all have a habit of incorporating in places where there are no taxes and so that's something that doesn't end up being an issue for them I know the 501c3 nature of nonprofits could make that simpler but it's something to definitely take a look at and then it's a little bit project specific there's an idea that you're specifically applying for based on this one idea it's not for an overall like this is our nonprofit and we need a grant it's more so we're trying to create a payment solution for nonprofits and so it ends up being for that one specific thing but why it's relevant I'd say is that Web through Grants focuses on open source projects and I think the open source nature of things could end up being one that ends up benefiting nonprofits because it's less capitalistic in nature in terms of starting some sort of profitable company and instead creating a technology that is just good for everyone who ends up wanting to use it and again it's one where there's innovative funding get coin being one of them when I say native grants programs here there are many companies in the crypto ecosystem who run their own grants programs and the reason that they've had to do this is that because it's the best way to say it so because there are so many blockchains that people can build on and so many companies that they can build their products with there's essentially been something where you have to create a pool of capital to incentivize builders to want to build on Ethereum versus something else because if a builder sits down and they can build anywhere why should they build on your chain and so you end up having a situation where there's actually a lot of grants programs that you can apply to you end up having to sit down with understanding that the benefits and drawbacks of each one where there are some chains that people in the crypto ecosystem would joke or those chains meaning that no one is there, no one is building and it is just a token that is being speculatively traded whereas if the Ethereum ecosystem is one where somewhere between 80 and 90% of all development in the crypto ecosystem tends to be taking place there and there's also optimism retro public retro active public goods funding that they've talked about this is where you're able to apply and they give funding for things that people have been doing that may be deemed valuable even if it's not something that is in the immediate future of what they're looking to build but is more so based on what things people have already done there's a round for that going on at the moment it's a little bit of it's like a strange concept to take in but they at the moment are giving away I think somewhere between 20 and 30 million dollars the applications for this one close later this month and so people have been applying all over the place venture capital this is one that many people know about it's simply financial investment in early stage companies in exchange for equity it ends up specifically if you're working with the right VCs being something that can be really good there is access to large pools of capital there's mentorship that comes in the VC funds some of the bigger funds even they will hot handle all of your HR they will handle helping you with legal they will do so many things for you particularly some of the better VCs and recent Horowitz being one of them which is a 16 C listed below the amount of things that they offer to the entrepreneurs they invest in outside of just capital it's pretty amazing and it's part of why it can be competitive get access to their funding but people who get it they they want to make sure that their entrepreneurs are focusing just on building companies and a lot of these funds very large lots of capital but that also comes with having amazing networks to be able to help you in closing drawbacks here obviously there's equity dilution the misaligned incentives in that the VC is incentivized to get companies to grow very quickly to become very profitable so that they can sell the company to someone else or so that they can try to take the company public I'd say that's definitely one of the considerations and so goes back to when I was talking about this like potential hybrid structure related to accelerators but it does create the idea of having tech oriented social enterprise that can be funded and this hybrid structure for creating for profit subsidiaries could be one that isn't as focused on creating the most profitable company but figuring out how to answer some of the problems that nonprofits might be facing some examples of really well known VCs would be Andres and Horowitz A16Z Variant Fund Unions where Ventures, Finance Labs OptiEx Ventures Of course that Ventures have Q Capital these are companies from all over the world Asia or in the west many of them tend to have subsidiaries all over the place as well and so you don't need to necessarily be based by any means where they are it's just something about getting in touch with them finally is the token launches this is the one where I wanted to talk about it but I'd say I'm the most apprehensive in terms of even fully considering this a solution obviously the benefits can be seen it's really just a fundraising mechanism similar to IPOs that you're able to do without having to deal with the regulatory things that need to be done for doing an IPO but it's access to a global pool of investors there is a lot of money the token economy is something that has been growing in terms of launching tokens and the biggest thing is really just you can raise a ton of capital major drawback is the regulatory concerns and scrutiny there is a lot happening particularly in the west around lack of regulatory clarity in this space and without regulatory clarity it puts anyone in a strange position if they're launching a token and other than that there's a lot of scams I think the SBF trial Sam Bank and Fried who launched FTX and is on trial for a massive conzi scheme just started yesterday I believe and so there are definitely scams in this space there's definitely poor management in this space the trial with FTX involves both of them and the other thing is volatility comes in get going as an example had a token that was at one point valued at close to $30 I think it went to 29 and change I think today when I looked earlier it's 88 cent and so being able to really understand everything around having proper management and launching a token can be very difficult there are relevance here you can create incentives for donations and community engagement through these sort of token as like a community like a social token for the community but again there's so much legal and financial advice that are needed these companies that I mentioned below as examples many of them have created lots and lots of value but this is definitely one of the ones to be a little bit more apprehensive and yes that's everything for me for now I wanted to leave my contact info I know we'll be chatting next week as well but my email address is right there I tend to be on Twitter quite a bit and Telegram is the crypto-native messaging solution that sort of everyone ends up using and it uses handles as opposed to cell phone numbers and if anyone wants to get in touch with them there as well I'd love to chat should I unshare my screen how should we go? I think you can stop sharing and I think Ann's going to do Q&A let's see what we have in the queue for questions thank you for that Azim that was excellent we had one comment from Nick who was sharing a little bit about what he's been working on he wants to get in touch but I thought it'd be worthwhile just bringing up what he was talking about so he says for a social startup aligned with SDG 16 we're building a civic media platform a centralized autonomous organization owned and managed by all users through forging digital democracy with blockchain technology defending data ethics with revenue sharing promoting critical thinking with gamified learning he says he's been in blockchain since 2011 and has been involved in Taiwan's exchange system some great projects that are happening here for those of folks in the early stages of their blockchain career before I enter blockchain what would you recommend as a really good first step for nonprofits to get involved so this is another one that's biased but Githuin launched something named kernel and kernel is a cohort based learning environment where they put it last for eight weeks and they put together an entire curriculum that from everything I've looked at allows people to go from not knowing anything about crypto to being able to become sales people if they wanted it's a pre-curriculum that anyone can download even if you don't end up being part of the program itself but it takes you in a methodical way from one to eight weeks of all of the different philosophical arguments if you want to be able to podcast might be available if you want to take a look at fireside chats if you want to take a look at things that are actually happening now like all of those things end up being included and I would say it's been one of the most comprehensive things I've seen crypto stuff is difficult because there isn't and especially because the industry evolves so quickly there's no one website that you can go to that will teach you everything but I found the kernel curriculum has definitely been one that I tend to recommend to people because you can go and pick and choose from it where you're like oh I want to learn more about this verse and that and it ends up being a super beneficial one and it's definitely the one that I recommend most people awesome thank you and Eli's got the link in there for people to take a look at that we have a question from Larry Reed who says what are some good sources for learning more about how to build a business plan for social enterprise based on an open source software so she says we have a proprietary platform now but are considering making it open source I don't know that I know exactly where to point you in terms of materials but please reach out to me because I know individuals that I can think of that I'd want to connect you to that would be able to talk more about that but specifically any articles or podcasts there's nothing that comes to mind that I'd be able to send you in the most concise way at this moment but I'm going to take note of this and there's a couple people I have in mind so please make sure to reach out let's see okay he's going to reach out that's great if anyone has questions feel free to drop them in I'm wondering I know Diane had commented earlier just asking about the various opportunities Diane I don't know if you want to describe a little bit more about your organization we can talk to some of that right now but in the meantime I'm wondering can you share Azim a little bit more about where you see Gitcoin going in the future and what your hopes for the organization are as a decentralized organization yeah so one of the things that we've done we started out with this grants program in 2019 and it was software that we built for ourselves and we're using to run our grants program on that quarterly basis and what we found was that other companies in the ecosystem who also had grants programs would come to us because they saw the amount of engagement that we would get when we ran ours and as a supplement to their native grants programs would ask us hey can we run around for us with these criteria to be able to do it let's get just a lot of people to come and so we ended up doing that but over time what we found was organizations came to us and said we want to run it but we want to run it at a different time or we want to run it for a different length of time and so would it be possible for us to use your software and in the spirit of being open source we went on a journey of taking the software that we had that at the time was centralized that we were running our grants program on and have now open sourced it and have been getting other organizations to use it one thing that we came to the conclusion time ago was that there was no way that Gitcoin alone would be able to solve for all of the issues that we face today and so instead we embarked on a mission of trying to create the tooling so that other people would also be able to join in on doing what has become our new slogan of funding what matters and so for us over the next five years my hope is that many other Gitcoins pop up as opposed to Gitcoin being in this position where month on month we continued to be asked why aren't you running a grants room for this why aren't you running a grants room for that why aren't you running a grants room for this and instead is now we want to offer the tools and whatever guidance we can from what we've learned in being able to help other organizations run however they would want to using the same tooling that we have awesome right Susan is saying we want to create entrepreneur mindset community center project under 501c3 as a DAO for public good she's asking if chronal is a good start but maybe also worth just chatting about like how you would go about starting a DAO underneath a 501c3 going back to the regulatory nature of things that that's been one of the tough ones I'm not sure where you're based in the United States I think the only state there's only a few states that recognize DAOs I think Wyoming being one of them but being able to just incorporate when it comes to DAOs has been something that ends up being very difficult Gitcoin is a Cayman Island based corporation for that reason I think Swiss foundations have been open to it but the idea of anything around regulatory when it comes to incorporating DAOs has definitely been one of the things that's been a hot topic for debate when I was in Paris earlier this year in the summer we met with different individuals from the European Union to talk about how we needed to be in a better position so that it was understood that DAOs while they're very much like crypto native LLCs are not analogous perfectly for what an LLC would be and that there needs to be adjustments made for organizations that are looking to be able to incorporate as they go who do you say maybe that like they could take on like DAO properties or take on some of the benefits of a DAO without maybe formally doing it from my experience a lot of what it seems like a DAO is being able to make it so that you can almost do like representative democracy I don't know if you'd agree but how it works at GitPoint is that individuals can be delegated tokens and then when there are governance decisions to be made the individuals who have been delegated the most tokens are in a position to be able to vote in a way that allows them to help push things forward and in ideal world the people being delegated the tokens are the ones that the community trusts the most to be able to make decisions on their behalf so for me in many ways it's felt like being in this place where you're just like a senator almost or a congressman yeah I would agree I feel like a lot of what people are looking for in terms of adopting a DAO is actually it's often the non-blockchain elements so it's the flat hierarchy it's the shift of power from leadership to community and that sort of thing and actually incorporating some of the blockchain elements might not necessarily be required for a lot of organizations so that's something to consider as well Keen is asking Azim what are your experiences with international development organizations and what will the best sources for funding for agriculture and mining initiatives be so international development organization I'm starting to get more closely aligned with I was in New York City and had a few meetings during the UN General Assembly and was having conversations with them but I'm finding that many of them are in me much earlier stages of being able to see how to go about this one of the potential partners that we've spoken with is the UN World Food Program and while they put themselves in a position where they have started to accept donations in the form of crypto they did something with Binance recently in a popular music artist named The Weeknd and it created some sort of NFT and then funds from that ended up going towards the UN World Food Program I haven't found that they've been very quick moving and it's understandable but have not been very quick moving for best sources on funding I think the mining initiatives and I would honestly look to some of the I don't know the mining companies end up being a little bit shadowy at time but being able to donate specific amounts of money that they're earning from doing their mining activities perhaps there's another one I gotta actually think about I would say also there's Big Green Dow is a Dow that grants towards climate specifically a bit more agriculture and food related projects so you can definitely check them out they're run by Kimball Musk who's Elon's brother and then probably what will end up being one of our last questions anyway I think this morning is Susan is asking what delegated tokens are and maybe you can talk a bit more about that yeah absolutely ends up being a line of lingo in the space essentially if Gitcoin ended up launching their token there was 100 million tokens total I believe in the total supply and when we handle governance how it works is that we put something up on a forum and then it goes to a vote and let's say you went and bought 100 tokens or you worked for Gitcoin and this is the Gitcoin governance token which anyone can go on Coinbase or Binance and purchase or they can go on one of the decentralized exchanges and purchase essentially you're in a position where you can either keep your tokens and then use them to vote when you see things happening on the forum or you can say I'm not in a position where I know enough to vote or you can say I actually really so-and-so from the community and I want to be able to give them these tokens so they still stay with you you're not giving those tokens away by any means that if the token goes up or down in value it still sits in your wallet no one has access to it but it's a way to be able to say this person in the community seems to uphold the values that I like and so I want to give them a little bit more of a delegation of these tokens so that they're in a better position to have a stronger vote on the matters in the community that they end up looking at and then voting on. That's great thanks I think that's it for questions so Billy we'll throw it back to you. Okay Hey I want to thank you Azeem for spending so much time with us and your willingness to do a deep dive next week for those of you out there who got some value out of this conversation please drop love bombs for our friend Azeem and yeah we really appreciate it we know you're a really busy person and time and out for us really matters so thank you so much. This was awesome The work that Texas does is amazing I was looking into it more and you guys do great work for me to be able to spend a little bit of time making a deck and taking a little bit of time out of my day is more than worth it. I really appreciate it. Thank you Ann for your awesome Q&A facilitation and knowledge dropping the knowledge on us