Episode 57: Lukas | SafeDAO - Manage crypto assets with smart contract wallets
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Status
Master file - https://bankless.dash.app/sharing/dcf8a41d-c785-408a-a147-56f1295e5cb6?shareType=ASSET_SHARE
Transcription file - https://app.fireflies.ai/view/CryptoSapiens-SAFE-Episode-50-final-mp3::BdwL54CQQL
Timestamps
00:11 - 01:14 – Crypto Sapiens Introduces Lucas.
01:16 - 06:46 – Lucas made an introduction and talked about his journey into Crypto.
06:48 - 11:05 – Lucas described how Gnosis can help peoplè access Crypto space..
11:08 - 16:41 – Lucas explained the benefits of using smart contract accounts, and who can benefit from using them.
16:42 - 21:54 – Discussion on how DAOs change the landscape over at Safe.
21:55 - 26:50 – Lucas talked about some of the things that will allow for Safe to continually evolve as the DAO ecosystem grows.
26:52 - 29:22 – Lucas discussed the expectations and opportunities opened up since Gnosis Safe transformed to Safe DAO.
29:24 - 40:18 – Discussion on Safe token and its governance
40:20 - 44:26 – Lucas’ thoughts on Web3 and how SafeDAO will play a part in it
40:17 – Conclusion
Transcription
(00:00:11) Humpty: Hello, and welcome back to Crypto Sapiens. I'm your host Humpty Calderon, and today I am very excited to be talking to Lucas from Safe, or as it was better known, Gnosis Safe. Lucas started with Safe as its product manager and as the project grew, became its cofounder. This conversation, in my opinion, is very timely because as the state of crypto shows, we need to take ownership over our digital assets and our wallets. And Safe helps you to do that. We explore Safe from an organizational perspective as DAOs using it to manage funds. But we also ask the question about how retail can use this. We ask how can families collect art, manage funds and share ownership of digital assets? In my opinion, that is what's most exciting about Safe and tools like it, is that it makes crypto more accessible and usable for everyone.
(00:01:11) So without further ado, let's get started.
(00:01:16) Lucas: Sure. It's a pleasure to be here. So, yeah. I'm Lucas. I'm cofounder of Safe, formerly known as Gnosis Safe. We just did a spin off from Gnosis and rebranding hasn't reached anyone yet, but we're slowly getting there, maybe a little bit. My story, how I got to where I am now and how I got into crypto. The first touch point I had with Crypto was in 2016 when I saw a video of Vital Butterin at Defcon One sharing his thoughts on Bitcoin and Ethereum, and how Bitcoin is like a static calculator and Ethereum Is this Swiss Army knife that has many purposes, use case agnostic and programmable. And I found it interesting. But at first I thought, what is this nerd talking about? I have no idea.
(00:02:17) It was very technical and I came from a business background, so I didn't quite get it at that point. And I just forgot about this type of blockchain topic for a while. I was in various product and event management roles in general Tech and Web2 back then, and through participating in various tech events, I met people working in Crypto. Afterwards, in 2017 when the ICO times started to hit, I got in touch with many more people working in Crypto and blockchain, and what struck me was that there are so many smart people that are super passionate about this technology, even though I still didn't get what's going on. But these people seem very passionate about it. And then you had lot of capital suddenly going into this market, and for me, there was always this strong belief.
(00:03:12) If you have smart people that are passionate about something and you give them capital to execute on their passion, usually, something good will come out of it. It's not always clear what exactly it is, but it is usually promising. So I wanted to be closer to this ecosystem and I joined an investment advisor group, Darwin Group. What they did was: they worked together with projects and structured their token sales in a way that's regulatory compliant. And I joined as an internal researcher. So the people that were working at this company had challenges keeping up with all the things that were being built at that point and they needed someone who can take on researching full time, while educating them about what's going on. And then I really learned the technical aspects of it. So not just the investment aspects.
(00:04:10) And I got in touch with prediction markets, with decentralized exchanges, with stablecoins and all these crazy ideas that were there, not yet implemented, but as a form of white papers. And I thought, I need to be part of the builder side, not just part of the researcher side. So I stumbled upon the name Gnosis a couple of times while doing my research. It was like a project that has many people in Germany and that was based in Berlin back then. So I wanted to join that team. I applied and got rejected. I was a bit disappointed, but I kept going and I just applied for the next position that came up, which was a product manager position. And luckily, I joined the team.
(00:05:00) And I was then responsible for one of the products that Gnosis was building back then, the Gnosis Multi Sig, now called Gnosis Safe. And I just took over the product's responsibility and over time took on more responsibility until the point where Gnosis had this strategic decision to decide on where they wanted to double down on. And they decided to double down on the Gnosis chain, one of their projects. They spun off two of the other projects, including the one I was involved in. And so I took over the founder role of the spinoff together with three of my colleagues. And that's where I am now.
(00:05:48) Humpty: Amazing. I love that. That's such a wonderful story. First of all, I want to rewind a little bit. You talked about being from a business background and not understanding the technical aspect of it, but being curious, right? You were curious about it. And when you got rejected the first time, you just found another way to kind of make your way into a project that you really were interested in and cared about. But I really like this idea, too, of you building up this project, this initiative or product within this kind of project like Gnosis, and then ending where you are. Or not ending, but continuing where you are today in terms of being one of the co founders of this project and really just having the freedom to continue to develop this wonderful tool which we'll get into
(00:06:40) Because I think there are tons here to explore about Safe, the product, and who best to talk about that than you, right? So maybe before we just kick into that conversation, though, there's something here that I'd like to discuss. And you talked about this and that was kind of maybe the accessibility of some of the things as you were coming in. Just maybe conversations that you were listening to. Maybe there's metallic talk at DefCon one where it sounded great but very technical. Maybe looking also at coming in and contributing to a project like Gnosis and some of it being inaccessible. So coming at it from a product side, from your perspective, and maybe the work that you've been doing at Gnosis safe and now SafeDAO, what are some of your thoughts in terms of the accessibility of the space?
(00:07:37) Like, what do you think are some of the clear challenges for someone that may come in? And how do you suppose a product like Gnosis Safe can help with that?
(00:07:50) Lucas: Yeah, and I think that's pretty much the same trajectory as any technology where it starts off being extremely hard to use. It's very technical, it's expensive. If you look at the early days of the computer era, no one could afford it, no one could actually use it. And it's just natural that it starts that way. But usually the engineers and developers are the first users because they're the closest to what is being built. And then over time, we just figure out UX patterns, we figure out ways to make this technology more accessible. And that's where the magic in technology happens. That's when suddenly it unleashes its potentials and it's not just a niche thing, but it actually provides a lot of value to many people. And that's what always excites me about technology.
(00:08:37) And that's why from a business background I looked at how I could get as close as possible to technology, and that's sort of product management where you can help make this technology more accessible, more usable. And that's also what excites me most about Safe and the work that we're doing. Because one of the many challenges that we have right now is that we want to have people be owners of assets. There should be owners of digital art, owners of tokens, voting rights and so on, and have these in a self custodial way. So it's not dependent on a third party. But at the same time, we give so much responsibility to the user itself. So suddenly we need to educate people that they need to write down this twelve-word seed phrase and store it securely.
(00:09:35) And best not to write it into your notes app on your iPhone because that's pretty much the worst thing you can do. And it works kind of, but it's definitely not the end stage where we should be. And Safe has the potential there to solve many of these challenges. To reduce the risks of this one private key, this seed phrase, which is really a big risk. It's cool that as long as you have this private key which acts as a master key to all your assets, as you have full control over your account, you can do whatever you please without asking for permission. But as soon as you lose access to this key, you don't have access to your password manager anymore, or you forget where you stored or wrote down your seed phrase, then you're completely locked out.
(00:10:31) And that's like a terrible situation. You can lose all your net worth, you can lose all your precious collectibles in one second. And on the other side, it's also very easy for others to get access to your account because they just really need to have access to this one private key. So it's this all or nothing kind of thing. And Safe enables you to have much more secure ways to have full control over your assets without giving up or having to trust another entity to do so.
(00:11:08) Humpty: Yeah, that's a good point. So you've introduced a few ideas here. One obviously is the accessibility, having to remember your private keys, having to be able to store those probably even better framed in a way that's secure, right? Risking it all if any of that gets accidentally revealed. And also I think there's something here to be said about things like social recoveries or social interactions with assets. We've kind of framed the difference between private accounts or these private key wallets versus smart contract accounts. Describe to me a couple of scenarios, and obviously DAOs are a good example of organizations that are using smart contract accounts, right? But what are some of the other things that you've seen or other groups of people that could benefit from a smart contract account?
(00:12:15) I have a couple of ideas, that's why I'm asking the question. But I'd love to hear from you as someone who's so deeply involved with the product. Maybe there were some exercises to identify how Gnosis safe is making this space a lot more accessible.
(00:12:31) Lucas: Maybe to take a step back a little bit, how smart contract accounts, like Safe, work as opposed to private key accounts. So to say that when you have access to the private key, you can do everything, if you don't have access to the private key, you can do nothing, as opposed to a smart contract account. We define the logic, how it's being controlled, what it can do and so on as part of a smart contract. And we know with smart contracts, you can program anything you want. A smart contract allows you to do cool stuff like having an account, and it's not just controlled by one private key. It has multiple private keys that have a key, that I store on a lecture hardware wallet.
(00:13:22) I have a key that I have in the Mid account. I have a key that I've written down in some Swiss bank account somewhere. And then I can even say how many of these keys I need to control the account. So maybe have three keys and two of them I always need to make a transaction with the account. And so I'm reducing the risk on this single point of failure. And probably the most prominent use case for this is if you have multiple people involved in coordinating assets collectively, because then you really can't use a single private key. With a single private key, if a transaction is made, you don't know if five people had access to this private key or who those persons were that made the transaction. So you need some way to distribute the ownership in a way that's transparent.
(00:14:18) And what can be done then with a smart contract account is that you define the group of people that have access to this account and you can implement this logic there in a smart contract. That's a cool thing. And that's actually where the trajectory of most projects is. That they start off with a group of people that found a new DeFi protocol. For example, they manage the treasury together, but then at some point they turn themselves into a full fledged DAO and they want to have a community of people. So maybe hundreds or thousands of people control an account together and not have just the four co founders do so. And because smart contract accounts are programmable, they're also reprogrammable.
(00:15:06) So you can say it's not these four people, but it's actually this collective of a thousand token holders that can vote on transactions. And if it reaches a certain forum, then the transaction is executed on this account. That's where a big chunk of the usage currently is coming from. I'm not sure this is necessarily where the biggest share is coming from in the future because this smart contract account is probably also very useful for retail users that manage assets themselves without someone else involved, where they can have more security but also more fallbacks. So in case they lose access to their private keys, they could have a program running in their account or like a smart contract extension that would say they have a recovery mechanism implemented. Like they could go to a trusted party, like a bank.
(00:16:05) Or maybe they have a group of people that they have defined before that act as recovery. They can usually not make any transactions on the account, but they have some system where they can be involved in order to regain access to the account. And this issue of retail users that depend on themselves to store assets can be solved to some extent by involving or distributing responsibility to trusted parties, friends, family or financial institutions, whatever they want, to give much more flexibility and ownership to users.
(00:16:42) Humpty: You're talking about a future that I have envisioned for myself and my family, so that's kind of the direction that I wanted to lead the conversation, at least that question. We're heading into the holidays and everybody's meeting here in the U.S either for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and conversations come up, what are you doing? What are you working on? And I like the idea of extending this kind of conversation of what am I working on and how can we work together? And I can start imagining a bunch of family DAOs popping up right? Where there's this shared pool of assets. It doesn't have to be like I have a quarter of a million dollars of assets in this account. But it's a fun exercise to introduce people in terms of shared ownership.
(00:17:28) Right, because to your point, when we talk about a lot of what we're working on in this space, it seems so far out for most people. It's like something that we don't necessarily register as possible. But when you think about this shared ownership where your family can all hold different keys to different accounts, smart contract accounts that then allow us to pool some funds, to be able to collect some art, for instance, or to be able to hold some assets that are meaningful to us, right? We as a family have a pooled ETH smart contract account, for instance, and then talking about it in ways that makes this a lot more familiar to them and then bridging that conversation. And by the way, I'm a member of like a hundred DAOs. This is what we do.
(00:18:16) We all have these shared accounts. That's kind of interesting to me. And one of the reasons why I'm personally excited about Safe is because it does several things. One of these is it makes conversations about cryptocurrencies and holding digital assets a little bit more familiar, a little bit more safe, right? But it also kind of bridges the conversation between that familiarity and a lot more complex structures like DAOs. So let's dive into DAOs a little bit. As organizations, there's this idea that most DAOs are really these groups that have come together around these shared missions and shared treasuries. That shared treasuries, a lot of them is made possible because of Safe, Right? So maybe as someone who's been there for quite some time now, leading up to where we are today, you can describe how DAOs change the landscape over at Safe.
(00:19:22) Lucas: Yeah, I mean, it really started that Gnosis had to guard their own funds back in 2017. So we built Safe and back then no small as an internal tool to do so. So we didn't want to rely on any external parties, a bank account or something to manage our treasury. And then over time, Gnosis developed itself into Gnosis DAO, which is a collective of gene holders, Gnosis token holders. And also the treasury obviously had to be decentralized in that way and ought to be controlled through the gene holders, and that was where we developed and saw the need for the Safe, not just to be used by centralized teams, but DAOs or bigger groups, and a lot of other teams followed suit. And we have this emergence of DAOs coming up and controlling assets together.
(00:20:26) And I think that's also the beauty that didn't exist before web3/smart contract accounts. People can have shared ownership like the same way I could in web2 or in real life, own something by myself by just having physical access to it. It was not possible to have joint ownership without having someone in between. There are joint bank accounts, but there's always this bank in between that regulates that, set up the permissions and so on. And we have suddenly this ability to have a trustless way to hold assets together.
(00:21:11) And that's why it was suddenly so easy for people to just come together, people that might not even know each other around a shared mission, a shared idea, and just pull together assets because they have the certainty they can control their assets together without any legal contract that assigns them a share of this shared treasury since it's all enforceable on chain. And I think that's a big part of why DAOs have exploded so much. Itt was, for the first time, from a technology perspective, possible to have this very quick, cheap way to coordinate assets together.
(00:21:55) Humpty: Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. So certainly I think for those of us who are in the space of DAOs, we realize the value and the importance of it. Good to see some of the ways that Gnosis is kind of dogfooded, right? I think that's the right term. What I've realized, too, by the way, as you were telling that story, it's reminding me that a lot of the best products are born from needs internally. Like one of the examples that comes to mind, web two is slack, right? Probably one of the best known examples of a product that was born that wasn't a product intended to be for public consumption or use, but one that's certainly gotten a lot of adoption.
(00:22:40) I think it's interesting to also see, that Gnosis safe was a product that was developed internally to support its needs and of course, now becoming an invaluable tool and seeing it grow the way that it has. I like this idea, too, that you framed in terms of permissioned banking, in terms of being able to do so now in ways that are a lot more sensible to us. Right. They make sense to what we're building in this space. What are some of the things that you think will continue to allow for a product like Safe to evolve as the DAO ecosystem continues to grow or as some of these new use cases, as you said, continue to evolve.
(00:23:24) Lucas: I think that's a very critical part of our strategy that we realize smart contract accounts provide many benefits for vastly different user groups and use cases, from DAOs to family accounts to retail accounts to institutional systems and ways to control other smart contracts like this. Tons and tons of use cases which benefit from the security and usability benefits of smart contract accounts. And we're not going to be able to build them all by ourselves. It is impossible to build up these dozens, hundreds of different products that are optimized for these user groups and use cases. So we did a bigger strategic change recently that we said we had this flagship product out there that proved the use case of smart contract accounts. It drove value to the protocol. There's now $40 billion worth of assets, like 10% of all Bored apes.
(00:24:28) It's already got significant traction. But to really grasp all these, get these other use cases covered, we need others to jump in and build these products for them, these solutions. So we're shifting now more from being a product focused project to being an ecosystem project where we want to foster different teams that have ideas on what to build on Safe, what to build on smart contract accounts, and extend what's already out there. It's a composable system where people can come in and add functionality and add other smart contract components to really help them achieve that, while growing a system that's also independent of one single entity. So today, if you have a Safe account, you can go to about 25 different front ends.
(00:25:22) Wallet solutions, treasury management solutions, and then use your account. That way there's no need to use the UI, the interface, that we provide. And this then makes Safe a portable account that you can use with very different products. And that's also something that's only possible in web3 like you cannot imagine. It'd easily be possible that you take your bank account from this one bank and take it to the other. They want to make it as hard as possible. They want to lock you into their systems. It's hard to get your Facebook account into Twitter and so on. But for free, you have these portable accounts. And when we grow this ecosystem, products are built on this smart contract accounts, then you change this portability property.
(00:26:12) And so we also shifted towards becoming a DAO ourselves for the Safe project, which takes over the coordination between the different ecosystem parties. So the people contributing to the protocol level, people contributing to infrastructure or to the front ends of the products, make sure that we have proper standards, proper interfaces between them, have a joint vision of where Safe is going and also involve both the builders and the users of Safe, and have their voices heard in this ecosystem that we're building.
(00:26:52) Humpty: Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, I like this idea of composing, obviously that's a huge unlock of Web3 and I like that Safe is kind of seeing that or considering that as it continues to develop, and really this ability to allow for anyone to build on Safe and to integrate it, to add this flexibility. I guess one of the things that we haven't talked about yet and we should do is SafeDAO. So, before this call, I also shared some of my thoughts in terms of some really interesting possibilities for the DAOs that have been using Gnosis Safe for some time. So introduce this idea. I think you already briefly did the transition from Gnosis Safe to SafeDAO and some of the expectations for doing that and some of the opportunities that have opened up since then.
(00:27:54) Lucas: So SafeDAO is a way for us to make sure that the protocol stays critically neutral in the future and that it really takes into account different opinions and interests from its builders and users. And what's interesting here is that a lot of the users of Safe are DAO themselves. So we did a token distribution and as many do, this is going to users as well as critical stakeholders of the protocol. And then it happens that a lot of these users doused themselves and they suddenly got this Airdrop of Safe tokens which gives voting power in SafeDAO governance process. And now we have dozens, hundreds of DAOs that got voting power and all these DAOs are communities that are behind it.
(00:28:55) So we are almost becoming like a metadata here which also tries to juggle the different interests of the DAOs as users. It's really at the beginning stages, we did the token distribution a month ago and it's quite early, but it's going to be very interesting to see also how DAOs as users will voice their opinions in the future of safety.
(00:29:24) Humpty: Yeah, that's very interesting, this idea of not just individuals, but organizations having voting power and that's a lot of responsibility, right? I'm a member of a few DAOs who have this governance power and the conversations that are happening internally about delegation. Like, do we delegate to existing stewards in the safeDAO ecosystem or do we elect some of our own members to become the stewards because there is just that much safe tokens that are at our disposal so that we can have some, I guess, valuable influence in the way that the DAO operates in the future. So just generally, I think that's very interesting, this whole idea of organizational governance or DAO to DAO governance in terms of safeDAO.
(00:30:24) What are some of the conversations that have happened or that have been inspired since the launch of the Token and since DAO have begun to participate as stewards of SafeDAO?
(00:30:40) Lucas: Maybe first little bit an interesting tidbit there on how we selected the stewards for safeDAO. So what we want to prevent is the delegates, the people that are recommended during the claiming process as being representatives of their opinion, being people that just have a big following and that leverage their following to get a lot of voting power. We didn't want this to become a Twitter popularity contest where the people that have the most followers on Twitter get the biggest say in SafeDAO. So these people that were selected, we call them Safe guardians, like the people you can delegate to, these are all people that have a proven record of contributions to Safe in the past. And because Safe has been developed over four years, there were 200 people. There were initially 1000 people applying.
(00:31:38) And then we had to cancel that, select the 200 who have a provable record and not just made up some things in retrospect, but 200 people and entities that have some record of contributions. And those were then suggested as delegates. So that's an aspect where we expect a different dynamic from other DAOs where it was more about the already existing followership that they have. Although now I forgot the initial question so you need to repeat that.
(00:32:10) Humpty: Oh no, that's fine. My question was were there some interesting conversations that were inspired from DAO to DAO governance?
(00:32:19) Lucas: Yeah, so we are quite early, a month after kicking off the governance process. So we had a couple of discussions, one being around the participation in safeDAO, of what this actually means. And there we took a very interesting approach which is giving clarity to DAO participants from a legal perspective, what it means to be participating in DAO, and also to limit liability for the participants. Because just keeping it in the vacuum is a risk, you never know what different jurisdictions define us. Who is participating in DAO, what's their responsibility, and we want to have a clear document that's agreed upon by the DAO regulating these things. So today was the day this proposal went through the process, and it's now signed off by the DAO.
(00:33:18) Beyond that, there's a couple of other discussions that are a little bit earlier in the process. One being the operating model of the DAO. So we also see some DAOs that it's not really clear how their funds are being used and what's the structure between their treasury, how it's being used, and it end up being susceptible to people just trying to get as much value out of the treasury for themselves as possible. And proposals like grants proposals, etc, not really aligned with an overall mission of the DAO and strategic objectives, but just going in all different kinds of directions. So we want to have an operating model that was proposed by Peter Pan from one Kegs, that defines the mission, the strategy and the initiatives and how this process works, how the initiatives are selected and funded by the DAO.
(00:34:25) Still not completely finalized, but this is a very interesting proposal to follow up. Another one that's currently brewing up is around the constitution of the DAO. That's the part where it's important for a DAO to have an off-star to know exactly what the ideas that people come up with. There, we want to have a document which is also modifiable, even though we have a threshold similar to the constitution of a nation states, which can be often updated over time. But it's very difficult and requires a big forum or a big majority of people agreeing to it. This is setting the North Star for safeDAO and defining the reasons we come together, while recording it together. And I would also expect this to be more mature in the next few weeks.
(00:35:23) For now it's just discussions in the forum. We also have discussions that go around the token and how the token is being used. We did also take an interesting approach during the token launch that is a nontransferable token to start with. We did this very intentionally. We didn't want to take this decision of making a token transferable or not. This is really something that we believe needs to come from the community because there are reasons to not do it, also there are reasons to do it and we didn't want to take this decision from the community because it's a one way road, and if you would make a token transferable, it's impossible to take this back.
(00:36:08) And there's now very controversial discussions in the forum and I expect this also to be a proposal that's going through the governance process quite soonish and I think it will be very controversial to the end, and I'm not yet sure what direction it will go. Quite excited to see that play out. But yeah, that's also something all the DAOs might copy in the future because it really adds a lot of value to get the community's voices involved in important decisions like that.
(00:36:40) Humpty: Yeah, I think it's really wonderful to hear about the different conversations that are happening right now and the thoughtfulness behind governance at SafeDAO. It's also interesting about the point that you just made right now, the strategy that you took or the direction you took in terms of the token distribution. Tell me a little bit about that mentality to make a governance token non-transferable. What led to that? What was the decision to say In terms of governance rights, we want to make sure that the people that we're incentivizing to participate in governance aren't using this as some sort of market to freely go out and just make money off of this, but instead to hopefully incentivize them even further to participate in our ecosystems governance.
(00:37:38) Can you maybe dive a little bit more into that briefly or as deeply as you want to go?
(00:37:42) Lucas: Yeah, and we put a lot of thought into how the initial distribution of the token should look like and what stakeholders we want to get involved with and to what extent. And we even had the community already participate in that before we did the distribution. So we didn't just decide this in our silo and then went with it. We had this published openly and we implemented feedback. And we thought we have an interesting distribution in terms of voting rights in the safeDAO to start with, to really have different voices from DAOs using it to DeFi projects and Builders on Safe, which got a completely separate AirDrop which is different from the user AirDrop. We also have this ecosystem, AirDrop, where people building on Safe also got voting rights.
(00:38:39) And just overall, we think we have a very interesting mix of people and a relatively fair distribution of voting rights. It's never possible to make it perfect, but we think we got to a good point, and now it's like a chance to lock this in, at least for some time, to really get people's voices involved in things like the mission, the constitution of the DAO, things like how should the DAO operate? Essential things that you hopefully only, at least at this level, discuss once, and then you just update it as the DAO matures, as things evolve. But if we had launched a token in a transferable way, this voting right, this ownership structure would have immediately been very fluid. Like, people can give tokens to other people, potentially they can buy them from other people.
(00:39:38) And this we didn't want to have from the beginning because it immediately diluted this initial we considered fair distribution and it's fair to say that at some point this might be needed in order for the DAO to evolve, to grow, to get other people's interests involved and have them have voting power. So you need the transferability for that. But it's not to begin with, and we want to keep it up to the community to decide if this should happen, when it should happen, and how it should happen. So that's kind of the thought process behind that.
(00:40:17) Humpty: As we're kind of wrapping this up, I wonder if you wouldn't mind sharing with us your thoughts of this ecosystem. Just generally web3, but also safeDAO placed in it and some of the things that you personally would love to see happening in the next couple of months or projecting in the next couple of years in terms of the way that the ecosystem itself will evolve and how safeDAO will facilitate some of that as well. Either the adoption or the evolution of it.
(00:40:50) Lucas: Yeah, and I think we're very much at a critical point right now where regulators are looking at crypto and they are concerned and to some extent very rightfully so there's a lot of shady things going on, there's a lot of scams and hacks. Regulators, you can blame them for whatever you want, but they also definitely have some interest in protecting consumers. They don't want to see people that use wallets lose access to their private keys. The risk there is that the alternative to it, to having people have full control over their assets, is to go back to what we had, to custodians taking the responsibility. They have obviously more capital, more resources to protect private keys in the name of their users.
(00:41:53) And the danger there is that regulators really through regulation or through other types of nudging bring the ecosystem more towards this custodial world, which then really is the same that we knew from web two. And then it's questionable what we actually want at the end. And I think one thing to resolve this is to solve the security problems and to also have some more of a spectrum between you having full control and having no control at all. And I think that's something that I would really like to see built in the future. We call this internally hybrid custody. So you might have some level of control. You have some private keys that you control in an account.
(00:42:47) But you might also select any third party that you trust and that can help you secure this account, support you on fraud prevention or make sure that you're not making any mistakes and can potentially also freeze transactions, but in a way that you always have control over this third party support that you get. And then you still have the beauty of control. So you can always say, I don't trust this bank anymore. They censored my transaction, I want to cut them off, or I want to change this other bank. And you have these portable properties, but you can choose where you want to have external support, where you want to have maybe insurance, like looking over your transaction and saying, yeah, thumbs up. That's good. I'm insuring this transaction.
(00:43:40) And if it's like a weird transaction, I would say you can go along with it, but we're not going to insure it. Like you have this kind of spectrum of hybrid custody where you involve these other parties and that's at least where probably regulators would be more confident in, where they say there are many opportunities for you to have control, but there are ways for you to not depend on this single private key. And I think there's also ways for the safetDAO to really advance this, but it's not going to be a product that's going to be built by SafeDAO itself. It's just that the underlying protocol, the Safe protocol, can be fundamental to this being achieved.
(00:44:24) Humpty: I really like that. I like the idea of kind of some of these tools that we've grown organically over the last couple of years, starting to become the tools that allow for regulation. Because to your point, regulation is not a bad thing. But we just want to make sure that we are facilitating internally as much as we can to soften the potential blow to the ecosystem. Because you don't want to over regulate it either. So I like this idea of like these tools that we've been building organically over the last couple of years that allow for this to make for a more seamless or easier transition in terms of the way that from the outside world people see this ecosystem functioning and building out tools with that. Right? So the Safe protocol being a useful piece of that puzzle of the future.
(00:45:20) So one of the last questions that I normally ask all of my guests is really to try to get a good sense of how we can be better learners in this space. In your own personal crypto journey, is there someone or something that has been hugely influential to you in the way that you think. That could be someone that has been a good mentor, that could be a book that you read?
(00:45:48 ) Lucas: Your call it's a big cliche, but I would really say crypto Twitter, because it is really where the community is meeting and where I'm at least sourcing almost all of the updates on a daily basis myself. And it's obviously challenging that you don't fall into some filter bubble and you need to make sure that you're also following people you might not always agree with. But for me it's a super useful tool to just keep updated, to learn more, to get off the culture of web3. And the second part is conferences where you make these meaningful relationships with the ecosystem. Online events are great, but post pandemic, the in-person conferences, they definitely have a different aspect to it.
(00:46:51) And like everyone who hasn't been to any should definitely go to technical ones like Hackathon, ideally global hackathon, or to one of the various conferences like Defcon Vcc.com, there's pretty much in every country that you live in. And I think that's the way that you experience the culture, but also in a way where you make the connections and you learn.
(00:47:19) Humpty: And that's a wrap. If you want to learn more, you can follow Lucas on Twitter at Schor Lukas.
And Safe at Safe. If you've gotten this far, thank you for listening to Crypto Sapiens. If you want to listen to more episodes like this one, you can check us out at Crypto Sapiens.xyz. And please don't forget to like and subscribe whenever you're listening to this podcast. Until next time. Stay brainy.