WAGMI conference, Jan 2025

Sven

Sven

Member
Evolutionn is out, yay! ... Yay? ... Hmm, what did Quantum Explorer say recently?

The fear I have is that in a year from now I'll have built the best project out there, with smart contracts, way ahead of the projects valued in billions and no one will care.
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Let's not let that happen!

I secured a speaker slot at WAGMI https://wagmi.miami/ but I need your help.

My idea is to present Evolution as a new truly decentralized, yet scalable Web 3 platform that offers exciting new capabilities to developers, combined with funding opportunities for promising startups building on that platform through the Dash Investment Foundation (DIF).

I truly think this is a powerful combination that will find a captive audience at the conference and has the potential to bring real-world use cases to Dash. It is also the kind of event where Dash should have a presence if we want to regain relevance.

What do I need?

1) Help preparing

I'm not going to speak as a developer, and this is not a developer audience. I'll be speaking in front of investors, entrepreneurs, the crypto-curious. People who want to know "What can this thing do for me?" and not what SDK or framework it is built with. So who can help me to put together a high-level overview:

  • What is Evolution?
  • What other Web3 / Defi platforms is it most similar to?
  • How is it better than those other solutions?
  • What main benefits does offer? Why should a business care?
  • How does it scale?
  • How much does it cost to run at scale on Evolution?
  • What does the road map look like?

The timing is tight. X-mas and New Years is around the corner and I'll have to submit slides a few days before the conference starts on Jan 22. I'm hoping that someone (@QuantumExplorer?) could work with me directly, not just posting random tidbits here on the forum. Who has the knowledge and is willing to help?

2) Travel

The conference is in Miami. I live in Berlin. I used my connections to get the speaker slot for free and I'm willing to donate my time prepping and delivering the presentation. I'm not as excited about paying travel expenses on top of that. I could charge it to the DIF, but the DIF doesn't have a marketing budget and it's not really our remit to promote Evolution. I was thinking of this as outside my role as a DIF supervisor.

It's too late for the Dec budget cycle and posting a proposal in Jan to see if the community supports this would be to late for the conference. So I'm willing to front travel and would post a proposal for reimbursement later. But I'd like some feedback if you guys find this valuable and, if you are an MNO, if you would support such a proposal.
 
I 😍 the idea @Sven and you'll have my full support for the reimbursement of the travel and accommodation and whatever else is needed.
The thing that you have a slot there as a speaker is a big advantage.
Not the best person to respond on the questions above but I'm sure the community @thedesertlynx or even someone from the DCG can help you go through it.
 
Sounds great, Sven. I think you'll be the perfect presenter to this audience.

I'm happy to give you my thoughts on what Evo/Platform is and how it can be valuable to devs and entrepreneurs. Personally I think the (eventual) best value from Platform will be storing critical financial (DeFi) data like Dash-native equities, loan agreements, credit scores, etc. However, if we're lucky, Platform will be usable enough that it will compete with the very large web2 service provider market (e.g. hosted database, cloud functions, web hosting, BaaS, PaaS, etc).
 
splawik21 said:
I'm sure the community @thedesertlynx or even someone from the DCG can help you go through it.
Click to expand...
Budget for a gold-plated statue for the world stage of first-class cryptoinfluencers in Miami.
The Capitol of Panem(Florida/USA) is a technologically advanced metropolis where the nation's most wealthy and powerful citizens live....... have a talk with Joel Valenzuela
We are the High-Class! Nobody has to do the work on the street and in the villages and introduce a brand new currency to the lower class.
 
Update:

I got officially added to the speaker roster:
wagmi.miami

Speakers

Speakers
wagmi.miami wagmi.miami

They also put me on the agenda
wagmi.miami

Agenda

Agenda Immerse yourself in a curated lineup of sessions designed to educate, empower, and inspire. Be sure to check back often for the latest additions to our agenda! Print PDF of Agenda Wednesday, Jan 22 16:45 – 19:00 WAGMI Kickoff Celebration & Networker by CoinFund Pier 5 Market 401 Biscayne...
wagmi.miami wagmi.miami

Somehow, they put as title "The World’s First Ownerless & Memberless Investment Fund: For Dash Users, By Dash Users". I gave them a different working title, but apparently they took the headline from the DIF website. My talk will not focus on the DIF, so I'll get that updated on Monday. The slot is pretty late, not ideal, but I guess beggars can't be choosers - unless you're a real celebrity whose talk helps sell tickets, these slots normally sell for upwards of $80,000! Have a look:
pitch.com

WAGMI Sponsorship

pitch.com pitch.com

I also wrote our DIF portfolio companies, it looks like I'll be meeting some there and I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunities to spread the word about Dash Evolution outside the stage.

Travel is booked. Paid hotel in Dash on Travala, they announce all crypto sales on Telegram, so you can see it here: https://t.me/travala/990810 Set to go!

The organizers also gave me a discount code for the Dash community:
DASH30
gets you 30% off the ticket price. So if any of you OGs, whales and Dash fans want to meet up in person, learn about the latest and greatest in the blockchain space and show a bigger Dash presence, come and join!
 
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Now, the talk itself:

Like all solo speaking slots, it's 15 minutes. It shouldn't come across as a sales pitch. If we want to have a chance at similar future engagements, we need to show the organizer that we can excite the audience, offer some general insights, thought leadership. So I'm planning this basic structure:
  1. What is the problem currently in Web3 / dApp space?
  2. How does Dash Evolution solve this problem?
  3. How can Dash (DIF) help you launch a business based on Evolution?
That leaves only 5 minutes for each block, so it needs to be concise and impactful. I'm all set to talk about 3. any time, and Joel and Pshenmic helped me get a better grasp of 2. Thanks guys!

The way I understand it, is Evo is a decentralized structured database. Permissionless, indexed, fast and cheap to query. Unlike Filecoin or STORJ that just dump files, Evo is kind of like SQL or MongoDB on the blockchain, but doesn't need a 3rd-party indexer or other trusted middleman. If that's accurate, does someone have a basic diagram of the Evo structure that I can put in my slides? Just the main components, not full of geek speak. Or could anyone help me make one?

What with the term "data contract" I often hear around Evo? I understand how smart contracts work on Ethereum's EVM, but Dash doesn't have those yet. I also know SQL - data in, data out. Simple. So what's with the "contract" part in data contracts, is it like defining the table structure in SQL?

What I could use some more support with is 1. An effective way to show why what Evo solves is a big problem. I'd love to show some real-life cases where some project failed trying to do something on other platforms because data was too slow / expensive / trusted. Either they couldn't build what they wanted or maybe someone got scammed by a malicious trusted validator etc. Mark Karpeles from Mt. Gox is a keynote speaker. Can I take a jab at Mt.Gox or does that case make no sense in this context? Better examples?

Or any "What if you could ..." scenarios, even without specific examples of failure. Things that aren't possible in Web3 today on Solana, Avalanche, Ethereum that would be possible on Dash Evo. The more relatable to "normal" non-dev people the better.

Any help is highly appreciated. If we make this thing rock, it helps all of us!
 
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Sven said:
What with the term "data contract" I often hear around Evo? I understand how smart contracts work on Ethereum's EVM, but Dash doesn't have those yet. I also know SQL - data in, data out. Simple. So what's with the "contract" part in data contracts, is it like defining the table structure in SQL?
Click to expand...
Yes - that is what it is approximately. In terms of analogy you could refer to SQL, where DDL stands for “Data Definition Language” and represents the subset of SQL syntax for describing the database schema. One could say that the "database schema" from the SQL world corresponds to the "data contract" term in Evolution technology. You could go further into detail with the analogy of DDL subset of SQL, because DDL allows to create and update database objects, such as tables, indexes, or views, but also stored procedures, and triggers. They are all declared in the "database schema", but the stored procedures and triggers are functional using some executable environment. These functional/executable types would in "data contract" terms of Evo correspond to "smart contract". That is why one could claim that the data structure (data contracts) is more fundamental, and than the execution environment for procedures (smart contracts) will be a "mere extension" of the data contract framework by these executable objects associated with an executable environment called virtual machine. In other words data contract defines schema for all types of objects including executable smart contracts.
 
Sven said:
What I could use some more support with is 1. An effective way to show why what Evo solves is a big problem. I'd love to show some real-life cases where some project failed trying to do something on other platforms because data was too slow / expensive / trusted.
Click to expand...
Here I would definitely go for the usernames data contract and the decentralized solution to identities and contacts that might be actually feasible in practice for many applications. All identity or username solutions out there are either trusted, leaking or not capable of protecting privacy, or both. It is actually part of Android DashPay already. I don't have more time right now, but others might elaborate on this more.
 
denk said:
All identity or username solutions out there are either trusted, leaking or not capable of protecting privacy, or both.
Click to expand...
Can anyone help me make an overview of this please? You know those feature tables where several competitors are compared along a few different features and only one has a row of all checkmarks? Or at least give me their names and respective shortcomings, I can make the actual table myself, but I need help with the content.
 
This example of what Dash Platform could solve, I thought was very interesting. It was shared with me by TheDesertLynx.

"This is a long recording, but in the first half we talked about Swarm City, a now-defunct ETH DApp that ended up failing because of decentralized data storage issues (in particular latency). Swarm City was basically "Uber of everything on ETH" (back when it was cheap to use), kind of like the ultimate fulfillment of an on-demand P2P marketplace. I think they tried IPFS at once point for storage but it didn't work
https://twitter.com/x/status/1807579594527998032
" - TheDesertLynx

---------

I hope that helps some. I see the restrictions that your presentation involves, but here are some thoughts from my perspective.

What I see that makes Dash Platform very powerful is that it can connect any person directly to any other person, directly and privately. From a sales point of view, Dash Platform is a great disintermediator. Dash Platform gets rid of any 3rd parties.

Let me caveat this point, THIS IS ONLY A DASHMONEY PERSPECTIVE.
I think that anyone will have a hard time selling Dash Platform as a feature add to their product. What I mean is that plugging Dash Platform into your product or incorporating it into something else will be clumsy. Dash Platform works best when your product is on/in Dash Platform, not when Dash Platform is on/in your product.

Lastly, I figure out completely new ways to use Dash Platform every couple of weeks or so. So everything I think could be completely upended by someone else's ideas. I don't know what everyone else will come up with. No one does.
 
DashMoney said:
This example of what Dash Platform could solve, I thought was very interesting. It was shared with me by TheDesertLynx.

"This is a long recording, but in the first half we talked about Swarm City, a now-defunct ETH DApp that ended up failing because of decentralized data storage issues (in particular latency). Swarm City was basically "Uber of everything on ETH" (back when it was cheap to use), kind of like the ultimate fulfillment of an on-demand P2P marketplace. I think they tried IPFS at once point for storage but it didn't work
https://twitter.com/x/status/1807579594527998032
" - TheDesertLynx
Click to expand...
Thanks, sounds good! I keep getting "Something went wrong. Please try again later." Is it me or sth wrong with the link?
 
Sven said:
So I'm planning this basic structure:
  1. What is the problem currently in Web3 / dApp space?
  2. How does Dash Evolution solve this problem?
  3. How can Dash (DIF) help you launch a business based on Evolution?
That leaves only 5 minutes for each block, so it needs to be concise and impactful…

What I could use some more support with is 1. An effective way to show why what Evo solves is a big problem. I'd love to show some real-life cases where some project failed trying to do something on other platforms because data was too slow / expensive / trusted. Either they couldn't build what they wanted or maybe someone got scammed by a malicious trusted validator etc.
Click to expand...
This article from Moxie is a must read regarding what the (or at least one prominent) Web3 problem is.

My first impressions of web3

Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than ...
moxie.org

As you already know apparently, the best thing you can do is really understand the problem you/we aim to solve.

Personally I’m more interested in solving Web2 problems with Platform and Evo nodes, but that’s probably not something to emphasize in this conference.
 
I'm in Miami, met several interesting projects today, the most interesting one probably https://rentality.xyz/ It's a P2P car rental company where owners can rent out their cars, kinda like turo.com but also including things like shared investments (people pooling money to buy a car that is rented out and every investor shares the profit). They launched on Base, but found the Evolution concept interesting and would be willing to explore running on Evolution. They'd need smart contracts though.

Does anyone have a good feature comparison how Evo stacks up against other layer 2 solutions like Base? Or against Solana, Avalanche etc?

BTW, there is a live stream at https://www.youtube.com/@wagmi_events/streams I'll be on tomorrow if anyone wants to watch.
 
Done. Went pretty well. I'm in the live stream from 8:04:00. They screwed up the slides a bit because they didn't have the right fonts installed on the machine that the presentation ran on, but if you don't know, you may not even notice. There will be a proper recording published later. Good event!
 
Just wanted to post a proper wrap-up and share some of my observations.

Smaller than expected, but still large,
In their promo material, e.g. the social media templates they provided, they claimed "#WAGMI will bring over 10,000 attendees from 100+ countries..."
There definitely weren't 10,000 attendees, my guess would be somewhere in the lower 4 digits, 2-3 thousand or so.

No other blockchains
On the expo floor and the speaker lineup were lots of companies that form the wider crypto ecosystem - tax and legal services, crypto cruises, trading bots, ID services, various web3 and AI crossovers, incubator funds, lots of defi, tokens, games etc. - all of them commercial projects. I didn't see any representation from other major blockchains. The closest was Charlie Shrem, billed as "Bitcoin Pioneer". I guess truly decentralized projects have difficulties finding and funding representatives to attend. So Dash stood out a bit in that sense.

The vibe
Upbeat mood that often revolved around political changes in the US. People put big hopes in Trump's policies. Lots of talk around Solana. I've heard several people mentioning they like their tech and are building on it. We need to be clearer in our communication how we're better.

I also didn't see anything around payments. No payment processors, debit cards, etc. Nobody talked about replacing fiat.

Reaction to Evolution
People who have at least some tech understanding are intrigued. The headline I chose "SQL for the web" seems to resonate. Questions immediately go to scaling and cost. What if I run my business on this that may scale to hundreds of read/write transactions per second? What if other business do the same? How will 300 VPS evonodes handle that load? What is it going to cost me in fees? If the Dash price goes up will this become prohibitively expensive? I didn't have good answers for that. Can anyone explain?

I did have good conversations especially with Rentality as mentioned before and Fizen. I hope we can get them onboard to build on Evo. IMO getting real-life businesses to use Evo is the best for Dash to get out of the doldrums again.

My presentation
I was confirmed as a speaker quite late in the prep phase. I got a verbal commitment a few days before Christmas and the actual confirmation came only after New Year. That, and the fact that I got the slot for free, probably contributed to being scheduled so late on stage. I was scheduled as the second-last speaker, but the one after me canceled, so I ended up being the last one. That was unfortunate, because lots of people started leaving and the audience was half empty.

But people still saw it, I got comments and questions at the after party and we still get a proper recording and pictures in a few days that we can reuse in our marketing. In the meantime, there is the live stream, although it only shows the slides, not the speaker.

They screwed up the slides a bit because they converted the file somehow and didn't have the right fonts installed on the machine that the presentation ran on, making a lot of things look squished and e.g. on the "SQL for the web" slide, the right column is missing Xs in the red circles, stuff like that. Their staff tried to frantically fix the worst things backstage with me in the 15 minutes while the speaker before me was on. I think it still came out ok.

They also screwed up with the video that was supposed to play after me, resulting in the "What will you build?" slide flashing a few more times, haha! Free advertising to drive home the point...

A strict 15-minutes limit and a mostly non-technical audience meant it had to be compact and couldn't go into too much detail. Had to have some entertainment value for people to not zone out. I think we had a good balance and I'd like to thank all the people who helped me prepare, especially:
  • Joel (TheDesertLynx)
  • Pshenmic
  • DashMoney
  • BlackMirrorDesigner

The WAGMI organization
The organizer, Moe, had also done the Dash conference 2017 in London and is the one who submitted a proposal a while ago about organizing a new Dash conference. I had to disabuse him a bit of the idea that there's enough funding or even a large enough active community in Dash for a dedicated event right now. So he was looking for ways to get us more involved in his general events, paid of course, it's his business. Unfortunately, I don't think a single ticket was bought with the special Dash discount he gave me. I wish some more Dashers had shown up. Seeing life in the community also helps secure future speaking slots, they do similar events all over the world.

I'm actually drafting this on the plane going back home, will post it later. Spending the night in an airplane seat isn't the most fun thing. It occurred to me that Joel also has speaking engagements in Europe. His topics are usually a bit different, but if opportunities like this to speak about Evolution should arise again, maybe he can do the American gigs and I do the ones in Europe? I've done a lot of traveling in my life and I'm not so keen on it anymore. Anyway, I'll submit a proposal for expense reimbursement when I'm back and I count on your support getting it passed! :)
 
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@Sven — Massive kudos for representing Dash at WAGMI! Your dedication to showcasing Evolution’s potential, even with last-minute hurdles (font-gate 😅), is exactly what this ecosystem needs. The fact that Dash stood out as a truly decentralized project in a sea of commercial ventures speaks volumes.


Key Wins to Celebrate:

✅ Real-World Interest: Rentality, Fizen, and others seeing value in Evolution? Huge! Let’s rally to answer their scaling/cost questions (community, let’s brainstorm solutions!).
✅ "SQL for the Web" resonated — a genius framing for non-devs. The recording/pics will be gold for future marketing.
✅ Community Teamwork: Shoutout to @thedesertlynx, @pshenmic , @DashMoney , and me 😅 for the prep grind. This is how we win — together.


Next 3️⃣ Steps:

1️⃣ Reimbursement Proposal: Drop it ASAP. You’ve earned full support — MNOs, let’s greenlight this to encourage future ambassadors.
2️⃣ Follow-Ups: Rentality/Fizen outreach is critical. Who’s volunteering to help demo Evolution’s strengths?
3️⃣ Lessons for Next Time: Smaller but targeted events? Partnering with Joel for regional splits? Let’s strategize.


To the Dashers Community:

🗣️ Your Voice Matters:
Even if you couldn’t attend, amplify the recording! Retweet, share clips, and tag projects that could benefit from Evolution.

💡 Got Answers?
Sven flagged scaling/cost questions — if you’re technical, jump into the forum/Discord. Let’s turn these into talking points, not roadblocks.


Final Thought:

Conferences like WAGMI remind the crypto world that Dash isn’t just alive — it’s pioneering.
Every brick Sven lays needs our mortar. Let’s build. 🚀


P.S. Miami fonts trolling the slides? Iconic. Next time, we’ll smuggle in Comic Sans for maximum chaos. 😎

Like & Reply if you’ll back Sven’s proposal and push Evolution’s adoption! 🔥
 
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