Thank you very much, Nathan. I will do the intro. So for those of you that have heard of Akasha, Akasha is the correct name, It's a kind of an old project and we've been, let's say, co evolving along alongside the whole blockchain ecosystem and the general understanding of what blockchain can be in the context of decentralized social networks. And, you know, if we look back, the first experiment that we tried to do was, can we use IPFS as a technology and a smart contract to build a fully decentralized social network? And since then, we grew in our understanding of what would the success look like in this decentralized paradigm, and that's how we reach the vibe viable part. As in, if it's not capable of, independent existence, then when where is the decentralized, part? And, you know, this is one of the set truths of, decentralization, let's say, as a movement today because I think it's only a keyword sometimes. But we'll we'll get to that. That being said, I represent together with Filip and Martin the Akasha team. We are a team of 17 people. Interdisciplinary by default, so to say. We come from a wide range of fields, like Martin, for example, is a former biochemist, you know, the med scientist type of, the cool the cool kind. Filip is also from, like, the more social sciences, and I'm, in this blockchain space since, 2011. When together with Vitryk, we started the Bitcoin Magazine and later on the Ethereum project. And that's end of the the pinnacle. But if you look at the history when talking about Akasha in this particular, talk, the initial version was kind of like, what would be the user experience that we could just replicate and why we use this meaningful technologies in the back end. And it was kind of like a medium type blog posting platform where the mechanism was quite simple, and we even used the private chain just to, you know, as a test net. And, you know, it was during this time when everyone is like even though the pieces of that stack was kind of interesting, the most often asked questions during this time and particularly also during the beta phase when we expanded and started to do also the web access. The most asked question was like, when ICO? So we went through that whole period, you know, and we made the commitment not to do an ICO. And, like, moving on from 2015, in 2000 between 2017 and 2020, we basically rebuilt from scratch to other fully working decentralized apps. Only that in the beta versions, we applied some of the lessons learned, like, we were able to make the content load faster. You know, the user experience was one of the, things that we were really focused on because, you know, Blockchain in general is such a cool idea, and it can make so much impact. But, like, if it's not usable or at least enjoyable, you only do it when you really have to. And the social interaction is about having fun, you know, not being there doing some chores. And, to our surprise, you know, we had, like, one of those moments, Wow, look, This we we are here. There were also a couple of books where Akasha and our initial efforts relating, you know, social networks and blockchains was mentioned. And since then, you know, during this and as the team grew and our understanding grew, we are finding ourselves at this point where, let's say, we combine all the experience we had during these three apps, social networking apps. And we tried to make something, and this is a metaphor. It's not like a super accurate one, but it should serve as a, you know, a close comparison. You can imagine something like the WordPress for decentralized social networks. And, you know, this is quite different from the idea of just building one social app that would be decentralized, the decentralized social network. This moves a bit into the meta, because now it's not about building one social network, but about building an ecosystem of social networks. And this is kind of the meta social network, and that's kind of a decentralized social network when it's comprised of other decentralized social network and, you know, inception. And just to kind of highlight, during this, like, learning curve, I think it's an accurate name, we also realized that, you know, like before Akasha, Akasha, especially during the early days of Ethereum, there was the the component of, like, the the legal entity. And today, we are speaking as the Akasha Foundation, a nonprofit born at the intersection of blockchain and collective intelligence. Yeah, blockchain. And we like, what we talked about until now is the software framework, the Akashabode framework, as we call it, which is this set of libraries, tools, and services that can be used to build the customized social networks. So you can think of, like, Blockchain augmented social networks. In some cases, it can mean just basic transactions. In other cases, it could be more complex on chain interactions. And this is, like, a part, you know, like the whys, the legal framework. And this is like something that we reached a bit later, but it was something that was kind of becoming more and more apparent as our, you know, toolkit matured. It's like, oh my God, we are almost ready to deploy this. And what about the governance of this, and how would the community self cover, you know? And this is how we started to do a bit of legal hacking, bit of legal hacking, by designing this independent legal entity, to serve for ethereum. World, as the the community self governance structure. And the Ethereum world is the first social network that we are building with this framework, and the aim is simple, to unify the Ethereum ecosystem of apps and services. And in the Mission Manifesto is, like, the declared purpose of this particular social network is to accelerate the adoption of Ethereum based apps and services, making transforming how they attract, direct, and engage users. And, you know, for, like, at the surface, it will look it might fool you. It's like, you know, kind of a feed app. You scroll, you see posts, you see hashtags, and this is not by accident. We actually did some user research and tried to understand from the perspective and, like, the almost like the collective consciousness of what the Ethereum community uses today. Twitter seems to be, like, the favorite tool. And, you know, it was an interesting, for example, a dilemma where do we want something like character limit for post? Yes or no? And, you know, for example, the person that joined our UX team was like, I don't think so. It's like testing our assumptions. And people actually wanted the the character count limit, you know? So it's like we it's even the slight decisions in here, at least we we try to inform them with the actual data. And the interesting part part is that behind this user interface, you can also think about the framework that can be used by all these Ethereum developers to integrate their apps and making it available through this social kind of experience. And then you also have the community that can actively engage in self in the self governance process by joining this legally recognized independent entity that, you know, also brings the benefits of limiting liability and so on and so forth. But I will just make a pause here and pass the mic when it comes to the thinking for social networks, social side. Filip?

Of course. Thank you very much, Filip, for grabbing the mic. So, you know, the need for and choice of a legal entity is probably, like, the driest and most boring slide that you can, you know, you go at the Blockchain conferences, like depends on the conference, you know, if it's something in the legal context and maybe it's cool, but in most, it's like boo. But I have to confess that especially in the early days and, you know, this was back in 02/2014, now it's 2021, things are a bit less dark, more gray. But back then, we were faced with this problem. So Ethereum was not yet born let's say, born as in the Blockchain itself, but we had developers working actively on the clients, the Ethereum clients. And, you know, we had a few. We had the c plus plus client. We had the Go client. We had the Python client. And, anyway, the the point was that we had these developers asking us and themselves, will I get in trouble for contributing code to this project? And, you know, in some cases, it's one of those situations when you go for a clear answer to your lawyers and say, hey. Would they get in trouble? And then they reply, well, it depends. And then that's, you know, it's like hours and hours of discussions. But, the certainty is that, you know, I was also one of the earliest enthusiasts and, you know, I was passionate and already thinking, oh my god, DAOs, before the blockchain was even there. And even in the early post, some of the on the ethereum.org when we were discussing about the plans of the foundation and so on, the idea and the vision of something like a transparent, open, community governed, DAO type like structure was in the air, structure was in the air, you know. So this was something that we were going towards. But the pragmatic and, you know, the reality is that you do need this entity if you want to operate in the real world. If you want to enter service agreements with your developers so they have, like, a clear, for example, legal liability and so on and so forth. And the the set truth is that, you know, even if code is law and it can be seen as law in so many dimensions, Just pretending that the laws related to jurisdictions evaporate is like sticking your head in the sand. So I am all for decentralization, but at the same time, it's a matter of looking at the pros and cons. And since then, when we were looking at the initial models and what would be most suited, the end choice that we made for Itanium was a foundation, as a nonprofit, as one move to solidify and, like, protect the vision from any corruption that would be brought by for for profit business models. And, you know, it's like, you might say, wait, what would that mean? The vision there was like CryptoMozilla versus CryptoGoogle, CryptoMozilla one. And if it would have been a CryptoGoogle, you might have been in this situation where you see many protocols, composable protocols, forming the DeFi space, and part of what makes and drives current adoption for Ethereum. And if there would have been some, like, key components that would have been identified as a profit making mechanism, if the Ethereum would have been for profit, you could expect to just replicate that and it's like, oh, wow. This is by Ethereum, the official. I'm gonna use that, not that random developer from the Internet. So anyway, I think long term and looking at the result here, this was the right tracing, kinda create this Linux type safe sandbox for different organizations and interest to play in. And since then, like, fast forwarding, I will pass the mic to Martin to talk about the choice and how this plugs into the picture.

Yep. Thanks, Mihai. So when when so as Mihai outlined, it it's a it's it was for us a very important question, what type of legal form we would be using for for Ethereum world that is compatible with the intention and the ideas that we have building here a decentralized social platform. And you know that there are some maximalists that would say, yeah, of course, you you guys are on Ethereum. Or you you have a blockchain project. You need a DAO, but there are definitely limitations of this choice. There is not really a legal entity that is recognized. It's basically merely a collaboration that people would engage in. And so they would be each individually liable for the actions they take on on such a entity. So that's why it's important to, in our minds, to to to take a step back and start bottom up with an already existing legal entity. And the choice that we made, in this case is, the Swiss Association. This is, despite its, its its its provincial name, maybe, it is a legal entity that is used by by quite a few internationally operating organizations. And we like it for several reasons. First, it's very simple in terms of its constitutional requirements. You you could set it up with just two people that need to formulate basically, the articles of the association and define also a board and appoint a president. And if they were doing this all among themselves, that would be fine. You wouldn't even have to register this. This this legal document seals already the the requirements of a Swiss association to be recognized in in the Swiss legislation. What we like, especially, is about the idea of an association that we are talking here about members and not investors. So we we are not interested in selling shares to to investors that want to invest in that project and then at the same time have value extracted from people that are relying on this platform. Instead, any participant of Ethereum World should be able to have a say. You might imagine you just share Ethereum World with others to communicate, and that's that's the way that you derive from it. There might be bloggers that use their profiles to to monetize content that they want to share with others. They should also have a say and and not basically depend on that on that top down governance structure of a of a typical web two company that might just kill the pro kill your profile, change terms and conditions. So it's democratic by default because every participant can become a member of that association and has a single vote. We currently set out in our articles a one member, one vote policy. It's also an organizational form that is very easy need to be joined by by anyone worldwide, both as a as a as a company or as a project if you want to be joining as an, software developer that wants to to to to, implement this, smart contract with Ethereum world, but but also for anyone else. So what we believe, in the way of, how the Linux Foundation has recently formulated similar efforts, we believe that this is the minimum viable form of centralization required to to to bring put to push this forward project forward, basically, and put it on on a sound legal ground. There you might you might argue, of course, is is a problem with this because you still have a president, and you still have a board in an association. So that's quite a political business usually, who who should be elected and so on. And for this reason, we have we have devised a modular approach to this. So, Philip, can you Yes, thanks. So on this slide, you see the concept of panels. So what normally would be the board and the members' assembly now is, in our case, panels and members' assembly. These share the these these two entities, the members assembly and the panels are sharing the sharing the capacity that normally would be residing in the board of physically appointed individuals. In in our case, each of those panels is in itself a type of organization or a group of people up to seven, we have defined, that are in charge of defining what we would call in the vein of the concept of modular politics, which is, by the way, something we discovered after we came up with this and we're really excited about, and that's why we are here today. So these these these panels, basically, are are could be seen in a way as as as modules or as as orgs that are defining the operational procedures of the of the of the association. Ideally, these panels in our idea are very important in the in the initial bootstrapping phase and are setting up the policies. And then later on, these would be increasingly automated, and the panels would be only required when there is need to change something and adjust the agreements that are set out in the code, because that is definitely the case that in the bootstrapping phase or throughout, there will be conditions that it cannot be just run automatically. We also have one specialty, and that is there is while the panels not usually are appointed by volunteers that are elected through the member's assembly. There's one additional legal entity coming into play, and that is a contracted service provider. We call it the administrative panel. And that's supposed to be taking care of the day to day operations, and it's seated in Switzerland and can also perform all the legal duties that the association has in front of the legal court system. Yeah. And I hand over to Philip who is gonna

Locate the organization.

the

Of course. Thank you. Thank you, Philip. So the idea is that during this presentation, you know, we had a choice of, like, what should we actually talk about? So this is like a snapshot from our current thinking on a specific set of problems. And, you know, we chose moderation simply because in terms of, let's say, tangible development, this is one of the areas. It's like, okay, we're gonna build a social network. What is that? It's like a feed. And then, oh my god. What about moderation? Oh, so oh, it's like we can build an app that would would do the moderation and then an app that would take the input and feedback from this to display if chosen by the user, the curated feed by using this moderation. So anyway, that's why we chose the moderation. And as you can expect and already highlighted by Philip, we'll be at a bleeding edge, which means lots of crashes. Many times things not work as they should, but we are getting there and we are very close to actually have something that would be available publicly and, you know, coming soon, the Classic. But that being said, besides the, let's say, subset of governance issues related to moderation, we also have these other active areas of research like self organizing models and systems and modularity and usability by default at all layers of the, let's say, mental LEGO, from the legal part to the softer part to the way the integrations that expand the platform works. And that comes also into, like, for example, questions, how would the community curated and governed app store for Ethereum look like? You know, you how would discovery work in this, you know so there are a bunch of really interesting problems to to solve when you look at this in the context of Ethereum as an ecosystem, and we are kind of zoning in into this, but with the mention that we see this combination of software plus legal frameworks applicable in other context beyond blockchain as well. So, you know, there's nothing really saying that we couldn't see a world for independent journalists, crowd funding, and, you know, time stamping and tracing the are many directions you can go. And while we were kind of doing and, you know, head down and trying to see with our lawyers, hey. Can we customize these organs so we don't have the functions as in in the individuals, but actually distribute the responsibility and power towards the edges, towards the members as much as possible. This is what we reached. And somewhere along the way, we also discovered this modular politics stuff, and so it's like, damn. Look at these guys. They're like, we are we talking about the same thing? It it looks it looks like we're talking about the same thing. So it was like, man, we we gotta talk and see where if there are synergies and if we can do cool things together. And that's where the governance was with now, you know, if we focus the moderation, will be the first really small experiment into, like, really broad, challenge. And, not lastly, generative identity and interpersonal data is something that, you know, is one of those really delicate things when it comes to what is personal data, what is interpersonal data, and anywhere you have this flow of information between participants, especially like in a social network. It goes beyond just me having my data. You are co creating this data with your participants and there are really interesting problems and challenges also there to solve. Filip is doing some great work. You can visit generativeidentity.org and it's a hyphen in the middle for more information on that. And to end with a really classic, you know, problem and active area of research, which should be maybe number one there, the Blockchain UX. And, you know, it's like as we said in the beginning, we developed a few applications, you know, Blockchain apps. And every time it was, like, you know, even for us, it got to the point where, like, man, this is easy. And, you know, then you was like, oh, let's let's have someone to try it. And it's, like, you know, it's not so visible for for everyone. And sometimes it's not even in things that you can control from the interface. Sometimes it's simply how MetaMask works or, like, you know, there are things also out of your control. But moving on, we identified this, leap and which is fought by economic constraints and all that, to a layer two. And this is also maybe quite interesting when you are considering the possibility of kind of like these layers that would encompass and provide the interface but that you can move within communities, you know, lowering the cost of interacting and, like, there are many things that could be done there. But we're still super early and we don't know exactly how that would look. And I would like to, you know, kind of bring the presentation to a conclusion and, you know, we started with this designing of viable decentralized social network. And because we also have some DAO OGs here, I would like to, you know, pinpoint that when it comes to DAOs, at least, you know, for the random Joe that doesn't necessarily understand the magic of Blockchain, that it's, like, transparent. The resource management, you know, it's transparent. You can see, I can trust that, that I'm not, you know that that guy didn't take the money and you know, there are things related to the resource management. And then when it comes to the d in the DAO, it's like the decentralized governance. So it's like, as a community, we can decide on where those resources that are transparent, you know, how they are used. And when it comes to the putting that kind of in this context, we think that through this minimally viable centralized entity that indeed has a footprint in a legal jurisdiction, which makes it, you know, liable also in one, at least you get this shield which protects you from being attacked in all the others. Because if you don't choose a point where you plant your flag, you are kind of liable in all at the same time, which is a nightmare. Imagine having, like, losses for doing activities via a DAO that you're part of in 10 different jurisdictions at the same time. I don't want I hope we won't get to see that happening. But in this case, when we look at the social network as Ethereum, and for Ethereum it's maybe a more special case than in other communities because this is already an established community, We have this idea that if we bring this entity in the middle to empower the community to self govern itself via a legally recognized entity that limits the liability of the members in the governance, We are talking actually about the decentralized autonomous social network, which is like, wow, super excited, and we are looking forward to see how this could be applied in a variety of communities and how this overlaps with also some of the areas of active research in Metagalf and the other projects that you are part of. So thank you very much for your attention, and I'm going to open the floor for questions and for that.

Could you restate the the question? And we're I'm really we're really happy for this for this community to be a forum for intersecting kind of decentralization world and kinda, social science institution science world and several other worlds. So we're really happy. If if you're seeing this as an opportunity to kind of get a deeper sense of of of how those views influence what you're working on, we're really happy to do that. Did you have a did could I'm sorry. Could you restate the question?

Great. I mean, you know, I only have, yeah, little little little notes and on on the larger view, I think I have to learn more about the, the the project personally to have a good sense. But you'd y'all can consider me, a a a person to go to if you, have questions. And just want the institutional perspective on the

Can I take this one? Yeah.

Go for it.

So as I said in the beginning, the search for the most favorable, so to say, jurisdiction when doing blockchain stuff has been something that we've explored since 02/2014, and that's when we've scouted a number of jurisdictions including Netherlands, UK, Germany, Singapore, Canada. We looked at quite a few, USA, and then was like, oh my god. Let's not do that. And the Swiss, let's say, initial kind of setup, that was with after proactively engaging the local authorities and explaining, look, we are doing this. This is like a platform. This can be an opportunity for this country and jurisdiction. You know, it's like, we're not here with the you know, because in the media, it was like, Silk Road and all the bad stuff, and it's like, what about the children? Oh my god. The blockchain people are here. Hide the children. You know? So it but that's like a different topic. But coming back to the choice, there is also an interesting point to be made. There are few established legal frameworks that allow the complete decentralization of power into these functions that dissolve into groups. Most of the legal structures that you have around the world are like the best ideas from one hundred plus years ago. Right? So it was inconceivable almost, like, to envision that what group of random people from around the internet made decisions without some all wise shepherd there for the herd. So at least in my search, I have seen also other initiatives. I will say this, you know, like LAO or LAO is another initiative that's kind of trying to do this from a for profit. I think it's Wyoming or some USA based jurisdiction. And there are other initiatives, but you can try to use the, let's say, units of accounts as some kind of proxy for shares, but they're not shares, you know. So there are many ways in which you could structure this and, you know, including the one that is currently hot. Let's have a governance token, and I will just say that even if I admire the initial intention, which is, like, in theory, sounds like a good idea, when it comes to the actual result, then it's, like, what does success look like in this model? We have this situation where model? We have this situation where governance equals who has the most money, has the most say. And, you know, it's like when you put who who who came up with that idea, you know, looking left at who who thought it's a good idea? But it kind of works, at least in theory. But when you look at then what does this look in, practicing, and then not just in theory, behind these governance tokens, which are more like signaling tools, not governance tools, usually have some kind of entity incorporated some somewhere. So it's like, I don't know, not so, you know, I like the project that I'm mentioning, so it's not like if I mention something, it's like who so for example, even Compound or, like, there are many other, you know, like DeFi or, like, decentralized projects that do have an incorporated company somewhere. And when you look at that, this company would be providing that head where you can point and cut the head, you know. It's like what you're trying to achieve with decentralization and kind of, like, increasing the pass factor. And when you have this type of situation where you do have a centralized entity somewhere regardless of the jurisdiction actually doing and deciding the technological roadmap of the you know, if push push comes to shove and, you know, like, the governor says, 90% of the people, let's do something, but for some reasons, the interests are not aligned with the company actually doing the development and being directly responsible for that development, the entity that is actually liable will have the last say. There is also, of course, like, there will be a fork, and the community can do its own thing afterward, and probably there will be a big fallout. But what we wanted to do here was to actually ignore the tokenomics from the governance problem. And yes, I know, democracy is kind of like outdated also, it's kind of like this old idea, again, like the best idea two hundred years ago, but compared to this model where the people with most money have the most say, I would say, still, maybe it's a better choice than what is. Although I'm open and really excited about all these other ways in which you can customize and come up with your own, like, DNA of governance for your specific needs, which is kind of right to overlap with this. But regarding the jurisdiction, we did not find anywhere else in the world a more favorable jurisdiction, at least from our we would be interested, by the way, if you know, where we could do something like this and get away with it while still being legally compliant. Short

Yep. I can I can maybe do a first part of this, but and then I I I know Meehan has a lot of ideas to say too? So I I just saw another question. I think I want to just put in as well where it was also asked. So in what form would these deliberations happen in the beginning, and how are we scaling this? So the the hands the hands on answer on that, I think it's related to this, will be that we are starting definitely with a nuclear, you know, small small community because you won't be able to to set anything off with with, like, inviting a thousand people and then ask them to agree on something. So so the ideas and also the form in which this is happening will be very organic and nuclear, and there might be initially just cause. We we we won't be ready maybe with everything on our own technology sec yet. So there might be even a discourse forum that that's that's starting that process where we will be discussing how with, by the way, and constitution that's already written. So the rules, the the the permissions, and and duties of these different panels, this is what we have defined. But that's all. We we we needed this for the legal document and the fact that we decided already what legal form we start with. But then in a way and that's the the gradual process of how we are increasingly, yeah, handling this out and distributing the the power in a in a larger community of people that all as members then are able to to join. Yeah? And, yeah, and it's it's it needs to start with just a few people in a in a call and hashing out documents and and and written stuff and and going from there, which is, by the way, again, why I'm really excited to see some of the discussions in the Slack channel because it seems like, man, this is really similar problems. We we are looking here at a specific community, definitely, but but but there are tools being developed, and we are very open to to learn from others. Yeah.

I would like to to add something there, like, in regards to, like, how would this be initiated, you know, and we call this, like, the initiation of the association, which is not necessarily the registration. So there will be this, phase in between where, it's it's like maybe a useful metaphor is, like, we are creating this structure. So that's what we created, the structure. Then we open it for the community to kind of self select and see is like this the right structure. If not, let's customize it, adapt it. And at the end of this process, when the community that would actually make use of the structure would take ownership of it and would claim its destiny into whatever governance model he chooses, that's when the community can register that association. And that's gonna be the point where it's not gonna be just two, three, 10. Preferably, it's gonna be over a 100 over I don't know. It's gonna be a a journey to understand also, like, what would be the wisest approach here. But more most likely, it's gonna be a gradual approach. But with the mention that there is this period in the middle where the community can really take control and define or, like, completely override some of the stuff that we came up with before the community really, you know, puts the stand. This is truly a community driven and, you know, decentralized initiative.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

I'm being here. Thank you for the invitation, you know, and Thank

Thank you also for this great work that you're doing there. This is pioneering. Looking back, fifty years from now, I will tell my grandson, I knew those guys, you know, when we were just running on that bullshit operating system. So, you know, really encouraging you to continue doing the awesome work you are already doing.