Join Alliance Dao members discuss ideas to build in crypto for the upcoming Hackathon at ETHGlobal New York 2023.

Hack with some of the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem, ETHGlobal New York 2023.

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Welcome to Alliances, Requests for Startups Proposals.

of work into making this list because we have data from probably like 5 to 10, 000 applications that have come into the Alliance Accelerator Program.

And we tend to see some of the data points that could dictate where the future is gonna go.

And so based on that data, we've created a specialized list just for you so that as you're thinking about building your project within the ETH Global Hackathon, you're able to get inspired from the list that we're gonna share with you.

And for the winners that get the number 1 spot for our bounty, which is a

reward, you're also going to get an interview by Chow and myself.

So, Chow, Let's talk about what excites us.

What's the first idea that you're most excited about?

At a high level, we want to see really weird things, really crypto-native things.

Specifically on the consumer application side of things.

We want to see ideas that haven't been done before and that are uniquely enabled by crypto.

There are many great ideas that have been proven to be too early before, but what really excites us is things that haven't been done before.

So to give you a very quick example, I think that in the ZK space, zero-knowledge proofs are at a point where they are mature enough from a tooling point of view that they can actually enable new consumer applications and that consumer developers are able to build interesting things.

A couple of years ago, zero-knowledge proofs were a little bit too early for consumer developers.

But today, we really want to see interesting applications.

1 example is pseudonymous social networks.

So the idea there is to use the knowledge proofs to prove that you are part of a certain group or you have certain credentials without revealing those credentials.

And you can participate in the gossip, in a gossip network, right?

So those are, that's an example of something we wanna see at a high level.

Another great example is, you know, on Tinder, you put your education level, your net worth, and other key features about the user.

And some people may not want to feel like they have to share that publicly.

And you could think of, you know, pseudonymous social networks where you can share these key properties of yourself without revealing the actual data behind it.

A related idea in the consumer application space is payment.

We think that in the first probably 13, 14 years of crypto, payment was a little bit too early because there wasn't a critical mass of users who hold crypto.

But today we're at a point where there is a critical mass.

And so the idea here is to build applications for consumers or tooling for businesses that enable payment using crypto rails.

But the key point is we don't want to see projects that try to compete with Venmo or Revolut or CashApp, like those traditional incumbent Web2 payment applications.

We want to see applications that serve a uniquely underserved user segment in the world, a segment that is underserved by fiat payment rails.

So to give you an example, it could be, you know, users or businesses in the cannabis industry, right?

So stuff like that, like really weird things, Things that are either weird or sometimes potentially even outrageous, controversial.

This is the kind of stuff that we're excited about.

Another area is the creator economy and fan engagement area, with the rise of Friend Tech and Song.xyz, you're starting to see more or less some penetration in the types of consumer apps that can be built for this genre.

And so some of the things that I'd love to see is more applications for the superfans where artists and musicians can better monetize that 1% of superfans.

tickets for listening to Taylor Swift at a live concert.

And so there is an opportunity to monetize that area.

Another example is royalty from derivative works.

So an example of this is, you know, you could enable a whole class of remixes on music that could then be monetized if those remixes become successful, where part of that royalty then goes to the musician that came up with the original song.

And the last thing is revenue sharing, which is you could think of DAOs as like labels that acquire music, and the music then that gets distributed or licensed can earn a fee that can go to the DAO.

These are some of the things that I'm excited about when it comes to creator economy and fan engagement.

A broader theme across creator engagement is the idea of hyper-financialization.

1 is the consumer applications that are hyper-financialized.

If you look at all the most interesting crypto consumer applications that we've seen so far, they're all about speculation.

Be it tokenizing individuals or tokenizing PFPs, tokenizing music of famous musicians.

These are the things that users really want and care about.

Ultimately, they care about making money.

For me personally, if you think about crypto, there's really 2 things that crypto are fundamentally interesting about.

Like, they're at the 2 extremes of a barbell.

1 is hardcore decentralization, anti-establishment, you know, destroying the central bank, you know, all that stuff.

And the other extreme of the barbell is speculation, is the chic ones, is, you know, sniping at New Year's, the 20s, that kind of stuff.

So we're really interested at both extremes of the barbell.

Obviously on the hardcore decentralization part, there aren't that many founders and it's obviously risky to build that kind of stuff.

But on the other side of the barbell, there is a lot of founders doing that And there is not that much risk.

We want to see more experimentation in that hyperfinancialization slash speculation part of the barbell.

Another area that I'm really excited about when it comes to hyperdecentralization is proof of physical work.

We've started to see helium and others that have started to kind of build the core infrastructure of what a successful proof of physical work product can look like.

And some of the areas that we think could be the future could be renewable energy.

It can be, you know, like from power sources like wind and solar, it could be batteries.

It could be many, many different areas that could ultimately take the community of people that are all individual operators that can contribute to a much broader network that can enable a new product or offering that wouldn't be available today.

And that's all by using decentralization and then a power of incentives as a way to align the community around a product or an idea.

So in the proof of physical workspace, it often requires domain expertise in 2 seemingly very unrelated domains.

So crypto is 1 and the other 1 is the domain specific.

So it could be telecommunication, it could be climate, it could be science, right?

These sides and another really interesting example.

So we really encourage everyone who come from these non-crypto related domains to experiment with proof of physical work because the crypto stuff, we can help you with it.

But again, that touches on the hyper financialization part of crypto.

So speaking of hyper financialization, obviously there's DeFi.

Imran, what are you excited about in DeFi?

So what I'm excited about DeFi is 2 things.

1 on the traditional DeFi side, There is startups like Ajna that is using request for quote system that enables no it enables 2 parties from The borrow and lend sign to be able to come in and fulfill an order from both sides without any protocol integration.

So this enables seamless decentralization and then 2, no counterparty risk as an example.

Number 2 is I'm excited a lot about NFT and the purpose or NFT5.

And so that is there are perpetual markets that could be created around NFTs and the lending and AMM side as well.

An example of this is with Blend, you're seeing the RFQ system being used as a way for 2 parties to be able to enter into a transaction.

And we think that this is great for tail end assets, but there are opportunities to build something that's much more scalable in a way that can offer better rates.

Number 2 is on the perp side, we've seen NFTperps.com that recently launched but then shut down.

And So I do think there's an opportunity for NFT perps that's scalable and that could solve the Oracle pricing issue in a way that could help grow the perpetual markets for NFTs as well.

A big part of DeFi I'm personally very excited about is privacy.

We've been talking about privacy for 14 years, but unfortunately we still don't have truly private DeFi.

And obviously as a DeFi user myself, I fully appreciate how important that is.

I want to be able to send transactions, to swap tokens in a way that my addresses, my amount, and the name of the token is not revealed to the rest of the world.

Maybe it's as an L2, maybe it's as a privacy centric wallet.

We don't know yet, but we'd love to see more experiments on the privacy-defy side of things.

And I know you're really excited about the AI and crypto crossover.

So maybe if you wanna talk a bit about that.

Yeah, so 1 of the most obvious applications of crypto in AI is actually content authentication, right?

So in a world of AI, there's a huge growth in terms of deep fakes, fake content.

1 of the ways to solve this problem is for the creator of that content to sign a message on chain and separately publish their addresses on social media, for example, in a way that people can verify the signatures.

So this is 1 of the most obvious ways in which crypto can be helpful for AI.

Another interesting area to explore is to use crypto incentives to bootstrap physical networks of GPU.

So right now we're in a massive shortage of GPUs due to recent rise of LLMs and the subsequent demand for the GPUs.

So again, This goes back to the previous conversation around proof of physical work and hyper-financialization.

The idea is to use incentives to bootstrap such a compute network.

So AI, I mean, it's gonna be really big in the coming years and there should be a ton of opportunities at the intersection of the 2.

The next idea I'm most excited about is habit formation, forming apps.

We started to see this with Stepin, where people were incentivized to walk, and as they, so they could either walk or run and they would earn rewards in the form of tokens.

And this created a positive feedback loop because those that were that may not be able to walk or run without any real incentives will not do it.

And with the power of the token, many of the people that wouldn't have walked or ran are now doing that because habits take typically 18 to, let's say 45 days to form.

And we've seen a percentage of people that use the Stepin app that turned out to be long-term users of the app.

In fact, even over the course of the past 2 years of the launch of the Stepin app, there's still 200, 000 monthly active users on the Stepin ecosystem.

And that shows that the Steppen has a product market fit that no other app has from the bear market side.

So related to this health habit formation, we'd love to see more experiments in DeSci, so decentralized science.

The idea is that 1 of the key challenges that science or the scientific community has faced so far is the lack of funding.

And obviously crypto is 1 of the most effective tools at capital formation.

So again, it goes back to the idea, the whole idea of hyper-financialization.

The idea is to harness the DGN energy of crypto users and help with capital formation for scientific products.

Obviously these words sound very abstract and that's because we don't know how it's going to look like exactly, but we'll have to see more experiments at the intersection of crypto and science.

And this also touches on the, the idea of proof of physical work.

So 1 possible example is use token incentives to incentivize users to bootstrap critical and large data sets for scientific research.

So think of, for example, a decentralized 23andMe, basically where users contribute their DNA data in exchange for tokens.

So to summarize, there are 2 interesting things at the intersection of crypting and science.

1 is capital formation, and the second 1 is proof of physical work and specifically in bootstrapping new data sets for science research.

And maybe my final idea, and there's many more ideas on our ideas page, but the final idea I'll go over is consumer applications.

With the rise of Front Tech, which enabled this really weird application that enables you to purchase a key or share of someone that gave you direct access to this individual.

It's a key way to think about how to build in a social media space with crypto rails.

You don't wanna build something that looks and feels like an app that you use today, like Twitter or Facebook, but it should enable something new using crypto and financialization.

And so we'd like to see more applications being built around the consumer use cases because We believe that the infrastructure is ready for mass adoption, at least for the next hundred to million users in the next 6 months a year.

My final idea is For those who are building on the infra side of things, so we've talked a lot about applications, but for those who are building infra, there are 3 things we'd like to see.

Obviously this has been talked about a lot, but we still haven't really experienced an awesome onboarding experience or transaction signature experience with mobile wallets or mobile applications.

So we want to see more of that for wallets.

So a wallet infrastructure that facilitates or makes the whole onboarding and signature experience a lot smoother.

Second thing is some kind of cross-rollout bridge.

So we're obviously in a world where there's going to be hundreds, if not thousands of rollups on top of Ethereum, and we have to figure out what is the most capital efficient way to bridge between the various rollups.

And perhaps the best bridge hasn't been born yet.

So I want to see more experiments with cross-rollup bridges specifically.

The third 1 is specialized ZK compute networks.

So you can think of, for example, ZK rollups as generic compute networks using zero-knowledge proofs.

But there are many applications that don't need a generic compute because the kind of compute behind those applications are very unique to that applications.

And as a result, the kind of zero-knowledge proofs that are required to run those applications are more specialized.

And therefore, they could be potentially smaller than those generic zero-knowledge proofs.

So we'd love to see more specialized zero-knowledge proof compute networks.

An example is a zero-knowledge proof compute network for AI.

So AI requires a specific type of compute, many of which is actually just matrix multiplications.

And so the proof for matrix multiplication is very different from the proof for a generic set of computes.

And if you wanna reach out to us for more feedback, you could visit us at the booth or find us on Discord, but look forward to working with you


Speaker 0: Welcome to Alliances, Requests for Startups Proposals. We specifically, Chow, put a lot

Speaker 1: of work into making this list because we have data from probably like 5 to 10, 000 applications that have come into the Alliance Accelerator Program. And we tend to see some of the data points that could dictate where the future is gonna go. And so based on that data, we've created a specialized list just for you so that as you're thinking about building your project within the ETH Global Hackathon, you're able to get inspired from the list that we're gonna share with you. And for the winners that get the number 1 spot for our bounty, which is a

Speaker 0: $5, 000

Speaker 1: reward, you're also going to get an interview by Chow and myself. So, Chow, Let's talk about what excites us. What's the first idea that you're most excited about?

Speaker 2: At a high level, we want to see really weird things, really crypto-native things. Specifically on the consumer application side of things. We want to see ideas that haven't been done before and that are uniquely enabled by crypto. It's okay if the idea is too early. There are many great ideas that have been proven to be too early before, but what really excites us is things that haven't been done before.

So to give you a very quick example, I think that in the ZK space, zero-knowledge proofs are at a point where they are mature enough from a tooling point of view that they can actually enable new consumer applications and that consumer developers are able to build interesting things. A couple of years ago, zero-knowledge proofs were a little bit too early for consumer developers. But today, we really want to see interesting applications. 1 example is pseudonymous social networks. So the idea there is to use the knowledge proofs to prove that you are part of a certain group or you have certain credentials without revealing those credentials.

And you can participate in the gossip, in a gossip network, right? Talking about things as a anon. So those are, that's an example of something we wanna see at a high level.

Speaker 1: Another great example is, you know, on Tinder, you put your education level, your net worth, and other key features about the user. And some people may not want to feel like they have to share that publicly. And you could think of, you know, pseudonymous social networks where you can share these key properties of yourself without revealing the actual data behind it.

Speaker 2: A related idea in the consumer application space is payment. We think that in the first probably 13, 14 years of crypto, payment was a little bit too early because there wasn't a critical mass of users who hold crypto. But today we're at a point where there is a critical mass. And so the idea here is to build applications for consumers or tooling for businesses that enable payment using crypto rails. But the key point is we don't want to see projects that try to compete with Venmo or Revolut or CashApp, like those traditional incumbent Web2 payment applications.

We want to see applications that serve a uniquely underserved user segment in the world, a segment that is underserved by fiat payment rails. So to give you an example, it could be, you know, users or businesses in the cannabis industry, right? So stuff like that, like really weird things, Things that are either weird or sometimes potentially even outrageous, controversial. This is the kind of stuff that we're excited about.

Speaker 1: Another area is the creator economy and fan engagement area, with the rise of Friend Tech and Song.xyz, you're starting to see more or less some penetration in the types of consumer apps that can be built for this genre. And so some of the things that I'd love to see is more applications for the superfans where artists and musicians can better monetize that 1% of superfans. A great example is fans purchasing

Speaker 0: $10, 000

Speaker 1: tickets for listening to Taylor Swift at a live concert. And so there is an opportunity to monetize that area. Another example is royalty from derivative works. So an example of this is, you know, you could enable a whole class of remixes on music that could then be monetized if those remixes become successful, where part of that royalty then goes to the musician that came up with the original song. And the last thing is revenue sharing, which is you could think of DAOs as like labels that acquire music, and the music then that gets distributed or licensed can earn a fee that can go to the DAO.

These are some of the things that I'm excited about when it comes to creator economy and fan engagement.

Speaker 2: A broader theme across creator engagement is the idea of hyper-financialization. 1 is the consumer applications that are hyper-financialized. If you look at all the most interesting crypto consumer applications that we've seen so far, they're all about speculation. They're all highly speculative. Be it tokenizing individuals or tokenizing PFPs, tokenizing music of famous musicians.

These are the things that users really want and care about. Ultimately, they care about making money. For me personally, if you think about crypto, there's really 2 things that crypto are fundamentally interesting about. And they're really at the barbell. Like, they're at the 2 extremes of a barbell.

1 is hardcore decentralization, anti-establishment, you know, destroying the central bank, you know, all that stuff. And the other extreme of the barbell is speculation, is the chic ones, is, you know, sniping at New Year's, the 20s, that kind of stuff. So we're really interested at both extremes of the barbell. Obviously on the hardcore decentralization part, there aren't that many founders and it's obviously risky to build that kind of stuff. But on the other side of the barbell, there is a lot of founders doing that And there is not that much risk.

We want to see more experimentation in that hyperfinancialization slash speculation part of the barbell.

Speaker 1: Another area that I'm really excited about when it comes to hyperdecentralization is proof of physical work. We've started to see helium and others that have started to kind of build the core infrastructure of what a successful proof of physical work product can look like. And some of the areas that we think could be the future could be renewable energy. It can be, you know, like from power sources like wind and solar, it could be batteries. It could be telecommunication.

It could be many, many different areas that could ultimately take the community of people that are all individual operators that can contribute to a much broader network that can enable a new product or offering that wouldn't be available today. And that's all by using decentralization and then a power of incentives as a way to align the community around a product or an idea.

Speaker 2: So in the proof of physical workspace, it often requires domain expertise in 2 seemingly very unrelated domains. So crypto is 1 and the other 1 is the domain specific. So it could be telecommunication, it could be climate, it could be science, right? These sides and another really interesting example. So we really encourage everyone who come from these non-crypto related domains to experiment with proof of physical work because the crypto stuff, we can help you with it.

And so that's proof of physical work. But again, that touches on the hyper financialization part of crypto. So speaking of hyper financialization, obviously there's DeFi. Imran, what are you excited about in DeFi?

Speaker 1: So what I'm excited about DeFi is 2 things. 1 on the traditional DeFi side, There is startups like Ajna that is using request for quote system that enables no it enables 2 parties from The borrow and lend sign to be able to come in and fulfill an order from both sides without any protocol integration. So this enables seamless decentralization and then 2, no counterparty risk as an example. Number 2 is I'm excited a lot about NFT and the purpose or NFT5. And so that is there are perpetual markets that could be created around NFTs and the lending and AMM side as well.

An example of this is with Blend, you're seeing the RFQ system being used as a way for 2 parties to be able to enter into a transaction. And we think that this is great for tail end assets, but there are opportunities to build something that's much more scalable in a way that can offer better rates. Number 2 is on the perp side, we've seen NFTperps.com that recently launched but then shut down. And So I do think there's an opportunity for NFT perps that's scalable and that could solve the Oracle pricing issue in a way that could help grow the perpetual markets for NFTs as well.

Speaker 2: A big part of DeFi I'm personally very excited about is privacy. We've been talking about privacy for 14 years, but unfortunately we still don't have truly private DeFi. And obviously as a DeFi user myself, I fully appreciate how important that is. I want to be able to send transactions, to swap tokens in a way that my addresses, my amount, and the name of the token is not revealed to the rest of the world. I don't know how it should be done.

Maybe it's as an L2, maybe it's as a privacy centric wallet. Maybe it's something else. We don't know yet, but we'd love to see more experiments on the privacy-defy side of things.

Speaker 1: Great. And I know you're really excited about the AI and crypto crossover. So maybe if you wanna talk a bit about that.

Speaker 2: Yeah, so 1 of the most obvious applications of crypto in AI is actually content authentication, right? So in a world of AI, there's a huge growth in terms of deep fakes, fake content. 1 of the ways to solve this problem is for the creator of that content to sign a message on chain and separately publish their addresses on social media, for example, in a way that people can verify the signatures. So this is 1 of the most obvious ways in which crypto can be helpful for AI. Another interesting area to explore is to use crypto incentives to bootstrap physical networks of GPU.

So right now we're in a massive shortage of GPUs due to recent rise of LLMs and the subsequent demand for the GPUs. So again, This goes back to the previous conversation around proof of physical work and hyper-financialization. The idea is to use incentives to bootstrap such a compute network. So AI, I mean, it's gonna be really big in the coming years and there should be a ton of opportunities at the intersection of the 2.

Speaker 1: The next idea I'm most excited about is habit formation, forming apps. We started to see this with Stepin, where people were incentivized to walk, and as they, so they could either walk or run and they would earn rewards in the form of tokens. And this created a positive feedback loop because those that were that may not be able to walk or run without any real incentives will not do it. And with the power of the token, many of the people that wouldn't have walked or ran are now doing that because habits take typically 18 to, let's say 45 days to form. And we've seen a percentage of people that use the Stepin app that turned out to be long-term users of the app.

In fact, even over the course of the past 2 years of the launch of the Stepin app, there's still 200, 000 monthly active users on the Stepin ecosystem. And that shows that the Steppen has a product market fit that no other app has from the bear market side.

Speaker 2: So related to this health habit formation, we'd love to see more experiments in DeSci, so decentralized science. The idea is that 1 of the key challenges that science or the scientific community has faced so far is the lack of funding. And obviously crypto is 1 of the most effective tools at capital formation. So again, it goes back to the idea, the whole idea of hyper-financialization. The idea is to harness the DGN energy of crypto users and help with capital formation for scientific products.

Obviously these words sound very abstract and that's because we don't know how it's going to look like exactly, but we'll have to see more experiments at the intersection of crypto and science. And this also touches on the, the idea of proof of physical work. So 1 possible example is use token incentives to incentivize users to bootstrap critical and large data sets for scientific research. So think of, for example, a decentralized 23andMe, basically where users contribute their DNA data in exchange for tokens. So to summarize, there are 2 interesting things at the intersection of crypting and science.

1 is capital formation, and the second 1 is proof of physical work and specifically in bootstrapping new data sets for science research.

Speaker 1: Great. And maybe my final idea, and there's many more ideas on our ideas page, but the final idea I'll go over is consumer applications. With the rise of Front Tech, which enabled this really weird application that enables you to purchase a key or share of someone that gave you direct access to this individual. It's a key way to think about how to build in a social media space with crypto rails. You don't wanna build something that looks and feels like an app that you use today, like Twitter or Facebook, but it should enable something new using crypto and financialization.

And so we'd like to see more applications being built around the consumer use cases because We believe that the infrastructure is ready for mass adoption, at least for the next hundred to million users in the next 6 months a year.

Speaker 2: My final idea is For those who are building on the infra side of things, so we've talked a lot about applications, but for those who are building infra, there are 3 things we'd like to see. 1 is wallet infrastructure. Obviously this has been talked about a lot, but we still haven't really experienced an awesome onboarding experience or transaction signature experience with mobile wallets or mobile applications. So we want to see more of that for wallets. So a wallet infrastructure that facilitates or makes the whole onboarding and signature experience a lot smoother.

So that's 1 thing. Second thing is some kind of cross-rollout bridge. So we're obviously in a world where there's going to be hundreds, if not thousands of rollups on top of Ethereum, and we have to figure out what is the most capital efficient way to bridge between the various rollups. And perhaps the best bridge hasn't been born yet. So I want to see more experiments with cross-rollup bridges specifically.

The third 1 is specialized ZK compute networks. So you can think of, for example, ZK rollups as generic compute networks using zero-knowledge proofs. But there are many applications that don't need a generic compute because the kind of compute behind those applications are very unique to that applications. And as a result, the kind of zero-knowledge proofs that are required to run those applications are more specialized. And therefore, they could be potentially smaller than those generic zero-knowledge proofs.

Smaller and more efficient and cheaper. So we'd love to see more specialized zero-knowledge proof compute networks. An example is a zero-knowledge proof compute network for AI. So AI requires a specific type of compute, many of which is actually just matrix multiplications. And so the proof for matrix multiplication is very different from the proof for a generic set of computes.

So that is my final idea.

Speaker 1: Well, thanks for listening. And if you wanna reach out to us for more feedback, you could visit us at the booth or find us on Discord, but look forward to working with you

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Alliance 🛠️ Ideas to Build in Crypto (Request for Startups)