Future Applications & Products on Ethereum

Synthesis from a February 2020 brainstorm at IDEO CoLab with Vitalik Buterin, Barry Whitehat, Jing Wang, the Ethereum Foundation, and 50+ entrepreneurs & product leaders

On February 18 (just after ETH Denver), the Ethereum Foundation and IDEO CoLab Ventures convened a group of over 50 entrepreneurs and seasoned product leaders—many of whom are at leading Web 2.0 companies looking to enter the Web 3.0 space—to brainstorm future applications and products that could be built on Ethereum.

We heard lighting talks from Vitalik Buterin, Barry Whitehat, and Jinglan Wang and built on their provocations through small group brainstorm sessions to surface new product concepts, patterns, and insights.

What follows is a synthesis of some of the key themes, applications, and design provocations surfaced during the session. The ideas and provocations below are just starting points that we hope anyone can take, experiment, and run with. If you are new to Web 3.0 or crypto-curious, the design space to bring new-to-world decentralized applications to market is still wide open and evolving everyday.

Composable Payment Streams

Vitalik’s lightning talk largely centered around streaming payments and how the composability and chaining of payment streams could ultimately lead to new markets, products, experiences, and hyper capital efficient economies. By enabling money to programmatically and autonomously flow between people, businesses, and services, composable payment streams could unlock a new territory of decentralized finance (DeFi) and DeFi-adjacent opportunities. Sablier is one example of a project enabling streaming payments on Ethereum today.

Potential Future Applications & Design Provocations:

• Credit & lending: How might composable payment streams enable new forms of credit, credit ratings and histories, and lending? Could payment streams like Netflix subscription payments be tokenized and serve as collateral for DeFi loans? Could existing, predatory lending products like payday loans be redesigned or eliminated all together?
• Digital media: How might composable payment streams enable people to consume digital media (e.g., movies, music, articles) in new ways? Could payment streams lead to the creation of new types of digital media all together (e.g., composable media)? Might it lead to new ways for people to create, share, and experience media individually or socially?
• Consumer services: How might composable payment streams enable people to engage with and/or pay for consumer services in new ways? Could companies and brands start to stream loyalty rewards to consumers? Could consumers start to stream their loyalty rewards and/or credits to friends, family, and co-workers?
• Circular economies & supply chains: How might composable payment streams increase the economic velocity and fluidity of specific circular economies and supply chains, whether P2P, B2C, B2B, or G2C? Could payroll, bills, invoices, receivables, and/or advance payments be streamed, chained, and automated within physical and/or digital supply chains?
• Financial planning & management: How might composable payment streams create new financial products and tools for people to plan, manage, and grow their finances? Could payment streams be used to reimagine retirement savings products like the 401k? Could they create new products that passively build wealth or execute trusts/wills?
• Social networks: How might composable payment streams create new social graphs and networks? Could payment streams create new economic communities that connect and engage with each other in new ways that were not possible before? Could this create new forms of social identity, connectedness, and behaviors that didn’t previously exist?

Money Legos & Financial Games

Jing’s lightning talk touched on the areas of “money legos” (i.e., composable financial primitives and building blocks) and financial games — and how they can be used for financial reasons (i.e., making more money), altruistic and philanthropic reasons (e.g., funding open source projects), and everything in between. DeFi is one of the most exciting areas in crypto right now, and it’s still in the early stages of exploration, experimentation, and discovery. Uniswap, MakerDAO, Compound, PoolTogether, Gitcoin Grants (quadratic funding), Moon 3D, and Fomo 3D are just some of the many examples of money legos and financial games in market.

Potential Future Applications & Design Provocations:

• Gamified finance: How might money legos and financial games create and encourage new financial behaviors in the areas of earning, savings, spending, and investing? How might financial games enable user experiences that onboard new users into the digital financial system?
• Financial education & literacy: How might financial games enable products that help onboard new people into the financial system? How might they serve as tools to educate and empower them to become more financially literate and confident, like kids trying to learn finance or people abroad in low financial literacy areas?
• Philanthropy & public services: How might money legos, financial games, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) enable new models for philanthropic funding, like quadratic voting? How might they increase funding of important public goods and services, like open source research, teachers, or public infrastructure?
• Social networks: How might financial games enable new social networks to form around global financial and gaming communities? How might existing social networks be gamified and/or financialized — and unlock new consumer experiences, behaviors, and forms of value?
• Civic engagement: How might financial games be used to create new forms of civic engagement? Could they help increase participation and engagement in community governance and government, like voter turnout? Could they be used for sophisticated attacks, and how might they be dealt with and managed in the future?
• Futures & prediction markets: How might money legos and financial games create new markets and ways to insure/hedge risks for things where there are no markets or insurance today (e.g., selling internet connections, code bug insurance, sports betting)?
• Content discovery & curation: How might financial games be used to help curate digital content on the internet and determine what content is discovered, suggested, consumed, shared, and blocked? Could new search engines, content curation sites, and anti-spam products be created?

Proof-of-Membership

Barry’s lightning talk covered several areas ranging from new markets (e.g., code bug insurance) to privacy tech to decentralized search and content curation. One area he found particularly exciting was how privacy tools could be used to enable people to cryptographically prove their membership or affiliation to something without revealing their underlying identity or information. This and related advancements in privacy tech could unlock many new applications, products, services, and experiences that are privacy-centric (e.g., pseudonymous) with cryptographic (and economic) proofs that verify whether users believe what they say they believe, are who they say they are, and did what they said they did — something that does not exist today in Web 2.0 at scale.

Potential Future Applications & Design Provocations:

• Social media conversation & debates: How might proof of membership mechanics be used with existing social media networks like Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook to add a new cryptographic or economic layer to conversations, debates, and followings? How might this improve or worsen those platforms, communities, and discourse?
• Social networks: How might proof of membership mechanics create new social networks all together? How might people be able to connect, communicate, coordinate, and express themselves in new ways if they can prove their membership without revealing their underlying identities?
• Reputation & webs of trust: How might proof of membership mechanics enable new reputation systems and webs of trust to emerge, particularly where none exist or are currently insufficient? Could it enable a new type of credit scoring or lending system for DeFi? Could they create new relationships and interactions between people globally?
• Whistleblower & public safety systems: How might proof of membership mechanics enable new whistleblower and public safety systems to be created that protect the identity and privacy of whistleblowers while disseminating their information to the people who need it the most?

Accelerating the Future: Turning Ideas Into New Ventures

For those who are ready to take the next step, IDEO CoLab Ventures is excited to be partnering with several leading organizations (including the Ethereum Foundation) on a program for new founders called “Venture Sprint Day at IDEO CoLab”: an intensive sprint at IDEO San Francisco that helps pre-seed founders design, prototype, and test new venture concepts in Web 3.0 (crypto, blockchains) with experts, investors, and end users in 1 day.

The first Venture Sprint Day is in March, and we’ll be running multiple Venture Sprint Days in 2020. Applications to the *no-cost* program are now open — please apply here or follow us on Twitter for the latest updates on our programs.

Thank you to our friends Sina Habibian, Albert Ni, Robbie Bent, and many others from the Ethereum Foundation for co-hosting this session and helping write this summary. Thank you to Vitalik, Barry, and Jing for taking the time to share your thoughts, and thank you to the participants who spent their evening with us.

Last but not least, shout out to Joe Gerber and Tara Tan on the IDEO CoLab Ventures team for co-hosting the session and co-authoring this write-up with me.