What do you want CCI to be remembered for?
Sheila Warren: Well my personal mission for some time has been to bring the benefits of blockchain technology and the accompanying application layer and the different projects and services that are built on blockchain to the world. While also making sure that some of the challenges in the space, many of which have become notorious over the last six months to a year, are addressed. So I would like CCI to be remembered as an organization that really helped to bring rationality into the discourse around blockchain technology and really help secure a regulatory and policy environment that really promoted the benefits of this entire innovation and industry while addressing the challenges at the same time.
Whatd’s a common misconception about blockchain?
Sheila: There are so many misconceptions about blockchain but I would say the most fundamental one is that somehow its day is done and that it’s not being used for anything and that it was just another totally hyped technology that came and went and really the only thing that matters now is AI. I think that is fundamentally and incredibly wrong. Not the least of which if you are someone who is passionate about AI you should be more passionate about blockchain, cryptoeconomics, governance on a blockchain because in part no technology is built in a silo and a lot of the innovation around AI is going to leverage some of the attributes of blockchain technology. To answer your question more succinctly, the biggest misconception is that somehow the day is done with blockchain as opposed to recognition that it actually persists. There are many experiments in the public, private, and civil society sectors that continue with this technology and then there are some places in which its faded away and it isn’t discussed as much because it is actually normal its a normal part of a techstack to be used and that makes it way less sexy but its becoming ubiquitous.
What’s a blockchain trend you’ll never give up?
Sheila: I’m really passionate about on-chain governance and the idea that you can create communities that have more accountability, more transparency within them. I should note, something that I am very fond of saying, is that transparency alone is not the end goal. We have to create a system of policies whether those are internal policies or external policies via regulation or some other mechanism that ensure that what we see on the blockchain that there is accountability around it so that if bad actors do bad things there is recourse and there is an ability for those bad actors to get caught and cease from doing and engaging in that behavior. So transparency alone is not the goal but I like to think that transparency driven on-chain governance is actually quite powerful and will have implications far beyond any crypto ecosystem but to the greater technology and society at large.
What’s a blockchain trend that needs to be dead and gone?
Sheila: This is a funny thing for someone in my position to say but I have really never particularly cared about the price of any given token. I think those of us who are in this for the long haul are not in it for the number to go up and go down, to make our bag and get out. We are in it for something extremely complicated and extraordinarily challenging to achieve which is really revolutionizing the way technology operates at a fundamental level. It’s a really hard problem but it’s a really important problem. So personally I would love to see less reporting on the price of this or that token and more focus on what is actually being done and why this technology really matters.
We’ve followed you on Twitter for some time now (big fan) and you’re pretty active, do you have a snack that you like to eat while doom scrolling Twitter or going down the rabbit hole of crypto twitter?
Sheila: I am a big tea drinker, I love drinking tea and got really into loose leaf tea over the course of the past few years so I am often drinking tea. I also love cinnamon sugar pita crisps. Id’ll eat the Stacy ones, wed’ll make our own. My kids and I make our own, they are super easy to make. I am a giant fan of cinnamon sugar, so cinnamon sugar on anything is something that I am often snacking on.
But why blockchain?
Sheila: I’m extremely passionate about blockchain because Id’ve had the privilege of working in a variety of different sectors, Id’ve worked in the public, private sector, Id’ve been an attorney on very high end mergers and acquisitions, Id’ve worked in philanthropy, civic tech and Id’ve seen first hand and experienced first hand the challenges around highly centralized technologies and technology stacks. I have seen how data in particular can be used as a tool of exploitation. Thatd’s true not just in the web2 context that gets alot of airtime but also even in philanthropy. There are lots of concerns around how data on subjects is used not to their benefit but to the benefit of different communities all together. I want to create more of that accountability within our systems. I want to create more of a digital economy that is about ownership. Ownership of data, ownership of funding, ownership of content. I think that unless we are in that world we never know who is intermediating our reality. As I watch my three young kids grow up and watch a world in which the content they even get access to is so intermediated. Everything on social media there is an algorithm that tells you what to see, what to look at, and what ads you get and that shapes your worldview and I think that is so problematic in so many ways. Not that this wasnd’t happening when I was growing up but the scale and scope of this is beyond my comprehension.
