Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and State Secretary for Research, Education and Innovation pay DFINITY a visit.
Swiss diplomats from FDFA and SERI spent a day at DFINITY headquarters exchanging insights with expert cryptographers and engineers on various Web3 topics, including decentralization, blockchain technology, digital identity and digital governance.
Aren’t field trips just for school kids? The Swiss Government would disagree. Representatives from Switzerland’s Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) and State Secretary for Research, Education and Innovation (SERI) recently embarked on one of their ‘Understand Technology Trends’ field trips to learn more about blockchain technology. Departure Bern — destination Zurich to meet top cryptographers and engineers at the DFINITY headquarters.
Their purpose? As policy makers and allocators of research funding nationwide, FDFA and SERI have an overall mission to explore new technologies that have the potential to improve the country, the lives of its citizens, and collaboration between nation states. During their visit to DFINITY, representatives of both organizations were interested in finding out how blockchain is evolving, how it could be used to benefit society, and how they could bring academia, industry and government together to steer the future development of blockchain technology in a way that allows innovation, but at the same time, preserves the privacy and security of end-users through the right balance of rules and regulation.
Getting to know the Internet Computer
After a warm welcome and a round of introductions, members of the DFINITY R&D team presented different aspects of the blockchain space, including the importance of decentralization, distributed computing, tokens and digital assets, digital identity, governance, and consensus algorithms. Samuel Burri, VP of Engineering then gave an overview of the DFINITY Foundation, relaying the vision of blockchain singularity, and the Foundation’s mission as a major contributor of the Internet Computer to build a World Computer.
With 73% of the employees in R&D, DFINITY has the largest team of top cryptographers in tech. Focusing on key areas such as distributed systems, cryptography, identity and authorization, programming languages, economics and distributed governance, the team of experts is dedicated to developing a decentralized ‘everything stack’ that scales and performs at web speed, while being cost efficient, verifiable, sustainable, and easy to use.
Blockchain 101
Björn Tackmann, Head of Research at DFINITY, kicked off with a brief summary of Web3, decentralization and a high-level overview of blockchain technology. Many in the audience had heard about blockchain and had a general understanding of it, but were unaware of how advanced the technology is or its potential. Decentralization was a key topic with regard to the architecture of a blockchain, specifically that of the Internet Computer. Björn Tackmann laid out the key differences between a traditional computer and a decentralized computer, asking the crowd if it is sustainable to trust one single entity, such as Google, Amazon or Microsoft cloud service providers. He then described a decentralized computer like the Internet Computer, which is hosted by a network of node machines run by independent node providers globally distributed across data centers. In such a network, several entities are involved, so there’s no single entity that could corrupt the system by acting maliciously. This resilience against corrupt behavior is made possible through a consensus algorithm that allows independent computers to ‘trustlessly’ agree on computation. If at least ⅔ of the node machines are performing correctly, consensus is achieved, and the result is immutably stored in the blockchain.
This overview immediately led to many questions from the crowd about hardware standards and the efficiency of nodes processing the same input, or how to deal with malicious nodes. The Internet Computer requires specific node machine specification but it’s basically standardized server hardware and not your average laptop. As nodes are assigned to a subnet, only nodes in a specific subnet process the same input for efficiency. This allows the Internet Computer to scale horizontally by adding more subnets as network usage increases.
Beyond the architecture, decentralization is key in solving the transparency and risk issues we have today due to our dependency on centralized entities such as financial institutions or tech giants like Google, Amazon and Meta. Imagine if the accounting delivered by banks was simply correct and transparent by design. Bitcoin was born out of the 2008 financial crisis as a movement to put financial ownership back in the hands of the general public via a transparent and verifiable ledger. As Web3 continues to evolve, taking back ownership of our identities, our data, our content consumption and the applications we put on our devices will be essential to the evolution and adoption of blockchain technology.
Digital identity & digital assets
After a team lunch with DFINITY Founder & Chief Scientist, Dominic Williams, the presentations resumed. Product Manager, Mary Dwyer gave an overview of how Internet Identity, a self-sovereign identity solution built on the permissionless Internet Computer infrastructure, will allow a user to reveal identity attributes, such as their citizenship or date of birth, to services requiring such data without revealing other aspects of their identity. Self-sovereign identity is a path forward also for governments which might be hard pressed to trust a global identity service that is hosted on industry servers that reside in another country or jurisdiction. As an alternative to centralized identity providers like Google sign-in, the Internet Computer’s digital identity framework would provide a safer, more secure, human-centered digital identity solution to connect citizens to key services. A governmental digital identity framework adds another layer of privacy and puts data in the hands of citizens, as it allows two parties to trust each other without having to expose personal information. As digital self-determination is a concern among Swiss government officials, the presentation on the Internet Identity framework was highly relevant, specifically in light of recent votes on a Swiss E-ID.
Senior Technical Program Manager, Dieter Sommer continued with a talk on digital assets. From tokens, to NFTs and backed stablecoins, Sommer explained the hype, their value and how tokenized trade finance addresses some of the pain points of today’s international trading and asset-companies, which is still often paper-driven, unreliable and non-transparent. A secure blockchain like the Internet Computer offers distributed computation and storage that’s democratized through a DAO, eliminating the need to trust a single party for honest information such as token balances. On the Internet Computer, every token transaction is recorded and reflected on all machines of the blockchain such that even if a threshold of machines are dishonest, it will have no effect on the system’s functionality nor will it tamper with the integrity of data.
Decentralized governance through algorithms
As government officials, the concept of digital governance was certainly a hot topic. Lara Schmid, DFINITY Team Lead for Governance & Formal Methods explained how decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) on the Internet Computer works, likening it to direct voting — something the Swiss are quite familiar with. There was a lot of discussion around how such an automated system could be implemented in real-life situations. It was mentioned that DAOs as a concept are digital versions of the Migro Cooperative in Switzerland where the Migro community determines the strategy of the supermarket Migros. A DAO could certainly be useful as a government voting system to ensure fair democratic voting processes.
Steering the future of digital foreign policy
This visit was not only an educational session for the Swiss government officials. The DFINITY team also got the chance to hear what is happening on the policy-making side of things with regards to technology. Swiss Ambassador Benetikt Wechsler shared 4 key focus areas the Swiss government takes into consideration when shaping foreign policies around new technologies such as AI, quantum computing and blockchain. First and foremost, digital self-determination — as human beings we have the right to be able to decide for ourselves what we share and with whom. Then there’s cybersecurity, which is about defining the role of nation states in cyberspace. Thirdly, as prosperity and sustainable development are important for the stability of the nation, tapping into digitalization and being at the forefront of new technologies is seen as an opportunity for Switzerland to boost its economy. Lastly, the Swiss government is actively taking part in UN discussions on digital governance in the sense of forming international law governing cyberspace.
Daniel Klingele, FDFA Senior Advisor, International Security Division and Swiss representative in the UN discussion on cybersecurity then shed light on the international debate on whether to implement new conventions against cyber crime. There is a clear divide between countries that want stricter measures to control what happens in the digital world, others would establish international rules but no control. Some of the main concerns or questions Swiss foreign policy leaders are trying to address all tie into their mission to first, protect and preserve the privacy of their citizens, and second to facilitate economic growth. On a national level, there is a clearer vision but finding common ground on a global level is quite challenging. How do we deal with the growing dependence on big tech? How do we promote values like freedom and independence in cyberspace? How do we come to an agreement on internationally accepted rights in cyberspace, or acceptable countermeasures for cyber attacks? What’s the right balance of policy and no policy to keep the peace and give space to freedom of innovation?
Let’s meet again
While many of the Swiss diplomats were not previously aware of DFINITY or what the foundation was working on, they left feeling enthusiastic about the future of blockchain technology and were interested in continuing the dialogue. The DFINITY R&D team were pleased to have successfully established itself as a thought leader in the area of decentralization, blockchain and Web3 in Switzerland and are looking forward to future discussions and joining the local debate on the evolution of Web3.
Written by Angela Harp
