The Internet Computer at Shanghai International Blockchain Week
The event attracted hundreds of developers and entrepreneurs, and featured a talk between Dominic Williams, Vitalik Buterin, and Juan Benet.
As blockchain’s potential to reimagine the world’s systems and services becomes clear, this year’s Shanghai International Blockchain Week, hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, was arguably the most important installment ever, bringing global experts, investors, and entrepreneurs together as the open web is taking shape. The centerpiece Wanxiang Blockchain Summit is China’s marquee blockchain event, and one of the largest blockchain conferences globally, providing insight into how Chinese developers and investors are seizing the opportunity to create consumer-facing dapps that deliver unparalleled value and composability to the public.
This year’s event featured the DFINITY Foundation’s Dominic Williams discussing the development of public blockchain technologies alongside Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Protocol Labs’ Juan Benet. But the week began with a DFINITY meetup and party around the growing Internet Computer community in China, drawing more than 400 developers, investors, and researchers, as well as representatives from gaming, social, AI, and other creative industries.
Chinese developers are working to expand their edge beyond the mobile web by being early adopters within the blockchain space. Meetup participants spoke of the Internet Computer’s appeal as a general-purpose blockchain on which accessible dapps, chat services, social media, and websites can be built using canister smart contracts. The application-centric nature of the Internet Computer, on which canisters are fast enough to deliver HTTP requests and interactive web content, distinguishes its ability to allow developers and entrepreneurs to immediately begin building out the next evolution of the internet.
A developer panel highlighting open web services that run entirely on-chain included Andra Georgescu of Distrikt, a decentralized social media network for professionals; Matt Grogan of OpenChat, a messaging dapp that expands on the model of WhatsApp and Signal; Harrison Hines of Fleek, the open web venture studio behind the Fleek.co developer platform, Plug wallet, and other products and services built for the Internet Computer blockchain; David Phan of ORIGYN, a nonprofit that uses NFTs to authenticate and manage luxury goods, fine art, and media; and Rick Porter of DSCVR, a decentralized content platform built on a novel protocol called “social fabric.”
Speaking of his experience bootstrapping OpenChat, Grogan described how the Internet Computer “provides an opportunity for developers to build dapps that compete with traditional IT in terms of performance and capability, but with the positive characteristics of a decentralized system, such as transparency, decentralized governance, and security by default. This represents a new market opportunity, and the earlier you can be involved, the more likely you are to take a leading position.”
Georgescu described how quickly she and her team were able to launch a complex, blockchain-native social media platform in just a few months . “I think that shows exactly how ready the Internet Computer is to onboard developers that want to move fast and compete with traditional platforms,” she remarked. AstroX, a China-based decentralized identity service built on the Internet Computer, created the framework that allowed Distrikt to release its dapp on Android via the Google Play Store — an early example of how Chinese developers in the IC ecosystem are bringing their mobile experience to blockchain and enabling dapps to be distributed on phones worldwide.
In a keynote speech delivered at Wanxiang Blockchain Summit the following day, DFINITY Founder and Chief Scientist Dominic Williams outlined the Internet Computer vision of blockchain singularity. “Blockchain singularity is the migration of all of humanity’s systems and services to public blockchain, where they will be reimplemented using smart contract software,” he explained.
The Internet Computer makes this possible by allowing web services to run on-chain from end to end, without any cloud computing infrastructure or reliance on centralized intermediaries. The network is impressively fast — query calls take no more than 200 milliseconds to process, while update calls to change state take 2 seconds — and its ability to scale consistently keeps on-chain computation costs low, approaching the cost of computation on traditional IT.
“For example, on Ethereum today, the cost of 1 GB of smart contract data can cost you upwards of $250 million,” Williams noted. “By contrast, on the Internet Computer blockchain, 1 GB of smart contract data can cost you as little as $5 per year.”
Williams pointed to the impact of plans underway to use Chain Key cryptography to directly integrate the Internet Computer with the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, bringing smart contract functionality to Bitcoin and allowing smart contracts on the Internet Computer and Ethereum to call into one another, potentiating the broader dapp ecosystem.
During the panel on the development of public blockchain technologies that followed, Vitalik Buterin explained the phases and challenges that the Ethereum community is managing in its transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, and spoke of the opportunities that exist for combining social media and gaming with blockchain. Juan Benet extolled the rise of NFTs and their impact on asset ownership in the internet era, arguing that they are critical to the use of public blockchains to build out the metaverse and ensure that corporate players such as Facebook (newly rechristened Meta) do not control this new emerging platform.
Williams also noted the importance of NFTs and scaling to the growth of the decentralized ecosystem, and predicted that the first billion users for blockchain are going to come from SocialFi and GameFi — social media and games interwoven with DeFi.
“When we recreate social media, when we recreate games, when we recreate enterprise systems, in every single case we’re going to reimagine what they look like, and their very essence is going to be different,” he said. “It’s going to start accelerating in the coming years. 10 years from now, the world is going to be a completely different place, and nobody will have any doubt that blockchain is not only the new internet, but also the new stack.”
Wanxiang Blockchain Hackathon
Wrapping up the week was the conclusion of the Wanxiang Blockchain Hackathon, organized by Wanxiang Blockchain in partnership with the DFINITY Foundation.
DFINITY staff engineer Paul Liu served as a judge for the Wanxiang Blockchain Hackathon. He delivered a technical primer on the Internet Computer to participating hackathon teams, reviewed their code, and evaluated all of their projects.
The grand prize was awarded to Dmail, a new decentralized email infrastructure. IC Contacts, a social network management tool that gives users data sovereignty, so that their online identities, social relationships, and assets are no longer bound by centrally controlled social applications, won first prize in the Social category. First prize in the NFT category was awarded to NFT Gaga, a one-click NFT badge solution for projects. And CCC/C3 Protocol, an open autonomous organization that facilitates decentralized community painting and “crowd created canvases,” was awarded first prize in Gaming.
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