Day One at the Web3Summit

The Web3summit takes place in the beautiful former East Germany broadcast center by the Spree River, now a nightclub called Funkhaus. The Funkhaus is a spacious venue yet the number of attendees was so large that sometimes there wasn’t enough space in the rooms to accommodate all the people.

Each day the talks on the main stage are organized into three parts.

The first day was introductory and started with reviewing the current state of web3 and blockchain. These talks stated the current problem that can be solved with web3. Aeron Buchanan from Web3 foundation talked about the role of decentralization in the Information Age, and how transparency and decentralized data ownership can solve many real world problems and help make life more convenient. Vlad Zamfir from the Ethereum Foundation explained what the challenges and benefits of governance in web3 are compared to the traditional centralized web. Wendy Hamura from Internet Archive tried to find the answers for the question “What kind of web do we deserve?” These speakers set the stage for the topics and presentations for the rest of the day.

After reviewing the current state of technology, the second section of talks concentrated on Pragmatics. Juan Benet from Protocol Labs talked about definition and characteristics of web3 as a combination of decentralized web, blockchain and linked data that can be validated, while web1 is a world of numerous websites with unstructured data, and web2 is characterized by having fewer large websites with specific content. This talk helped everyone to get gain an understanding of web3. Peter Czaban from Web3 Foundation talked about the structure of a web3 dApp: base layer of blockchains as well as other zero and low-trust interaction protocols such as DAGs, second layer protocols (state channels, oracles, encrypted storage), protocol enabled tools and APIs and finally protocol-extensible user interfaces. Peter also provided a insightful overview of existing technology stacks for each layer of a dApp.

The first day finished with an overview of future directions. Patrick Nielsen from Clovyr talked about how to make web3 more usable, while Trent McConaghy compared data economy in web3 with token economy.

Meanwhile, there were two smaller rooms that had more detailed technical talks. Kirill Pimenov from Parity Technologies talked about building blocks for dApps including: DHT, BFT, linearizability, assymetric encryption, conflict-free replicated data types. Sergey Nazarov from Chainlink explained how Chainlink helps to build decentralized data oracles for dApps.

Another room had workshops for dApp developers where, along with mentors, people built a query layer for dApps (led by folks from Fluence.one), implemented a proof of concept payment channel with Libp2p (led by Lucas Vogelsang from Centrifuge), and built a simple Token Curated Registry based dApp (led by Gautam Dhameja from Ocean Protocol).

Of course, a big part of each conference is live networking and knowledge sharing. For convenience, there is a separate area called Hackerspace, where attendees debated, shared knowledge and brainstormed on numerous topics such as architecture design, security, UX and other aspects of building dApps.

The night closed with the movie that showed the role of a human in the new web. It is not only about technology, our mentality should change and business processes must evolve to adopt web3.

To learn more about the event and live-stream presentations check out: https://web3summit.com/