TOKEN2049 - What Will Web 3.0 Look Like?

what I want to do is start with the homo sapiens and and the homo sapiens when you know just starting out food was the big thing okay who he who had food had poor spelling you know society and then scarcity shifted as a result of the agriculture essentially into scarcity of land and then a lot of the walls all about land second world war was Hitler's crazy idea that there's not enough land for the and and at some point we invented the dollar not too long ago we invented this whole thing of capital and as a result of that so many amazing thing happens we invented the steam engine and who invented the iPhone and we did all those great things and potentially it's now shifting again and the scalped resource right now is essentially no longer capital it is attention and if the attention of the human being is the scarce resource I wonder if looking at a technology from the lens of capital is the right way or is there another lens that would find more and deeper to callings for the use of a technology and you know this this will obviously bounce against the idea that you can improve your technology all you can but eventually it will be about your values and who you are as a human being so I would like to go deeper into that idea of can can technology enforce values and can we truly find a higher goal rather than capital as the true calling of websley 0.0 I think web 1 was essentially single production mass consumption web 2 was a little bit of mass production and mass consumption websley ideally would be mass production in more pinpointed consumption in acknowledging the fact that scarcity is now the big C so with that in mind I would like to allow my panelists to introduce themselves very quickly and then I will ask them some questions yeah I'm Martin Marty Kirkman yeah related to that well my my my day job is well founder of gnosis we are building prediction markets and maybe kind of can connect to to the attention the economy because it's really about in in in in in prediction markets it's about aggregating all the signals of the noise or the signals in into well into one number which well maybe then gets the attention it deserves but maybe just another addition and like in introducing myself another project I'm working on is called circles it's about the idea of creating a universal basic income with help of a new currency or was help of blockchain and that of course ties to to the idea that potentially capital is no longer a scarce resource or at least less scarce resource and that that we could think about those things like having a universal basic income and potentially boxing can help to deploy that thank you I'm Bonnie with 500 startups we are a global sea state investor so as a very traditional VC with typical ten-year time frames I think one way we looked at the web 3 it's a little bit broader and and higher-level then potentially just blockchain so allow me for one minute dragging us away from blockchain for a second is that when we look at a 10-year horizon what we're essentially seeing web 3 is the next generation of infrastructure of the Internet and what would it look like and when we look at it is really you know three elements of it number one is we're going to interact with the Internet very differently than we do today because so far we've seen all the last 20 years it's all a two-dimensional interaction so this is where things like VRA are is going to come in number two is going to be we looked at the infrastructure layer so far what one is very much single directional consumption of information what two is more of a bi-directional and what we see web three is beyond just communication exchange we should be able to innately have the ability to exchange any item of value to us currently today we cannot do that on the Internet we can talk to each other we can communicate without an intermediate but we cannot exchange anything we value without so ant immediate there so this is where we believe the blockchain is going to play a major role in that segment of of the Internet evolution and then thirdly is also we're starting to actually see more and more interaction between blockchain as well as on the innate embedment embedding of intelligence right so AI becoming more of a commodity many of the algorithms and how can it be embedded in our next layer of Internet infrastructure such that many of the things we looked at um we no longer need a specific third party to provide that intelligence but actually it will be innately and better in the infrastructure itself so this is kind of where um as an investor we looked at the web 3 ok I'm Roderick van der graaf I'm the founder of lemon escape which is an investment firm focused exclusively on blockchain and crypto assets in terms of Webster II so you know I think us here from from this industry were probably looking at it from the lens of what we understand under blockchain to be web Street but before all this came about there was already talk about web 3 that you know I had other things in mind Semantic Web them embedded artificial intelligence and all that so I think we need to take a broad view of web 3 and not only focus on you know like the the things the projects that are coming up that are you know web 3 stacks on blockchain and and that's it right so it's it's quite a lot broader than that and I think that ties up with what you say that's why although it is my investor because it gets this good afternoon my name is Mexico Tech co-founder and president of Liske I'm in blockchain space since quite a bit of time and I've seen in many communities that it's very difficult to build your own blockchain and that's why I co-founded liske with my partner Oliver barrows to make that simpler so we are building developer tools to enable JavaScript developers from all over the world to come up with their own blockchain concepts we want to make it as easy as possible so that we can have much more experiments more proof of concepts happening to really see what is truly the stack of the web 3.0 and to truly see in what kind of use cases people can exchange real value without intermediary with list we are taking a bit of a different route we're not only there for developers we're also there for just average users to gain access into the ecosystem by having for example in Academy where people can read about blocks in tech and educate themselves and we are big about user experience because we feel like the whole space is lacking that as well but basically what we are coming up with is developer tools for the web 3.0 stack specifically blockchain technology so when you think about the web 3 - to carry out on so the point I would like to essentially think beyond the basic stuff so I have my data with me I have my money with me and I choose my route in the internet and potentially I make value transactions so that's we think this is a better web for many reasons many obvious reasons it's you know there's no single point of failure there is no essentially immutability and centralization of knowledge and what I would like to sort of talk about are the hurdles in getting essentially I would like your perspective on how far are we from this utopian future and what do we still need to overcome in your mind in order to get to so yeah I I can start so I I think um well I I do think the first use case for for web web 3 at least the blockchain perspective right now there's the the other one is interoperability between different projects that that want to share some some same some same well liquidity or marketplace or stuff like that so I would argue for now most users don't care about just decentralization and it's more ya Pro projects or companies that that care for so if I offer let's say a marketplace and I want others to to build on top of it like pull stuff around use the API connect to it and that is quite hard if I'm if I'm a normal startup because to convince another startup to build on top of my stuff that's quite a risk for them because they are completely dependent on me and and so that's what we saw in the last ten years in Silicon Valley is there are a few when I texted all platforms that kind of get to that size where then they are big enough that others care and build build on top and they are monopolies well great or maybe not great and here yeah web 3 offers an alternative so I can offer something and even if people like don't don't believe much in or don't trust that much in the team or they can still at some point be confident enough that they can build on top of that and are completely independent so I do think that is at least my perspective that we are unfortunately not that they are yet that we can really or the benefit for the end-user will come later I would would argue so the benefit for them end user would be that there are platforms where immediately five six seven players well build stuff on top or around it and therefore then create a richer ecosystem and eventually that richer ecosystem will out-compete the centralized offering but you're slowly getting there so slowly those things are starting to happening but it to happen but I think there's definitely we have that ideology spot where we are right now on the really three obstacles we see right number one is scalability and if you've ever observed a space last year you know that there's been so many projects already right now so very encouraged to see some of the developments and we're slowly starting to see the space of scalability morphing into it's almost like the world of GPUs Asics and CPUs there's going to be some base change they're gonna be almost at a six they're fast but they're very specific usage they cannot cover a lot of use cases they're the more general base chains so that's basically and then plus Beijing we've also seen a lot layer two solutions particularly I think recently I've been quite excited and one who really watches the space of layer 2 physique ash that because to me is the second obstacle psi behind scalability is privacy a lot of times what you see is yes we talked about from the normal world saying hey crypto is so anonymous but it's actually not anonymous at all and that's one of the biggest issues of you know when people talk about adoption or when people talk about how do we monetize data is until the day we can actually process that data privately on the chain it's gonna be very difficult for that ideology to to really be reality and can I please challenge what if it's no big deal that the information is what if we can build a world you know in Sweden there already exposing their tax sort of consideration it's all public you can go and look how much money or friend made and all of a sudden in the u.s.

if my tax papers got leaked I mean it's already like no big of a deal I wonder if we can protect people more than protect information but and my answer to that would be that leads exactly to my third obstacle of interoperability because I don't see in reality the next 20 years corporations and companies disappearing yes we do see the behavior from the under 25 or under 30 Millennials being a lot more lacs about you know the amount of data they're willing to share the amount of privacy they're willing to expose but from a business perspective I absolutely do not see that happening and hence what we are looking at the current timeframe development right from last year everybody is building their completely close blockchain I wouldn't even call that blockchain it's basically it's very expensive distributed ledger systems but to today we're starting to see for example some of our accellerated a batch companies who are building public chains but now getting opportunity and exposure to work with corporation insight GM dish network Sarah to understand a little bit more about hey there is now slowly willingness and no copper aside to even touch the permission list chains and even to see you know what's being offered so from a investor perspective I see that as progress in the last 18 months but then what it what would happen is in the intermediate term there's gonna be many change that exists whether they're consortium permissionless permission and hence into a purple part of it it's gonna be another challenge right to figure out hey if everybody's starting doing you know little things here and there how is this gonna get glued together it's almost like in the old days of you know when every company is looking at we must have an intranet strategy how's the intranet gonna tied into the internet and what information is allowed to flow through what's gonna be stopped so I think that's kind of where we we see we are at this moment in time there's still obviously a lot of work but we are super bullish in the space because of the progress we see you know just from you know last year to now okay let me approach it from a slightly different angle so I think you gave a very good overview of kind of technical challenges that need to be overcome to get to eventually web 3 there are some some other ones as well so at this point you know we we know if a lot of projects being built in you know you can have decentralized compute the centralized storage the centralized states and that it's all it's all cool and we believe in it because we in this space for it to actually happen the end users will need to see a benefit to it because the pure ideology of being decentralized by itself is not enough and we have seen in their you know quite recent past things related to data and privacy actually most people don't really care all right so it is really about trying to crystallize what's in it for them and in a way that is that comes down to the interchange between you know the private data which is now being monetized you know centrally by few big parties and whether that can be kind of redistributed to the actual contributors to those networks either directly or via crypto networks incentives things like that you know until that happens it's very hard to see that it can be pushed just from the project point of view so there is there is an effort that needs to be made in that direction yeah I see it similar like in order to like really adopt the next level of the web we really need an increase in like like we really need an advantage for the user when we're looking at the web 1.0 it just short information right web 2.0 allowed people to connect to each other what will web 3.0 allow well literally allow to own data will it'll allow to like own value on some blockchain or what's the benefit for the user and coming from a perspective of a developer and building a developer platform of course there are many obstacles in terms of the whole development infrastructure which is just not ready I mean we at least we're building since 2 and a half years our our tools and we're just launching this year our alpha version and we're seeing similar stuff in the other ecosystems where the developer tools are just very basic very simple and they don't allow developers to securely develop blockchain technology so they're obviously still needs to be a lot done but if we're taking from the user perspective then what's in it for the user they obviously don't care so much but privacy does it really matter they don't care about decentralization people are giving all kinds of information publicly available to the world so they need to have a clear benefit and what could that be for example if you say now the tickets for this conference is it may be an access token on the blockchain which you could sell further that might be a real benefit for the user and it is pool 3.0 stack but is it the real web 3.

0 or are we talking about more interoperability stuff where then this clicks in with another so in terms of a hurdle I think there's still a lot to done to be done because at the end we will not have the web 3.0 until many pieces are coming together and I think we will look back and think like how did that happen because we are in it we are developing it we work and we see many things are progressing well but it's not nowhere near at that point so many hurdles technology was infrastructure wise but mainly also just benefit for the user what's in it for the user cool so I think there's almost a consensus within the panel that web 3.0 the real deal is still far this is unfortunate but it's also a reality to be reckoned and I think we should then ask do we see a web 2.5 and sort of is still clear benefits full platform that's been monopolistically bullying everybody until now and now that the sign is on can they gracefully a melt some of this you know ideas that as I'm saying on the wall so it's no longer white elephant that nobody talks about but everybody are talking about it so embracing that and gaining the users trust is something that potentially can help and we are definitely hearing about some platforms that are already making serious strides towards that call so what's your view on web 2.5 the SDKs and api's that will allow existing web businesses users to use them on top and I wonder if that's all there is to blockchain because I personally think no I personally am a huge believer in the two calling of web 3.

0 to make it very simple I think for as long as we have cheap labor cleaning you know toilets there is no actual incentive to invent an automated toilet cleaner okay robot that cleans toilet because it doesn't pay back but you know this this lens doesn't give us the best perspective on should we do stuff so essentially it's a little bit harder to what's in it for the user but maybe it's the freedom of you know living your life the way you think it should be and and having more freedom of thought maybe eventually that will be the killer app of that but let's go back to web 2.5 and essentially talk about earlier kind of use cases we will see for the ability to perform eco transactions so yeah I would say at least in some spaces or in in some areas we are not that far away so probably in my view and I certainly might bias the first case where we really see some of the promises of web 3 is currently well on etherium in the decentralized finance space because there are right now they are like probably like between 15 and 25 teams building on the same platform like similar but different products like decentralized exchanges lending protocols option protocols all that stuff and and and the effect I described earlier that that people built on top of each other's things without like with like building on an early startup startup platform that is what we see right now on aetherium because if you see that smart contract and you can just verify it you don't care who wrote it you you just use it and and we see well transaction transactions happening between yeah all the different exchanges doing doing doing arbitrage so of course that there's like far away from the whole idea of web 3 and so on but at least for financial transactions on the same blockchain it kind of started to work this is why sometimes we we do see that corporates are the necessary evils because if you think of them a lot of that ideological wipe three is hey wouldn't it be nice if you can sell your personal data true but if you ask people is it truly a huge pain right now they probably don't know because they're so used to Facebook where's when you go into the corporate world you look at digital transformation even the earlier wave it's always starting with what pain points they have they have a lot of pain in terms of cost savings obviously the easiest one to look at so if you take a corporate very simple use cases right at least get the teams to test out how their change is going to work in a real scenario for example we talked about web sorry as exchange of any assets of value so it doesn't need to be necessarily be just data as we think about time use on as web break the the asset of value could be in a cable provider they're actually having a huge pain point about locating assets they have no idea where gazillions of pieces of there many of the Tower related equipment is so the the project they want to run is figure out can a very specific high speed baseline a layer one chain help them do this in a very painless way meaning they don't have to dig back into that hole and tangled web of systems right now but they can pull it aside and say can we build and a permission chain even amongst all their own business units across the whole US you know 48 states to figure out how to track these real-time this is something of value to them another example would be with a car manufacturer they're looking at automation big time so one of the things they really want to see it blocking can solve is in the future energy is going to be something of value to them so they're actually thinking of the idea of when an electric car purchases energy from the grid or from wherever you're you're you're powering station is can the car actually resell that unused energy to another car and how does that micro payment between cars work and to me that actually gives our projects a law more boundary in terms of how to work it and how to make it run and see what happens versus a lot of times that I think when you come to like new use cases or new needs it often in the history of time you look at it it comes after all the cost savings are done then people have time and ability to look at hey now that we have this gadget what else can we use it for so that's at least you know kind of what we see in terms of investable areas and projects so I think one immediate thing that can happen pretty quickly it's already being worked on is finally you know bring the Internet of money to the internet right actually the original hypertext Transfer Protocol had provisions to have money embedded but it didn't happen because it was too hard to do at the time but now the means to do that or you know we pretty much know what they are so you know that is already a you know a good step to use blockchain and go certain way towards web 3 in the hybrid model so it can be used by any companies even if there is no decentralization going on now a little bit further down the line talking about 2.5 you can see you can see that as a hybrid between you know like web 3.0 is everything is you know the ideal case that maybe you like but in reality I mean you know not everything actually needs to be that way right so so you you will have a kind of hybrid between what what we know now and and centralized challengers to incumbents and in some cases they will win in some cases they will not win but you know with the associated redistribution of long period of time yes so for me web 3.0 is just a password I think when we're looking at the current internet we see application or web sites still out of the web 1.

0 era we see web 2.0 applications web applications I think you're in the face as soon as every startup this majority building in terms of this let's say with this background right now every new startup is somehow involved Media I'm somehow involved with like connecting people online right and I think we will be in web 3.0 once every new startup which is popping up is making use of this web 3.0 tech stick I think there's no real middle way of course there are areas which are already built on that stack but I think we cannot really talk about web two point five because either something is web 2.0 or its web 2.

0 between whether something is yeah that was my next point so I would just because of time reasons just ask one question can we ever say that we will be in web 3.0 if the Internet itself if the infrastructure is still centralized I mean Germany we have one node which runs like eighty ninety percent of the traffic of the Internet which is in Germany so I think we will have to also reinvent the wheel there and make a decentralized internet again before we can really talk about the web 3.0 okay interesting that first time I hear that I think I would like to share personally my perspective I think that my perspective as you can imagine doesn't talk about features but it goes a little bit I try to go a little bit deeper with what went wrong in the information era I mean Facebook was truly out to connect people all well-intended people over time becoming an enslaving machine of like triangulates you from every possible so they can tailor the perfect that how did it happen to them or to all the other you know well intended people that essentially and and can web fully provide an answer to that and I believe that somewhere in the process of free information we lost the idea of proof of work you know Bitcoin has the thing that you you cannot just run your mouth like lazy you need to perform a certain action before you can talk and then you think oh maybe when you put your money where your mouth is the dynamics of the discussion elevating rather than this integrating to you can we look at these pauses of elevating versus disintegration and try to learn what is the world that would emerge certain behavior that is novel and that is transcending and that is value creating in orders of magnitude more then top-down kind of so there is a vision well it will create much more words for the participants in these networks and it will allow help you know you know life work balance and all this good stuff but in order for it all to happen we must separate what is and what should okay so so many things are the way they are and we accept it as a necessity which are not really a necessity and and they shouldn't be like that so how can we tell those things apart how can we actually learn about something that we've been thinking is a necessary part of this social contract and essentially we can elevate and say no it's not it's not an essential part and and I think we've done that throughout history multiple times but I I wonder what would be the catalyst I think wealth oh value creation is very different than profit-making and if you can adopt this sort of view then maybe you start to see how you can measure value different than major profits and if you can do that potentially you can eat dust there's a natural resource or something that you can really you know is the right tool set in mind you can pump it off the ground and it's very lucrative it's it's something that if we are able to measure the what I'm doing now with you know monies being exchanged but potentially I like you more now and maybe we'll do business in the future so something really real happened but no the money business cannot sort of document that so there's there's so much better things we can do once those infrastructures are in place I think that putting those infrastructures in place is a long and complicated process you need to decentralize your plane and the way you've been thinking about solving problems in but just to summarize all that I think systems that achieve coherence in a top-down way will always have trust suspicion systems that achieve cohesion in you know start very distributed and they look further and further for the mutual themes and eventually the mutual theme is really great and we all these kind of coherence mechanisms by definition contains motorists and since we're is on such a philosophical concept now um I think one of the crazy questions you ask yourself sometimes is what's the point of web 3 or where for what five if it's not making our lives as human beings better right and hence to to the bottom line of it is can web 3 actually alleviate an elevator such as every single human being born in the future can have all necessities provided for hence you know universal basic income potentially can be one of the solutions such that every single one of us is only sitting here listening to the four of us talking just because you want to because it should be your time should no longer have any ties to providing the necessities that you need us to survive and I think to up to me at least from a point of like philosophical ideas is no technological improvement is worthwhile unless it's actually that's where we're getting to such that we all have more time because at the end of the I think the 24 hours of time is the most valuable asset we all have and and I'm also staring like over time if we keep on talking about going on time the stage will explode so we have to laugh thank you very much for listening to us and you're welcome to ask us any questions those outside you