Web 3.0: How To Prepare For A Privacy-Driven Future

[Music] hello everyone really excited for the panel that we have ahead today we have an amazing group of four speakers today to talk about web3 definitely web3 is one of the most commented topics of this 2021 and we're really excited to learn more about this topic which is uh super exciting conor welcome on stage you'll be moderating the session thanks daniel hi everyone i hope you're having a fantastic conference so far so i'm connor spencer i'm going to be hosting this panel today with uh these these great other people that we have here just to tell you a tiny bit about myself before we uh go go on to the speakers under the body of this this session so i'm connor spencer i'm the founder and ceo of web3 labs web3 labs is a blockchain technology company we write open source software such as the well-known and widely used web3j library for working with ethereum blockchain we also um provide products and services such as our efforts blockchain explorer and work with organizations like consensus vodafone microsoft jp morgan and so on on their strategic blockchain initiatives i'm also the author of a book which has come out this week called the blockchain innovators handbook which is a leader's guide for understanding and working with this technology for so so for those of you who want to really get more across some of this stuff or know people who do um i do you know shameless bug just to say uh this book's just come out and hopefully there'll be some useful stuff there but uh more importantly i'm really really excited to introduce the other panelists that we have here today so the the topic of this session as i'm sure you're all aware is web 3.0 how to prepare for a privacy driven future and um yeah i think i think we've got some great representation from some people who are working on some really good initiatives here both in terms of the base platform layers but also in terms of seeing the applications that can be built out on it too because it's that combination of both in terms of you know the but the platforms are interesting and cool but it's it's also the value that people are creating on top of it is really really important too so i'm really glad that we've got representatives from both sides there to to join us on the panel today so we're going to do a round of introductions for the different panelists and then we'll we'll get going so we'll start off with uh andrew if you'd like to start by introducing yourself and what you do sure um my name is andre i am the co-founder of district a decentralized social network that wants to empower users to take control and ownership over their digital presence district is a fairly new project it's being supported and maintained by the open internet foundation uh swiss not-for-profit with the mission to promote the expansion of an open internet through the development of digital products and services like district that have a focus on empowering the user um so the idea itself is not new people have been experimenting with this concept of a decentralized social network for a while with varying degrees of decentralization but uh what is new is that um is the implementation of districts because it lives 100 on the internet computer and because the of the unique capabilities of the internet computer it relies on no centralized infrastructure like aws which i think is quite empowering for a decentralized social network thank you andrea and i think that's a good segue into our our next introducing our next panelist jens as well who uh i can certainly touch on the the internet computer and uh what that is and what it means but say jen's over to you uh yes uh so i'm scott um i'm cryptographer by training uh and i'm a director of research at dfinity uh so dfinity uh built the internet computer platform uh that district is running on and many other apps are running on um and we continue to support the internet computer and and i think one of the main advantages of the internet computer is that it's a platform where you can build dabs on which runs at web speed and and is powerful enough to to host um on-chain [Music] thank you jens and then finally siddharth as well who is working on one of the what are called the layer zero blockchain uh platforms that i have to sit off thanks connor pleasure to be here so uh as conor mentioned uh polka dot is a layer zero protocol which i'm representing here on the call i work for a team called parity technologies um and based here out of london uh so polka dot is a layer zero protocol trying to connect um all various different level layer ones and and the one of the only bets against chain maximalism in the industry we have substrate native blockchains which then could be private permissioned public permissioned or public chains and there are 200 plus of them and there are it's a growing ecosystem of parachains and para threads which provide a lot more composability across pleasure to be here on the panel thank you siddha and so just before we ask our first question for the panelists um do as well if you as a an audience member have any questions you'd like them to answer to please stick them in the chat too because it's always more fun when we can uh you know make make these a bit more interactive and uh the the good thing anyway about being virtual like this not only in terms of being able to bring together so many great people to talk but it's also the fact that everyone can stick those questions in the chat they don't have to put their hands up and we can we can see them and see them and hopefully more easily get to them all as well so we do encourage you to ask any questions that you might have so i wanted to start off by really asking a question for everyone to talk to you uh and and this is uh how web 3 actually provides a fresh approach to building platforms networks and communities um because there's there's a lot of different interpretations in terms of you know how people perceive web 3 being a force for change over the coming years and yeah there's there's many different views on this so andrew i'd love to hear you know what what your view is on uh you know how web 3 kind of changes things i'm sorry you muted i'm sorry guys i was i was starting pretty strong there but you didn't hear it uh i was saying that web 3 has a pretty uh radical value proposition because it changes the relationship between a platform and its users and um turns the average user into an active participant and a decision maker and they can dictate the way they want to be treated by the platforms that they use and in my view they should because the users themselves are the only value a network has and in the case of social networks they are the reason why facebook is a network and not a website for instance right um and to empower these communities to form around similar values and goals is one of the biggest promises of web 2 um because having the power over the product instead of the product having power over you is again a very radical shift and this community can be any type of organization in business as we've seen with different dollars that are starting to emerge and basically the shift of power i think is the biggest promise and the biggest thing that web 3 brings but also incentivization because it's a very powerful tool that can help kick-start the growth of a product in ways that weren't really possible before absolutely absolutely that idea of shifting the power is a really key tenant there uh jens what about yourself yeah so i'm looking at this from a platform perspective as they are one platform right um so so i think there's a a lot of value in saying that users own their own data and data and also in tokenization which enables people to to do active participation and also be the co-owners of what they're in the apps that they're engaging with right um i guess i'll be a little skeptical i think the future will show whether we really manage to shift the balance right because i think there's still potential power plays between developers of apps and the end users who are using those apps um so i guess web 3 i think at least what we're aiming for is that it's not the platform that's the the owner of of the data yeah it's just definitely a potential challenge i think we should probably talk some more about this uh shortly um and and then finally uh siddharth as well i think it'd be also great to talk about what layer zero is in the context of all of this too in addition to your your own perspective on it too because we're certainly with our representation we've got builders of layer zero layer one and then we've got you know an application being built on top as well so it's uh it's i think it's helpful to educate the audience a bit too with this thanks for that connor so uh definitely as in i uh as in web 3 foundation which uh essentially is led by dr gavin what is an entity uh is this nonprofit entity right which works uh essentially very closely with polka dot and parity technologies right so essentially the way we are seeing things in in web 3 is if web 2 was kind of read and write of webin web 3 might be read write and own right and with ownership that might be assets but then that's also governance that's also distributed rights that's also a kind of co-building corresponsible right and you see that happening certainly on polkadot as well where there is an unchanged governance um there are motions and proposals people vote on them and the community votes on them only a few weeks ago we went through a rebranding in which none of parity employees or or web3 foundation or the council members knew what the logo or the future logo of polkadot could be and it was a purely decentralized decision between the token holders and and uh the protocol itself such as the the power of these decentralized networks and we see them kind of evolved from that right like where i think web3 can help a lot more or we we see that going is bringing all these communities individuals businesses together who might not have been able to interact with each other in the past right that's generally the promise of what blockchain brings together on how do you bring together uh mistrusting or non-trusting entities uh without a trusted third party or tdp in between right and we see that going forward uh with various different blockchains being able to talk to each other being able to depend on each other or have composability across each other via let's say a layer zero protocol such as ours or our bridges or prostate messaging or bunch of other tools that that we are building or the community is building uh that being achieved a lot more so such communities then can interact with each other depend on each other and coexist and go thrive yep absolutely and the um hearing the the idea of a decentralized uh you know rebranding as well it's kind of you you go back sort of five years ago and to talk about that people have been like would be like what it's uh how's that fit together um well one thing that i i was keen just you know especially given though um polka dots you know position in this space so what what is it that makes it a layer zero as opposed to a layer one people talk a lot about layer one blockchain's platforms um no yen certainly has spoken about the internet computer as a layer one uh ethereum's a well-known layer one the bit bitcoin network can be considered a layer one as well and so what is it about polka dot that makes it a little layer zero well uh of course some of it is technical and some of it is just uh positioning right so uh polka dot if it does one thing it's it's kind of a dumb relay layer uh between different chains right so technically then uh for it for whatever that real layer is communicating then needs to be via those layer once right so the way we saw the industry if you go back to kind of vitalik's white paper or dr gavin wood when he was the the cto of ethereum right um we had a concept of let's say the world computer which was uh which was then crafted within uh ethereum and then we saw ethereum as kind of this world computer where anything could be uh computed but it was turing complete and but had limited op codes right and we saw the scalability issues there so if you fast forward from couple of years from that what happened was people started creating specialized chains which were very good either in industry specific functions or uh previously functions so you had zika zcash file coin v chain uh hyper ledgers of the world cordless of the world and then what not right so we saw like limited op codes being solved special functionalities being produced but then again isolation data identity assets were getting trapped in these chains as bigger cooperates regulators were looking at these platforms right they uh it was crucial for them that they made the right choice because otherwise they're getting a vendor lock-in right um and and we saw that happening so where we see uh polka dot kind of coming in is uh still helping create uh and blossom those individualized specialized chains and we have a 200 plus building within our ecosystem right for private permissioned all the way to public chains uh built on substrate and then polka dot coming in as a layer zero which provides the network security provides uh a platform for all these specialized chains or layer ones to interact with each other while various different mechanisms and then be the kind of network security economic guarantee so that different chains do not necessarily or different layer ones do not necessarily need to compete with each other right so for the substrate based chains um that want to be polka dot native or want to depend on polka dot for their economic or network security those would be the power chains and the para threads which then um get a little more committed bandwidth but then for the ethereums and the bitcoins and see caches who might not be moving to our stacks so soon uh there are bridges and crosstain messaging and common good power chains and other infrastructure pieces is that that interconnectedness that it provides there and as you kind of said the uh was the routing between all these different blockchains as well as well as the base economic security or the network security and so moving back up the stack now we're just going back up to layer one and i i think it would certainly be helpful too for yen's to just if you're able to fill in just some of the gaps about you know what the internet computer is in terms of uh how it what makes it different uh and then i think there'll be a natural segue to talk a bit about why that's a good thing for districts as well but let's say jens if you want to talk a little bit more about uh yeah what what the internet computer is and what it does sure um so so so we think of the internet computers being sort of the third generation bitcoin being the first generation that had so like very limited functionality but sort of prove the the the concept of consensus via proof of work right ethereum has sold like their next step that sort of had general smart contracts that you could deploy right and and the internet computer sort of delivers super powerful smart contracts right so we have um so so you can it's powerful enough that you can run big applications big daps on it right so you can have uh smart contracts you can either have them so like very fixed and unlocked down so this is like a smart contract i can verify the code i cannot change it but you can also have like mutable smart contracts right where you can simply run it as an application and you can update it along the way and and sort of change the functionality of that smart contract right um and then you can host web on it so the typical way of developing that is you have like a front and you serve to the to the user right that they just get by their browser and then they interact with with the back end and all of this is done on chain right um and and the upgrades you can do to the smart contracts is also also something you just do unchained we can also change the internet compute itself on chain through through voting so it's a a very powerful platform for hosting a smart contracts yeah and this this idea of third generation opens up new opportunities as well for new types of business to exist in a decentralized manner and of course one such business is district and so andrew i know you've provided like a high level about it but what is it specifically that's made you guys say yeah now's the right time to build this out and i from from speaking before i understand that there were specific features of the world computer that we were almost an enabler to be able to achieve what you as a company wanted to be able to achieve with respect to a decentralized social network yeah um like i said there have been uh attempts at making a very popular uh decentralized social network with varying degrees of decentralization when you look at infrastructure maybe user governance depending on the dimension that you want to approach but what we really found interesting is having a social media network that doesn't rely on any centralized third party so district uh has the entirety of the app on chain back in front and including all the assets that the users uploaded the content that they generate and we do support photo photos and gifs not video yet but it's on the road map for a future implementation um so that in itself was very appealing to us because it's it was something that at least in my knowledge it hasn't been done and it came with its own challenges but most of all it came with a lot of fixes to the current challenges of web 2 that are mostly related to privacy data ownership data management uh treating the user as a person rather than as a kpi and it's um it's something that we really wanted to to to put out there into the world we wanted this alternative to exist and actually we came over the idea of creating district from a demo app that the dfinity foundation showcased a while back and it was called linked up because it was supposed to be an alternative to linkedin um and show how easy it was to build you know a mass-market application on top of the internet computer and the the article itself kind of suggested that this is just a demo app but if the community would like to take it and run with it that would be cool so me and my co-founder were like we are the community and uh we went and uh you know took on the challenge and district has launched in july we have uh the android app in in the google stores since september and hopefully the ios app in the app store by the end of the year so and right now if you want some metrics we're around 70 000 users and growing pretty fast i'm happy to say so when it comes to why we chose the internet computer we didn't see any alternative for this particular experiment that we wanted to do um and it was a great fit for us and the fact that we started off in february launched the product in july and the mobile app in september kind of shows how you know easy it is in a way to ship a product on an internet computer yeah it's just fascinating to hear that and so well one of the things i guess which is if we think about the future in terms of this this whole thing of um you know web3 i think what siddharth said was you know captured it quite nicely about how web3 enables you to read write and own and so this this notion of ownership with respect to decentralized social networks how do you think that changes things for the actual users you know what does that look like from the you know your average user's perspective that makes it uh different to facebook linkedin you know all these other ones well first of all you don't have uh i mean you do have the comfort that none of your private data is being uh you know collected because when you uh sign up for districts we don't ask for any type of personal data we don't even want you know you don't have to create a wallet or do any type of key management you don't need to give us details about your gender demographics and stuff like that we're not interested in you know your shopping preference because we're not selling you anything and we haven't implemented any advertising tools but to circle back to my point about community and you know empowering the community that brings the actual value to the product our community could decide that they don't agree with us and they do want to implement or maybe fund the implementation of an advertising model uh on district and that's perfectly fine because it's the product is good for them so when they it comes to their data they can decide i want my data to be collected in a particular way but that is 100 their option so while your content that you post on district is public and it can be seen by other district users um you don't uh have to provide any type of person with identification or data in order to train the platform and i think that in itself even in this early stage of the product it's pretty revolutionary absolutely and the this whole idea and of course the panels about how to prepare for this privacy driven future and you know what you're talking to there is is a fantastic example of well what it looks like from the individual users perspective in terms of they can they can opt in to maybe share a bit more about themselves but certainly it's that's not the default the default is that they don't need to tell anyone information about themselves so to speak it's obviously very yeah because on web 2 it's obvious that privacy lost the battle with convenience right and we kind of have this myth that we need to share all our data in order to be good digital citizens um and we don't really believe in that so in order to sign up for district all you need is your biometric access and it never leaves your phone or your you know device um and that's again something that we really liked about the internet identity um but we definitely need to do more to dispel this myth that privacy is imperative only if you have something to hide you privacy is a human right for a reason and not a privilege and you do have the right to be yourself in a digital space without it being anybody's business so there's a reason why you have doors on houses and everyone doesn't live in glass boxes right yeah so so going a little bit deeper into the the privacy side of things with um you know one one of the things with the well-known cryptocurrency network such as bitcoin and um you know the blockchain technologies like you know ethereum solana and so on um they there was always this idea of what happens on these blockchains happens kind of in public view you have an anonymity but you don't have privacy on them but there's been a lot of changes in terms of the i guess from a research perspective all these technologies evolving at a very rapid rate and uh jens being someone who's a crypto cryptographer by background what are kind of the key innovations that are starting to make this privacy possible like andra says you you you can actually support privacy um within the district network and so there's clearly some key building blocks beyond just blockchain because blockchain in its most simplistic form is kind of a um you know it's it provides transparency and trust but really that kind of goes against what we want with privacy so what's kind of the key enabler here [Music] yeah so i think in the concrete case of district and other tabs running on the internet computer i think that's really a question of what the application layer offers right so so as a user i mean you can read and that's something you do within milliseconds right and there's just not time to have consensus about what you write want to write on a blockchain right so in some sense if you response times really quickly you know it's anonymous from the dapps perspective right this part kind of the smart contract just doesn't have the time to write on know anything about that so that's basically just reading the state right so you get a very strong guarantee just right out of the bat there right and of course the the convenience of speed uh as well um if you go the other way right i mean when you actually do want to interact with an app and you want to write something to that that right then then uh you can do that as well right that's in what we call an update call on the internet computer um and of course there's nothing that prevents adapt from storing all the information about the rights that their users make and sell it to somebody right um so in some sense there's no guarantee of of privacy unless the dab wants to provide it right so it's a really question about what that that developers want to provide to the users what what the internet computer does provide and i think a lot of other blockchains provide is a lot of transparency right because you can actually potentially you know you can look at the code you can verify that this is what it compiles into and this is what gives you the tab right and so you can do a lot of you you can sort like do a lot of checks yourself with your sophisticated user right um something which you know there's no such thing on on web 2 right you just have some server that's serving you something and something happens with your data afterwards um and and i think the the really big advantage we have in in word three right is that that we can give users this kind of transparencies of what is happening to their data um and and even stronger than that right we can also put governance systems in place so users can actually vote on what should happen with that with the data yeah there's uh absolutely i i was just seeing here we've we've had like our first um question coming about this and i think it's a great question for siddharth on on this side um and that's why why do we need so many blockchains yeah thanks conair for that uh i think we do need many blockchains because each one of them uh is is providing a special functionality um so just to kind of uh level like what is a blockchain probably what how would we define a blockchain right so uh it could be a network essentially which which is specialized to achieve a particular function industry objective and then uh also tries to or aspires to become a platform if it wants so that people can then build applications on top right so either they'll be users of the network itself of a blockchain or the applications on top right now these uh if if we agree with that kind of a definition of a layer one or a network or a blockchain then uh there would be multiple cases in which you will need multiple different networks so let's take for example uh some of the substrate based chains which there are 200 plus but uh there are private permissioned stablecoin operations um essentially serving for livelihood of a million plus end users in refugee scenarios in jordan and bangladesh right so that would be one particular let's say a private permission ledger there would be a pharma supply chain and among the big farmers who are uh daily kind of tracking or like live actually but by the second tracking uh product provenances and and kind of costs and balances between wholesalers and stuff like that there would be other a little bit more open b5 networks right and there there's a community of a lot of different blockchains there are smart contracting platforms uh long story short and of course we have best like payments and nfds and gaming's office there are again very highly specific chains uh because um each one of them is a network of its own is a community of its own and and they want to have models of their own right so you do need these specific protocols and then you can kind of unlock functionalities on top where polka dot tries to come in is have them communicate with each other um so if i can add to that um so i think what what we need is a variety of many distributed applications uh it's not clear to me that we need that many blockchains right because there's also some measure of security you get by having more people packing the same blockchain and going into the same consensus protocol um so so i think there's a lot to be said for enabling dapps to talk to each other right whether that's so like on a blockchain level like polka dot is doing it or so like done on the as the internet computer doing by making it very easy for the dapps to talk to each other right i think those are viable approaches and i think we certainly want to have like as many and diverse applications as as possible um but uh i do think that in the blockchain space we will see sort of maybe uh less diversity in completely different blockchains that are running i don't think we need all of them right but then of course they can have different uh so like underlying characteristics and maybe there's need for more than just one type right but um but then but i think it's it's really about if we look at it from the use and developer perspective right it's about in that diversity not about blockchain diversity that's great that uh jensen i uh we have a different point of view here right like polka dot essentially has publicly committed to hundreds of parathanes or parallel running chains in in parallel achieving composability across having a shared network security and and then having kind of composable features on the top level but then also app level right so we already see that happening on kosama network and soon on polkadot wherein different blockchains are collaborating but then depending on functionalities for other chains and this is uh more so even unlocked on common good marathons which then kind of polka dot kind of stands behind right but uh fully value uh like yen's opinion as well like that's the beauty and diversity of the fast evolving ecosystem that we live in exactly and being here in these early days as well you know people are planting flags and uh you know who knows where we're going to be in 10 years time but this is yeah well what's so fun about being here now so um looking at some of the other good questions here i i think there's a great one here as well for andrew about tokens basically they do do all of these these dapps need a token um does district use a token district doesn't use a token at the moment but it does have plans to have a governance token i think in i mean in the case of district and decentralized social media networks uh governance is a great use case for a token and a great reason to have a token because you as i've said before we are very partial to having you know the the user sovereignty and the user governance part of our vision become a reality and uh relying on other tokens to do this job that requires a specific design that fits the needs of this specific application would be kind of difficult actually it wouldn't it would create multiple layers of dependency that we don't really want if we wanted that we would have been in with two depending on aws again right we do want district to become this autonomous self-reliant uh entity that can actually govern itself and the token in that regard is pretty powerful so there are plans um we expect it to happen next year but we don't have a fix to date we are also waiting for the sms feature uh from dfinity which would be very interesting i think it will basically revolutionize the way projects uh decentralize themselves it's like plug-in governance so yeah 2022 would be the year where we experiment with the decentralized social network token and and will a part of that actually be transitioning to a dow decentralized autonomous organization which i know is certainly a hot topic at the moment and is that a key part of it well i think the sns itself will be the dao much like the nns is now serving that function for the internet computer it would basically be a way that allows the district users to decide on key features or how they want the platform to evolve the direction it wants to go the priorities that it needs to have and most especially where does the funding go right because um in the case of the sns all the funds go in the treasury and they're being managed by that particular entity governed by the user so that's i think that automatically will make this a sort of of decentralized autonomous organization not very clear like about the definition of those right now because they um encompass so many different things like how decentralized how autonomous what type of organization there's it's a very broad spectrum but i think district will definitely fit in into one of these categories of adele yeah yeah and so just just for those people who haven't heard about it so from what i understand the sns is the service nervous system on the internet computer which will allow people to create these sort of governance type structures for projects yeah yeah i don't know if they can chip in here um so so so indeed so we have uh the network nervous system with the governance system used for the internet computer and we're now offering these service network systems which is essentially giving other uh projects the the ability to use the same type of of governance so it comes with with the possibility of tokenization and voting and putting proposals in place and [Music] things like that really a very eagerly anticipated feature so we've got just under four minutes left of the panel here and i i think it's probably a good opportunity to kind of round up with uh everyone to have a fairly quick uh response to a couple of questions um and so we'll go through each of you in turn uh start starting with siddharth here um and the questions are first of all what what are going to be the big things that happen in 2022 with respect to web 3 and it's a evolution and what's web 4 going to look like so again each person's got less than a minute to do this so we need to keep it it's short but it'd be great to hear your responses starting with sid off and then the ends and then andrea thank you connor for putting me on the spot we agreed it will be alphabetical but i'm happy to take the first shot uh well web 4 no clues even web 3's so exciting and uh the world is uh like um it will probably look very different in a few years who knows what application then what collaboration and what communities uh we'll end up building uh it's tough to imagine the facebooks and the ubers of the world uh 30 years in advance but hopefully 20 and 10 uh now so so no comments on web web for as of now uh 2022 very exciting at least for blockchain industry and polka dot uh like we are uh seeing a lot more parachains or para threads going live a lot more plan so achieving cross-chain collaboration uh different chains talking to each other unlocking functionalities and a lot more interest in public uh networks from enterprises from regulators who might have been a little more privacy or uh in in closed environments a little bit before so that's kind of my wish and excitement for next year yeah yeah so supercharging the interop and more networks you meet it sorry okay um so yeah uh i i guess so we just launched um a ton of proposals for three year research plans that i'm asking the community to so like tell us which ones of those they would like us to to go ahead with so that's something that's being voted on and i guess next week or something like that um one one part of that which is very pertinent to this panel is about privacy so we have so like have two technologies we're suggesting to explore um one is a trusted execution environment where you essentially trusted the hardware to to deliver some privacy and confidentiality and the other one is multi-party computation which are cryptographic techniques so you don't have to trust any single node that's running the network but you just saw like they jointly do the computation and and so so i think there's some some exciting stuff for us to to do in terms of adding more privacy and more confidentiality to the internet reputation and exciting research and finally andra for web 4 i think the goal should be mass market adoption like we should be able to call it the next level when we do have at least a couple of products that are you know decentralized blockchain based and mass adopted um and that the other one uh next year basically it developed i think we'll see a lot of a continuation basically of artists and content creators driving uh you know adoption of crypto and and awareness uh to people that otherwise wouldn't have had many a lot of interest in you know technicalities of it so i think that's a trend that will continue into 2022. wonderful well thank you so much everyone for your you see it's been a really fun panel to run and yeah i'll hand over to daniel thanks thank you very well put panel i think i'll keep one quote from andra earlier this week she said andra said that you don't have to be the the product to enjoy the product right and i think it's a very nice definition for what for what what 3 is right thank you very much also thanks to the audience for asking questions as usual it's very fun so i'll i enjoy i hope you can still ask more questions thank you very much and see you in the next panel thank you bye guys [Music]