Keynote: Web 3.0 Needs Data, Fast!

[Music] hello and welcome back we now have our second keynote of the day with henry ceo and co-founder of streamer you've probably seen him before in our last edition because he participated there as well it's good to have you again here henry the stage is yours be here thanks a lot victoria all right so hi everyone thanks for joining this session i'm henry co-founder and ceo of streamr so this attempts to be more of a show don't tell talk where i walk you through some interesting and concrete use cases that we're seeing in the kind of intersection of real-time data web 3 and crypto as that intersection is our home turf right as a project and protocol so i came across this tweet the other day and i thought it was a pretty good conversation starter in web one the companies created the content and earned the money and in web 2 we create the content but the companies earn the money and in web 3 we create the content and we earn the money i think this captures pretty well one aspect of how web3 might enable the birth of new data economies however i think this view is somewhat narrow right um we should be talking about not just people but also devices and ais um obviously not just the web but all services on the internet and not just applications but of course the underlying infrastructure as well so here's a few thoughts to illustrate what i mean i think to move beyond web 2 we need infrastructure beyond cloud you know it's not great that half the internet goes dark when someone trips over a wire in an amazon data center which just happened like a week ago we need business models beyond ads advertising has been the dominant online native business model for 20 years but is this really the only paradigm out there right we need scalability beyond people there's already an order of magnitude more devices online than people and this gap will only grow faster in the future and finally we need guarantees beyond gdpr and other regulation you know verify don't trust right radical transparency the blockchain space has a lot to teach us and cryptography and math they eat trust for breakfast right so to understand the use cases i'm about to show let's first take a look at how real-time data pipelines in web 2 actually work so basically all stakeholders in a data pipeline they connect to a centralized service that brokers the data the data source or publisher sends a new data point to the server and the central server delivers the data to subscribers right this is how whatsapp works how this video stream works uh how stock exchanges and centralized crypto exchanges work how iot systems and smart traffic work etc etc all data goes through a central choke point which makes these systems vulnerable and um grants the infrastructure providers kind of unsafe amounts of power all data flows through them and that's not great for the internet and its users so what we try to do with the streamer protocol is to decentralize exactly that so it allows publishers and subscribers to form peer-to-peer networks where basically everyone acts as a broker enabling data to be distributed broadcasted exchanged and even monetized at scale without any central party or service all right so in a web 3 stack many decentralized protocols work together around data for example blockchains decentralized file storage real-time data of course computation identity and so on to power applications that can avoid the pitfalls of web 2 while also enabling new business models and allowing self-sovereign control over one's data and just like we control all our other digital assets in web 3 using private keys and wallets right all right so that's the brief theory part and where this stuff fits in so now on to some interesting use cases yep okay slide wasn't changing but now i think it changed all right so let's start with something easy to understand this is the chat.eve it's an instant messenger that uses ethereum wallets for identity and the streamer network for message transport and this is coming soon it's something that a few guys in our ecosystem are working on at the moment so in web 2 you have you know facebook or whatsapp which is really just facebook or instagram which is really just facebook all of which collect as much data about you onto their servers as they possibly can but here here there is no server right boom you're chatting over a peer-to-peer network and your browser becomes a streamer node and lets the chat app send and receive data in the different chat rooms so no one can deny you access to this application eavesdrop on your messages or prevent you from communicating in web 2 chats [Music] in web 2 chats all kind of fraud and impersonation runs wild but here our identity is our wallet so you can verify you're chatting with say the owner of a certain nft or e s name a team member of a certain crypto project or say even the hacker that stole 100 million in the latest defy exploit right and add smart contract costs the mix and you can transfer and swap assets with people you're chatting with and so on i think instant messaging in web3 should be something like this um it's a fine example of that infrastructure beyond cloud bullet point that i called for before i also called for business models beyond advertising for web3 so here's a project called swash they allow you to monetize your web browsing behavior they use the streamer network for data transport as well as our data unions framework for sharing revenue with their users at scale right so um it's basically a browser plugin that collects data anonymously and you can control and inspect what gets collected it's fully transparent and they plan to run it like a dow using our data units framework it pays users 70 percent of any profits from selling data to buyers like market research competitor analysis that kind of thing and they have over 200 000 downloads so far and these guys just raised 20 million for the project so it's definitely getting pretty serious referring back to the tweet i showed in the beginning in web 3 people create data people earn the money and that's exactly what happens here i also spoke about going beyond people um here's demo a team that's doing something a bit similar to swash but for cars raised 4 million so far they have a hardware device you can plug into your electric vehicle that shares data about the car in real time over the stream or network that data can be used to detect traffic alert about accidents nearby or weather conditions like slippery roads you know state of charging stations animals crossing the street and whatnot the data can also be monetized by selling it for example to car manufacturers who are interested in battery degradation or insurance companies interested in driving behavior again the revenue is shared with the users right crypto gaming people are talking about play to earn so here we're talking about drive to earn with swash it's serve to earn and so on pretty big ideas i think and as everything's based on open protocols you also get full composability on the data side of things so you know you could use the the chat app i showed to to chat with your car to approve a charging expense or tell the car where to meet you as it returns from its self-driving missions in web 3 there are no silos individual apps are just interfaces to the same underlying data fabric created by underlying protocols okay again bit of delay here all right this is onbanks it allows you to share and monetize your bank transaction data in europe banks are now required to provide apis that allow people to download their financial data from the bank systems onbanks leverages that and allows people to easily liberate that data for other uses such as selling it anonymously so one takeaway from this is that regulation can enable bridges between web 2 and web3 unless forced to open up web 2 companies would rather keep the data in silos of course the banking regulation is more successful than gdpr in this sense as gdpr doesn't actually require companies to offer api access to data you do have the right to request your data from a company but the company can you know print it out and fax it to you or something and that's not quite what we need overall the eu is actually quite active in promoting the decentralization of data i think the reason is this the us and china they totally won the web 2 infrastructure game and web 3 is a new opportunity for europe plus the ideologies of decentralization and openness of web 3 fit very well with the european values as one example i'm showing here kraken a eu funded horizon 2020 project to build a data marketplace for medical and wellness data did that data that's highly personal and highly sensitive the work is being done in a consortium led by atos and it's being built on top of a fork of the streamer data marketplace where they add a secure multi-party computation element to allow computations on the data without exposing its contents and not everything is quite so serious yes somebody also made an nft with a deep fake elon musk reacting to dogecoin price changes in real time but yeah with the web resources on ipfs price data coming from the streamer network and the token itself on chain this kind of data-driven nfts can be completely decentralized so other real-time interactive art could have for example presence features like you know the piece could change with people coming and going or with how many people are looking at it and and stuff like that so really cool stuff so just to finish with a few summarizing thoughts first of all um the protocols needed for data-driven decentralized apps they pretty much exist now so yeah it's start it's time to start using them right we're also seeing these new business models emerging which enable people to own and control the data they share and these fairer business models that compensate users for data and content and they will compete with and eventually replace the web 2 models that's very clear and for sure experimenting with these new technologies is key to discovering new paradigms and pushing the existing boundaries thanks a lot for joining this is the end of the talk i hope this inspired some of you um to discover more use cases and learn about real-time data for web3 in general you can visit our project website streamer.network and join our discord as well as follow us on twitter if you have any questions you can also also reach out to me either on the discord or by emailing henry streamer.network and i wish everyone a great rest of the conference thank you so much thank you so much henry very interesting keynote and thank you for being an important uh yeah person in this whole revolution of weaponry and congratulations see you around henry thank you so much bye-bye cheers [Music]