The Plan To Decentralize The Web: Building a New Internet - Web 3.0

[Music] we have top-notch panelists today we have henry picala that is the co-founder of streamer we have peng song that's it's the ceo of tendermint cosmos we have aiden heyman that is co-founder and ceo of chainsafe systems des martin vp of marketing and user growth at brave software and everyone ecosystem development lead at party and i hope i pronounce your names right but i'm horrible with names and actually i wanted to throw a first questions to all of you i want to know how are your respective companies involved in the development of the next generation of the internet so let's do a round so that everyone knows what you're doing at what you're working on so henry the first one because you're in the middle of the screen am i in the middle sorry all right so yeah we developed a protocol and ecosystem called streamer and to understand where it fits in in the new internet uh it's necessary to of course understand what the protocol is so it's a decentralized protocol for transporting and sharing real-time data so if you think of it many web 2 applications have features that leverage real-time data such as you know sending an instant message or showing a stream of market data from a financial exchange or you know collaborative document writing and whatnot so you often see this kind of thing in the front end and in the back end real-time data is used to store what happened or collect metrics about application usage or to integrate data flows between applications and stuff like that and the traditional way to implement these features is to use a centralized message broker such as a cloud service right but in a decentralized protocol like streamer this middleman that all your data goes through that doesn't exist right so not only it fixes the sort of security issue of all your data going through some one uh thing um such a centralized broker would also be like a scalability bottleneck so this approach enables decentralized applications to use real-time data not only for the traditional type of features and the front-end and so on but the open and permissionless infrastructure also opens up the door for much bigger interconnected systems like you know iot and smart cities infrastructure to share data efficiently and at scale so yeah streamer is not a blockchain it's a peer-to-peer network though and designed for distributing messages that happen and now so if you compare to say ipfs and a protocol for distributing static files streamer is not for static files but for streams of data points that happen now and are sort of pushed from publishers to subscribers and that happens by nodes in the peer-to-peer network which anyone can run and this process is incentivized by the streamer data token and and that's pretty much that's pretty much it there you go first piece of the web 3 that is not a blockchain so let's move to eric yeah hi everyone so parody really develops kind of two main products at the moment so um and and they both work together um quite closely so the first product is substrate and the second product is this network called polka dot so i guess when we think about the new generation or the next generation of the internet we think about an internet where i guess people are able to kind of communicate with one another or kind of do certain tasks without this control this intermediary so you you in a sense you kind of need this way to come into agreement of what this rule of communication is between all these different nodes so essentially this is kind of where the blockchain part uh or some other way to come into consensus comes in and so currently uh in the current development of this new generation the internet you have quite a few disparate protocols that are separately having their own sort of consensus algorithms and their own rules essentially um but right now um in like it's these protocols right now are essentially communicating with each other in a very ineffective way or they're simply sometimes not able to kind of communicate with each other and in a new internet you would want kind of everything to be as interconnected as possible so really what polka dot enables is because the new internet requires all these different sets of consensus and different types of rules to be out there um polka dot serves as a meta protocol essentially to kind of bridge them all together into kind of one security layer and one kind of layer where i guess they can all interoperate and all kind of um i guess agree on an even more common set of rules of communication as well and one of the problems that we've run into while developing polka dot is that in order for polkadot to work you kind of have to have separate blockchains out there already and uh since it's a little bit difficult to develop these separate blockchains we've also developed substrate which essentially is a sdk which allows people to develop a blockchain that is teared towards their particular needs that's that could or could not be connected to the polkadot network thank you so we have the way of sharing information in the centralized way real time we have a way of talking between different blockchains and now adam what about changes hi thanks for having me here today everyone and alfonso for moderating this panel hey everyone my name is aiden i'm a co-founder and ceo of chainsafe systems and at chainsafe for a 50-person blockchain research and development firm and what that really means in terms of our day-to-day is building out core infrastructure open source infrastructure for the decentralized distributed web and so a lot of what we do is building out actual core implementations of protocols so we contributed with a few different people on this call we for example build out a golang implementation of the polka dot host which is basically what substrate is a framework around we build out a rust implementation of file point we have a typescript implementation of each two and all of the utilities that kind of go into that as well as we maintain web3.js which is a javascript library used for interfacing with smart contracts in the ethereum world we also have been contributing to ether mint which is a theorem on tendermint using the cosmos sdk and we've recently started collaborating a lot with the mina protocol which is an incredibly exciting new privacy focused blockchain in the in the space that i recommend people to check out outside of that we also connect a lot of those chains through a project called chainbridge and a few others as well and we do a lot of security auditing and general research for different protocols looking to optimize and maybe answer some questions about certain aspects of of what it is they do so again i'm really excited to be here really excited for this chat and to just talk to a lot of people um throughout throughout our conversation today thanks thank you and thank you you can explain a bit what is cosmos and tendermint because ayden mentioned it so i guess you should be the next one thanks alfonso so what do we do at tendermint and cosmos right so first of all looking look at that bigger picture right demand for blockchain applications is on the rise everywhere but yes there's major problems facing users and developers that are stunting even faster growth right we think that transaction fees for blockchain applications should be determined by the traffic of the users of that application but instead you know right now transaction fees are determined by the total traffic of all apps on that blockchain so you know ethereum where all smart contracts happen on one chain um forces people to pay transaction fees based on how much other people use other apps we don't think this makes a lot of sense uh so you know developers right now build on expensive blockchains because it means you know direct access to a huge number of users who you know have tokens on that change and more funds that are also easily available on that chain but it also means sacrificing that project sovereignty in the process you know they're building on someone else's platform so at tournament we believe that blockchain interoperability means building application specific blockchains all right so application specific chains should allow transaction fees to scale just by the app's traffic and by no other app this should grant change developers you know the same direct access to users and funds of other blockchains while preserving the project sovereignty uh through this protocol that we have called ibc so in cosmos we think that blockchain adoption should not be constrained by a single settlement layer but instead is unleashed by an interoperable network of application specific sovereign chains and we think that the future you know is a network of chains that all connect together this is what web3 is supposed to be and like like adrien has been talking about and then eric has been talking about as well you know these races will all be connected together and i guess that we need a way of interacting with all of this data that we're moving and there's last but not least we're gonna talk about how to interact with this new internet right yes um and uh hello everybody and a big thank you to victoria danielle and alfonso um so yeah i'm obviously i'm with brave and uh the talk the title of this talk could be a strap line for brave um i have it written down here building a new internet a bold plan to decentralize the web and that kind of sums up a lot of what we're doing at brave um and maybe i'll just take a step back because i think you know web 3 in my opinion my humble opinion you know we're still defining what web 3 is and it's often after the fact that we can kind of define these things but if we look back at web 2 um and where that went um i think it will give us a better idea of web3 the internet of value um looking at where we've come from to where we go and you know one of the things that's happened over the last 15 years is that a lot of the web is funded by um you know an ad tech ecosystem that relies on surveillance it relies on tracking profiling understanding people and then it has this incredible optimization process to serve ads through many different pipes down into uh into websites in in milliseconds um but that's that's a kind of a broken system um from a user point of view um that the whole privacy debate um is becoming it's becoming real for people um you know it's become a mainstream topic um and it doesn't even work for the advertisers because lots of uh fraud is occurring and publishers are getting ripped off as well so there's there's a broken system in in web too and looking forward you know there's so many people that contribute to the web and somebody recently um referred to the web as one of humanity's great achievements and i actually think it is i think that's a initially i thought it was a bit of a grand statement but i think it is and we've got to look after that right that's an important living thing and um in order for it to survive it needs a proper uh you know business model it needs something that can uh ensure it's its future success and a core part of that in the brave world is giving people privacy by default and that creates a more respectful web where you don't have large amounts of data getting siphoned off by a handful of large big tech players and they get bigger and bigger and the disparity between big tech and small creators it's just getting further and further and that's not a healthy system that's not a healthy web and you cannot centralize everything in in in a couple of players and think we're going to get um we're going to be in a better place in in the years ahead um so really a very kind of top line um uh you know brave is you know you're talking about the next generation of the web braves is a next generation web browser it puts privacy at its core and when you cut out all the scripts and all the trackers and the stuff that gets downloaded in the background you get a faster cleaner experience up to six times faster than chrome and uh because we are looking to put in this new business model into the web we've introduced the basic attention token we have a wallet in the browser that's where brave is now but i can give you a little bit of a sneak peek as to where brave is going to be in six months and i think you might find this interesting so we've acquired a a search engine tail cache that will become brave search so you will have brave browser plus brave search plus um a revamped wallet an exchange built into the browser so um this opens up a whole range of things you know in terms of people being able to travel across the web earn as they go spend as they go no credit cards frictionless um so it's a pretty exciting opportunity um and we think it'll create a much better balance that content creators can earn much easier and you can kind of decentralize a lot of the the weight and the influence of big tech um so i'll pause there but that's that's kind of a little bit about our future vision so if you think browser search and it's kind of like combined google and coinbase i joke we don't we certainly don't want to become uh google or coinbase but if you if you imagine merging those and then going forward and i should mention that our user base at the moment um so we are at 10 million daily active users and 29 million monthly active users so i believe that is i'm one of the uh most active projects in the crypto space thank you actually these links with my next question that is how i mean this is an open question how do you see this new internet this gave a bit of a glimpse of what is this new internet but if the rest of you could give us a view of from your advantage point of view your vantage point of view you how do you think that this new internet would lose like four users and four companies because i think that it's important for both sides to just start it's an open question to everyone so harry i'm muted so yeah for me i mean for the first time ever we can actually own value we can own data we can own assets and we can transfer those without anyone's permission right this is huge like money in a bank account maybe maybe you thought it's yours but it's it's more like a promise of money instead of money itself right so for me it's about ownership and and the sort of democratization of power in the internet and it unlocks a new class of all kind of use cases um where like most applications today are running in in cloud data centers of the big five tech companies um but with this change the power will will be distributed and applications will be built on top of decentralized backends like blockchains and ipfs and maybe streamer we've seen breakthroughs already with the sort of killer apps that we've seen in icos and d5 and nfts and i think it's just very much the beginning right and in in our niche of data you know we're seeing um applications like data crowdsourcing and peer-to-peer data monetization and this kind of things that haven't really been possible uh with the with the existing um technologies so that's what inspires me in this space eric yeah oh yeah i think i accidentally unmuted myself my bad but i mean i'll try to chime in a little bit um hopefully the new internet essentially looks to the end user quite similar to what they're currently used to in the current internet except for the fact that they can just assume to some extent that a lot of the things that they see that happens is actually what happens and that there's kind of no third party really involved in kind of you know spying on them or taking their data or anything like that so it's really the new internet is hopefully looks pretty similar to the current one except just what they what the internet was originally intended for and i think when the internet was first built really they kind of weren't expecting these large tech companies to really monopolize in a certain way then use people's data in this way and then for companies and developers in this set in the sense i think the internet um well the new internet will look a little bit different that the tech stack that they build on will be quite different um but it's pretty interesting because it might actually simplify the way that companies actually think about deployment because now in instead of kind of thinking about making sure all these servers for example are up you just kind of deploy code to some sort of cloud-like thing and that once you deploy your cloud your code to this decentralized cloud of some type your code will be up and then it will basically be sent and available to these users i mean the only thing that you need to be aware of is basically how to incentivize these users now in a financial way so i think the considerations are slightly different but to some extent i i think it might actually make participating in the internet actually easier for certain groups of people hiding okay so i think it's really important to decouple two concepts here right which is the web which is what we're really talking about and the internet which is what is the piping for the web right so most of us here are not actually doing anything with the internet the internet are the things that you know pipes going through the oceans you know this is the internet right what we work on is the web we're working on this layer on top of the internet that helps us truly have access to you know privacy tooling accountability transparency all these great buzzwords that you know a lot of us love because they're a lot more than buzz words they they mean you know so much to individuals lives um but at the end of the day you know we're not really doing anything about the internet so i mean i know when we got into the space many years ago you know their mesh nets and these things these are incredible ideas um that we haven't really seen proliferate too much um but that would be kind of solving for the internet i think it's important for us to remember our place and remember what we're here to do and that's the focus on the web to focus on the thing that individuals can participate in can be a part of really the economies that exist on top of the internet um so eventually we'll be decentralizing the internet and there are many grandiose projects in the blockchain space who are looking at decentralizing the internet but it's really important to remember i guess our place and so that we can highlight the place that others need to step up and provide a lot of value to and people and end users so what is web 3 what what are what is this new web this new web is one where you can get your data and this doesn't mean necessarily data as in you know um the metadata that's tracked from you on a website it could mean that but it could also mean you know your your balance of how much money you have your portfolio of how many collectibles you have your reputation of a game right there's so many different aspects of web 3 that truly give you the freedoms you need to be able to own your own digital experience and so i think it's really important for us to remember that what we're doing here is defining what can be the future of your experience with your relationships your economic relationships with all of the participants in this beautiful experiment on this beautiful thing called the web and that's something that um we absolutely have the power today to revolutionize and are doing so you know each of the people here in different ways really exciting i think this any of you have anything to add if not we can move to the next person i have a bunch of them just a quick thought to add um i always think kind of the canary in the coal mine for the early web was when artists and musicians and creators they couldn't really make any money there was no native payment layer there was no way for them to get that exchange and i think we're seeing that coming back so i think i think a lot of the things that we're kind of missing are now you know things that were in the physical world are now being replicated the things the the ownership the ability to transfer um all of that stuff is coming i think it's going to create a really vibrant ecosystem i i think there will be lots of transfers of value and data and and things where all the players benefit rather than a few i would hope i think to sum up you know what everyone has been saying on this topic you know the new web is self-sovereign decentralized right in web 2.0 we use applications run by major corporations and we pay with our privacy and our personal data web3 is changing all that uh you know we're building on decentralized infrastructure and the apps that we use are community owned you know the wallets and front lines are open source and our personal data travels with us between apps so you're not ever locked in and in web3 companies will continue to be replaced over time by decentralized organizations that allow you know contributors and users to have more skin in the game and also you know more control over the future of these applications thank you all this is really exciting and actually let's do a round of questions from the audience because i mean everyone is really interested in it and i'm gonna go with the first one that is one that i'm personally really interested in and it goes to iden because they say that it's a good point what to say uh there are these are all great initiatives but as you have pointed out they reside pretty much on the web at layers five six and seven what are your views on decentralizing the internet by revamping from layer one because just making changes at later one will not stop big tech companies from grabbing data at the isp mesh networks so things like mesh networks have been around you know things like peer-to-peer networks are what blockchains are built on top of but i think a really important distinction here though is that when we are building the web in a way that is privacy private by default right private by design we aren't allowing for certain things to be collected because of the pseudo-anonymous nature and now the the completely private nature of some of these new projects that are coming out so i think it's really important to remember that we are building things in a way where there is so much damage they can do um and at the end of the day there are initiatives that are working towards building more local internets right these mesh networks where people kind of work together to provide basically what should be a free service because at the end of the day this is a right of humanity without the internet you cannot you know empower your community you can't take your family to that next part of you know of the future and so this is a right for individuals that we're really just starting to understand how we can democratize this right and not just make it so that when we are offering this and giving this and agreeing for this to be a right of others that isps aren't the ones who are making money um from taxpayer dollars so it's really important and in canada we have a huge issue with our isps in terms of who controls our internet but it's important to remember that there's only so much damage that they can do and you know we're seeing such incredible innovation in the ways in which um an internet can be created for for people but there also are a lot of primitives that are truly crucial to this whole thing um i don't know if people have noticed alfonso's shirt but he's wearing a d-ranch shirt and so deerand is a distributed project that generates randomness as a core primitive for the web and so when doing a lot of things on the web you require randomness and so dear end is a group that um a group an open source project where there's about 20 something members that help to run a node that helps every 30 seconds provide entropy for people to to grab so if you go to dram.love you can see that every 30 seconds there's a new value generated that you can use for whatever um application you want and so these are core primitives that maybe people don't think about that are crucial for the new web to to exist and go to the iran love you will love the project and now like let's move to another question that actually is related and i'm going to generalize this question to everyone because someone asked if cam if brave can take down the almighty giant google this you probably have faced this question this over and over again and i'm gonna generalize that to do you think that these big techs will join our trend of web 3 or they will try to compete against it so that's the audience question and my follow-up question yeah i i might jump in and take that one um please i think it's a big question so um i i believe yes but let me try and break it down and the big tech companies most of them are big ad tech companies and they have built up a really sophisticated hugely detailed system that relies on on selling ultimately data of people and profiles of people to advertisers um they're kind of stuck in that world it's very difficult to change because they've got fiduciary duties to their shareholders they've got um a whole you know machinery that works around ultimately that ad tech world that the product that they're selling um so i do believe when you know and the shift is already happening but it's when it accelerates and people say i actually don't want to be part of that world and the thing at the moment is there is more people that don't want to be part of it but they can't find the alternatives so i think as the alternatives are there people will start to stampede away and it's going to be very hard for google to to change their kind of core business model i'm not saying they can't do it and i'm sure they will experiment and i'm sure they will there's a lot of bright people in there they will certainly come up with stuff but it's going to be difficult like there's a there's it's not even an oil tanker it's like you know it's like that thing that got stuck in the sewers canal it's like something 10 times the size of that it's going to be very hard to turn around in a in a comparable canal of some sort um so i i i think it's difficult and i think that gives all the new innovators in the space a lot of opportunity to grow um before google are in a position to do anything new what are the take of the rest i mean we would be able to compete against them or not it's funny like with the with the internet and the web going mainstream like during and after the it bubble every company suddenly had to become an internet company if they wanted to survive and personally i think that the same will happen for web 3 and blockchain and decentralization like every company will need to become a web 3 company if they want to survive and this might happen in sort of subtle ways and under the hood and you know hiding the complexity of that um but but it will happen and i fully agree with des that this change for existing companies will be very difficult so some of them will manage to to transform into this new era of of operating but many of them will simply fail and um that opens of course the door for for these new teams that are born on crypto island so to say to to take over and you know if you're a sizable enterprise and you don't have a blockchain strategy and a blockchain team in your r d department by now then you know you're already behind right so get get moving or or get lost i guess anyone else wants to add something if not i will move to the next question another topic i guess just uh on one point i guess like just you know allowing for interoperability of data is one thing but i guess i don't necessarily see too much difference in the selling of ads one way or another at the end of the day you're still selling people's attention and that's definitely not something that i believe is going to be part of a future model or at least that people are going to be comfortable with i mean i know a lot of people who use things like brave but don't actually engage in any of the ad side of things um and so i definitely think that that's going to be more and more of the model where people actually do want to pay for things they don't want to take free things for a worse user experience and for selling themselves and i think we've seen that with spotify right where people are actually comfortable paying a premium for something that they used to get for free just because of a user experience and i think that's really important to remember that people don't want a worse experience or they don't really even want fractions of a penny they want to have a better experience which means interoperability of data it doesn't mean a different business model on top of something that's already broken i might jump in there just as you mentioned brave um i think it's worth clarifying that the brave model um we have a kind of phrase we use internally that silicon valley has sent rockets into space but has not developed private ads and one of the things that's distinctly different with the brave ad system is that the uh the ad server comes to your device it comes to your phone and gets matched locally so you get the privacy and but it's opt in so if people opt in they can receive ads and they'll get paid for their attention um we fully expect you know certain people and you will not opt in that's just not what what they want um and we do have a whole series of uh paid products coming to your point uh aiden and i think that's a very real thing people will make a conscious choice i want to pay and i want a a a different ad free or in some way superior experience um but it's also worth pointing out that um you know content and publishing has been funded by ads long before the internet for well over 150 years so that that model is going to be very hard to break you know that's a lindy to use that phrase which is getting massively overused these days but you know that that trend of you know advertising or respectful advertising to to match with uh content creation it's going to be hard for us to break away from that in my opinion it's sort of disappointing that ads have so so far been such a big cornerstone uh in terms of business models on the web and on the internet like how how can it be that no one has really come up with anything anything better than that i'll tell you a story this is sort of descriptive even though it's not strictly related to the web but we were sort of doing some stuff with with car companies and they now have these connected cars and they want to find business models for that and new revenue streams and and and they were like hey now that we have these connected cars could we could we show ads to the to the drivers to create a new business model and i was like ah guys you have like you have these connected devices packed full of sensors that are roaming the environment that could measure everything from from you know air quality to to potholes to you know whatever pollution temperature humidity everything you can measure all of this with your intelligent sensors that are roaming the environment crisscrossing everywhere and covering the whole planet and you want to show ads to your customers then i might just jump in on that i i get where you're coming from henry but you know there is 330 billion dollars looking for a home in advertising every year and that's why it's still there because that money is floating around and it's being channeled into a particular place because it's like just this big cloud of money that's like okay put it here here and to some degree that inertia creates a continuation and i'm not saying it's right but i'm saying that's probably why you find yourself getting frustrated and everything and i don't have anything against the idea of ads and definitely nothing against brave for example i use it every day but it's just that would be good to have also different business models and once we get like um the infrastructure that can support these new kind of business models i think they can be very well applied to the internet and sort of take us or the web and take us from the sort of singleton universe of having just ads to actually having like you know not only paid services because payments become easier and more straightforward but also other kind of business models that can exist uh with enough innovation and enough technology put in yeah yeah i think that's one of the most exciting things i think the analogy that you use though does is not necessarily that's kind of like a defeatist attitude almost in that you know just because something is the way it is and we should kind of play into it and i don't think that that's necessarily um at all what this technology is about i mean we're i mean we're looking at the crypto industry now being greater than two trillion dollars and i think a lot of people at the beginning said well gold is 10 trillion dollars why would anyone want a digital gold um and i think it a digital gold is not actually a digital gold like you remember all those projects in the early days that were literally digitizing gold how many of those have been able to keep up with bitcoin um you know what what these are completely new paradigms completely new primitives that as henry's saying there are better and newer business models that can't exist um and yeah i mean i'm not against brave but i definitely don't see that i i see the beginning of what you said as ad tech i don't see how rave is not an ad tech company basically doing the same thing but just giving some of the revenues to users i mean it's what 70 goes to users um it'd be much better to understand how brave the company is related to brave the foundation like these are things that people don't really know about there's not that much information about on the internet um so yeah these are these are things that are incredibly important to understand like the delineation between this or the the relationship between these two things right when we're talking about freedom and and new and all these great stuff i mean transparency is number one sure um you mentioned the connection between brave and the foundation you mean basic attention token and brave and the company that's raised money in the past so how does that all work so do you work for the foundation no no i work for brave brave is a for-profit exactly and that's what i'm trying to understand right like what are the what are the relationships between these things and how do you make money as a company on the backs of users and claim i think you caught out there or went on music i don't think it necessarily needs to be black and white right what web3 does offer is the ability for users to choose how they pay for you know media applications anything that they want and that's what's very different from web 2.0 the choice that's there and the sovereignty over your own assets yeah okay i suggest that we move on to the next question because we we have a lot of them and we need to cover all of them uh this question is for peng actually because uh so i mean the audience wants some clarification on the rationale behind the inter blockchain communication that cosmos recently announced and actually i would like also to give his thoughts eric to give his thoughts because they also do this inter blockchain communication what is the rationale be behind all of these protocols and having these blockchains talk to each other yeah so very recently a couple of weeks ago we managed to launch the ibc protocol on on the very first chain the cosmos hub but there have been three to four chains since then that have also launched ibc so what does ibc do at a high level well allows chains to send tokens from one to the other permissionlessly entirely by the user and um so why you know why is this useful why is this necessary like everyone has been talking about here right one of the values of web3 is the ability for users to take what they own and move it to a different platform if they want without any sort of vendor lock-in right so right now you're not able to let's say take all your posts on reddit and move it to a different platform or you know take care of votes and move it somewhere else but you're able to do things like that in web 3.

and the reason why ibc is used for cosmos is you know we believe the ideal scenario for both users and developers the blockchain apps for you know each app to run its own sovereign chain right for users that allows them to just pay fees required by the the app itself for developers it lets them choose you know their ideal governance group their their ideal community they want to govern their own app rather than be subject to like a broader ecosystem governance process and this you know this future ideal of of multiple chains you know thousands hundreds millions of chains require an inter-blockchain communication protocol called ibc and that's why we've been working so hard on making this happen um and you know the use cases you know one of the primary use cases the most obvious use case right is the ability to create interchange exchanges letting users take their assets you know whether they are nfts or fungible tokens to exchanges that exist um through ibc and trade them for any other asset that they want so that allows you know developers to build on a platform they they entirely own with their community but also be able to interoperate and send tokens across other chains as users you know you know decide to move on you know let's say they're playing a game and they have so many assets on one chain but they want to you know play a different game right they might be able to sell all their assets on this interchange exchange and switch over to a new game awesome um so thank you thank for for talking about how in the cosmos equals somehow interflocking communication works i i think in the polka ecosystem we also have a i think a very similar kind of rationale behind uh why we care about communicating uh crushing communication in a sense so what we believe is that um there are going to be application specific blockchains in the future and these and this is because each of these blockchains uh will have its own set of developers own set of communities with governed by the rules that that community wants to be governed by but then within these applications there are going to be people who want to communicate between different use cases or create use cases that are kind of more powerful if they're able to communicate compared to if they're just alone and by themselves and in the polka ecosystem we have what's called xcmp which essentially allows two uh in the property system what we call para chains um to essentially communicate each other without the without at the beginning involving what we call the polkadot relay chain and um i think this is really kind of the core of like this is really the core of i guess what web3 really should enable uh is for these i guess developers to really have as much power and these end users who have as much power as they want to ensure that whatever kind of message they want to get across can get across not only to their own community but to kind of any community within this kind of broader blockchain ecosystem and within polkadot it will not hopefully not just get across polkadot the pokelight ecosystem but hopefully through bridges that are built between i guess the pokemon network and networks such as cosmos also these net messages can also get to the cosmos ecosystem as well thank you and i'm gonna start a discussion i'm afraid to throw this question but like it's it's a good one so many people at least it seems that many people are concerned about the viability of these foundations and these projects because they're spending a lot of money marketing in in promoting their protocol but like how will these foundations in these projects be funded in the future and what incentives do the employees of these foundations have to achieve continued success into purpurity i have my own opinion but i'm not gonna jump here so who wants to start um i guess i could begin so um parody is a for-profit company but um within the polkadot ecosystem polkadot not available and contribute for example financially as well to i guess the growth of the ecosystem make sure that the network is growing at a a certain rate but then i i actually don't think that a lot of these foundations actually intend to kind of remain for a super long amount of time because ultimately in a truly decentralized ecosystem you don't actually need a foundation behind that protocol you don't need any centralized entity behind the development of a protocol so as if the foundation's doing its job well it will kind of progressively decentralize and make the protocol popular enough and the network popular enough so that in the future it doesn't even need to exist anymore exactly and one thing that's very important to realize is that building something takes a lot more money than maintaining something so many projects raise funding in the beginning to build the thing and then build cons some kind of token economy or some kind of you know fee or tax or whatever it's called to go into some kind of long-term maintenance fund and and like you said it doesn't need to be the the origin team the founding team that gets this money rather it can be governed via a dao and placed as bounties or whatever and if there's enough stakeholders in the ecosystem to to care about it at all then those that work will get done for sure because there's insane very heavy incentives to to do so aidan yeah i mean i really really like this question and i think it's a really important one and something we ask ourselves is how many outside entities are contributing to the core fundamental technology the core fundamental infrastructure how many you know long talked about vendor lock-in i mean that's very true for a lot of decentralized protocols um a lot of blockchain protocols where there isn't an actual effort from day one to ensure that multiple entities are stewards of the tech and are actually main stakeholders of the future growth of these networks and i definitely think that you know that for us is a real core fundamental need before we engage with different groups you know they claim to be decentralized but are they just decentralizing the fundraising of their protocols to then centralize the development of their ecosystem because that's what we see a lot of um but that isn't usually the case usually these foundations are incredibly um or not i shouldn't say usually but in a lot of the cases these foundations have a vision for you know removing their their position in the space as eric was mentioning and getting to a point where they are potentially just creating relationships between people and allowing for the stewards of the technology the builders to take that and move it forward beyond anything they can imagine because for us that's that's key it's it's so important to truly see people's actual intention through who is doing the development work and a lot of the cases it can be faster to do it all yourself but that won't build resiliency that won't build um you know a true ecosystem and that won't create decentralization of protocol and so that's a core core component of what we can of what we look at when we consider whether or not this chain or their vision for a chain is sufficiently decentralized or not okay so similar you know to to polka dot thanks eric um we we are a for-profit company right tender is a for-profit company but at the same time every tool we build is open source you know one of the greatest things that we're building is starport which is the sort of the easiest way to build a sovereign chain in the world and over time right the foundation the interchange foundation that does fund the majority of cosmos development will will fade and their influence will fade and in fact some of that's happening right now on the cosmos blockchain um roughly about two and a half months ago the the community the adam holder community decided to fund roughly um two and a half million dollars into marketing and they went to a multisig held by the community and it was you know this whole distribution of funds was also run by the community similarly um i think a couple weeks ago there are there are plans to um you know have the community fund further development into an evm solution for cosmos you know to sort of accelerate production of that and get that going and that's also entirely community funded so over time i would expect you know token holders themselves across various platforms to use various forms of on-chain governance to fund development of future infrastructure foundations you know for for most companies for most chains right are really there to siege the initial growth and get initial interest but they're not meant to be here for a long time thank you i don't know if someone else wants to add something well i have maybe a question more than a comment like um how do you how do you guys see like at which stage should this sort of full decentralization of of the governance and the things sort of kick in like most teams start by definition maybe like more or less centralized and then they have this vision of full decentralization but the way to get there and the optimal pace to get there is is not exactly trivial and i'd be interested to hear your thoughts might jump in with some quick thoughts on that um so we have a program on our site moving through kind of gemini and apollo these are different terms we've used as to the steps we'll go through to to decentralize um our ecosystem um but it's i think everybody wants to start out with a lot of decentralization but it takes time and there are multiple steps um you know to go back to the original question brave is a for-profit company um but you know in order for us to deliver on all these steps there needs to be a business model that enables us to fund all of that um and that business model will change over time as things decentralize um and as we move away from that ad you know the weight of that ad environment that i mentioned earlier all those things will change all those new business models will open up but i think we have to be realistic that there are steps i don't think you know it's it's that easy to turn things around uh overnight and so i think it'll be a bit slower than than maybe people expect but i think when it does the the uh what it will open up will be immense it'll probably be hard for us to fathom i mean but i guess the question becomes are you the only one able to build a business model or to dictate what the business model is for the technology and that is the question of sufficient decentralization who is able to build business models and obviously there are people who are getting rewarded for things but who is going to be able to capitalize on most of that pie at the end of the day and if a protocol is not building itself in a way that is truly anti-fragile and decentralized in terms of sharing the value created by these platforms with other contributors however these foundations choose to claim decentralization it doesn't really matter at the end of the day because there will just be a centralized entity that controls most of the actual value creation that comes through that and so to answer your question henry i would say that it's a case-by-case situation it really depends and it really depends on intention right like why are these foundations being created you know in a lot of the cases foundations are really created just to just to create um separation between for-profit companies and non-profit companies we we don't believe that that is you know how it needs to be and we've seen a lot of people do this really effectively where they really do care about creating incentives for the community to take ownership of the protocol and it's an incredible thing to see and it's really obvious when it's not the case um so i think your question it's kind of like uh i don't have an answer but the answer is it really depends on on the intention right um why are people doing that and what is the purpose of them doing that yeah thanks i didn't want to hijack the flow of questions uh so i'll just shut up now actually there's there's a follow-up question for eric uh around this topic uh i would say the foundations are not needed to keep the project going if it is truly decentralized but having foundations tends to be a better approach when it comes to evolution and growth of the project well being a dao is ideal history has taught us that the communities are more like what waddles you still need an alpha penguin to lead the way any thoughts yeah that's a really good question so the way i like to think of it is that i think while there are still kind of active organization of communities around all of these things like in the sense that we think about oh the the polka dot community being i guess these people kind of actively involved in championing the cause i think that in a sense demonstrates that it's still relatively early on in the development of this project because i mean just like we see the internet today we essentially take the internet community as not even a disparate community but we think of the internet community as more of its sub communities that is in it for example you know the youtube community or you know all these community of communities of applications are being built on top of it so hopefully even if polka dot let's say becomes no longer stewarded by any particular groups of people uh if it is successful enough then really the communities will kind of evolve away from just being thought of as i guess the polka dot community into communities of chain let's say para change or applications are being built on top of this network instead thank you i think that we can move on i mean enough with foundations and doubts unless you want to keep discussing about them but like here's a really interesting question that says i mean how do you see the transition from web 2 to web 3 and what will it take to make it happen and also i want to do a follow-up which is uh for blockchains i mean for people that don't understand blockchain web 3 and so on um how can we explain them that web 3 is a better option you have like a shared a few like privacy and a few more benefits of blockchain and and web3 but what how can we sell this web 3 revolution and how can we make this transition happen should i pick someone like in class okay okay thanks sure so the question was you know how do we get this transition from web 2 to web 3 faster is that right so i mean the question is how would this transition look like and how can we get adoption sure so the transition is already starting right so it's primarily early adopters right now but there are more and more people you know picking up crypto you know perhaps it's just bitcoin um you know maybe some for some it's eve but for a lot of people you know they're starting to open their eyes to crypto and it's at the stage where we're you know about to cross the chasm to mainstream but at the same time you know the thing that will allow more people to join you know sort of lower the barrier's entry are our two things right first of all it's the you know the sort of great work being done at the infrastructure level and as a user experience level can make you know usability as as good as web 2.0 right obviously one of the big advantages of web 2.0 is that because services are centralized and ownership centralized everything sort of you know everything in one web application reports to one company they're able to build very good very strong user experiences you know on on the website front on the mobile application front and web 3 has a lot of ways to go to get there right so i think you know an improvement in usability for both you know end users who have to hold tokens and who have no idea what private keys or mnemonics are and then on the developer front right making various um protocols as easy to use as it is to you know to use wordpress or maybe for someone slightly more technically inclined you know to use like a javascript framework i think a lot of work has gone into usability for the web and not all of that's there yet for web3 i'll jump in with a quick thought i don't think web 3 has had its netscape moment yet i don't think it's had this big breakthrough where it's it's gone mainstream um i think it's coming i think there's loads of really exciting things bubbling away um and i think what peng said about usability is is so important um it's that 10x in experience which often comes down to usability is the bit that people go okay i get it um i think some of the defy stuff that's happening um i think compound was an early you know leader in the space and i think it'll continue to iterate the whole space but i think you know that there is a school of thought that web 2 and web one led to kind of an explosion of web developers i think we could get an explosion of investment advisors and and artists with uh you know nfts and with defy and those people become the evangelists and and they have the the the um they bring something forward i think we're on the cusp of that um and hopefully yeah hopefully it happens really soon it'll be incredibly exciting and we are only pointing out the benefits do you any of you have any kind of concerns with this new trend of web 3.0 i mean i'm concerned oh yeah sorry honey go ahead aidan are you sure thanks um yeah i mean i'm really concerned that people don't actually understand what they're being given i'm concerned that people are taking advantage of asymmetrical kind of knowledge gaps that they're being told something is decentralized or being told something is safe secure and it's none of those things and it never ever intends to be those things so i'm very concerned i'm very concerned with an average person i'm concerned with the thought of my mom being her own bank i don't think that that's something i think she ever wants to be or shouldn't need to think she needs to be and so i definitely think that we know we need a lot more kind of on the user experience but maybe from a key management perspective from a onboarding perspective and i think we need real applications you know we need a real utility to be built i mean when i joined the space the thing that excited me excited me the most was daos and it wasn't invest in vehicle dows it was daos that could operate new commons new services new ways in which we can all kind of communicate and exchange with one another and these things are close but not close enough and i think that that's really where we need to be to truly provide utility for the world um because you know money is cool and all but if i can't do anything with my money other than make more money it's not something for the masses and it never will be something for the masses so my hope is that in the next few years we start thinking and building for regular people and regular people need regular things and we're definitely nowhere near that and you know i i asked the people who think that everyone should own an nft how much art do those people have in their portfolio um i i think it's these are real questions we need to ask ourselves what are we doing with these nfcs um a regular person now i'm a pretty young guy my friends don't own art that i went to high school and university with what are they going to do with art um and so we need to start creating real utility and nfcs has an incredible amount of value outside of just selling art to rich people um and i think that that's when we're going to really unlock this next generation of applications and we really empower people to be able to build from a developer experience things that we all use day-to-day in our lives because it is possible we just need people to believe that there's value in them creating it that's a great point harry oh i was actually about to bring up the same sort of uh responsibility and usability angle like since we sell since we sell web3 with the sort of opportunity to own your own money and own your own assets and blah blah blah but i agree that people are most people are not ready to take responsibility for that and it can go horribly wrong and it's gone horribly wrong a number of times already and and there's probably no easy solution to that and that's partially to blame of course with the current status quo that people are so used to the situation where someone else is taking care of my stuff right somebody else actually manages my money it's in the bank and somebody else is you know doing this and doing that and now it needs to be me that's that's really scary that's that's terrible and i think the usability challenge and the responsibility challenge are the biggest blockers of of web3 adoption at this time i agree so i would add just just a quick thought um you know if you look at history every time a breakthrough technology like a big breakthrough technology comes along railroad electricity the web people lose a lot of money um it's it's i'm not endorsing that i don't think it's a good thing but that is a real downside and the first iteration there is there's different forms of mania and enthusiasm people get sucked into scams that happens and i think because this is such a big a globally connected thing i i i fear that there will be a lot of fallout on from that we've seen some of it already but i think uh that's just something i think you know it comes with the territory but as a community we have to try and protect people from that where possible yes exactly and ideally it's like you know one step backward and two step forward i'm just a little concerned that it's going to be like one step backward one step forward repeat forever kind of thing but but there's certainly potential okay thanks actually i'm gonna throw a question because i've seen this buzzword in a few questions smart cities so i'm gonna just saw it uh where's where streamer and other projects can be used in the smart cities i see someone from the smart cities industry trying to find out if there's value here sure so okay so smart cities is a very broad broad spectrum of things you have everything from you know smart traffic smart energy smart buildings smart everything so maybe it's a little bit easier to answer if we narrow it down but we could think about you know for example smart traffic um as it was also used in that that's that little ad story that i that i told before so how does streamer come in so the the problem with current approaches when it comes to smart devices and connected devices is that the data is very easily silo so you know you have you have one you know let's say the public transport authority is um is you know make some kind of open data api where you can stream the real-time location of buses and trams and and whatnot and then on the other hand you have like connected cars on the streets and you have smart traffic glides and you have this and that and everything is a separate separate system that doesn't by definition like talk to each other you can plug them together by making integration between the apis but you don't have this connective fabric that would act as a sort of common ground for all data that's being produced enabling anyone basically to to tap into those data streams and innovate and create new applications like some kind of predictions or or whatever you're you're planning to to create there so that's what streamer is sort of sort of trying to to solve there in a smart city is that it would act as this kind of shared fabric between different kind of devices where anyone can publish and subscribe data streams and use each other's data streams of course it's not only for open data but it can also be you know encrypted and permission controlled and this kind of thing but just to enable that efficiency that can be achieved by by unsiloing that data and putting it onto like uh connective tissue in between thank you so we're running out of time we have four minutes left so let's do an experiment uh you have like one minute less than one minute each to leave a final message on this broad plan of building a new internet so let's take it away because you're in the top of my screen okay i'm in the hot seat um i um where to go with this i think the the revolution is in people's choices i think there is now some really credible web 3 options or options that are taking us in that direction start using them start road testing them and start spending your time uh you know on those projects and if there's ui ux suggestions ping ping the devs on twitter or github and make those suggestions um we change for the better by actually getting involved and voting with our time and our actions what we do where we put our our energy will build a better way awesome thanks eric yeah i mean i just i think right now is a really good time for the whole web 3 uh development weaponry as a whole and there's kind of so many things that are really interesting for everyone to take a look at not everyone has to be involved in actually building this stuff but i think that for anyone who's listening i think that you're already interested enough in the concept of weather in the first place so i think it's it's just great to just keep uh keep track of what's happening in the space and then so that when you do feel like participating i think you'll you'll be able to do that very quickly and take advantage of the knowledge that you've already gained in the meanwhile so ben or henry that you muted yourself so what what people want will shape what the world will look like so want better things you need to want better things and the centralized web is not enough so it's great if people get involved learn uh be be creative and be inspired and to make a matrix reference take the red pill thanks yeah so for the builders out there you know if you want to build your own chain um you should check out cosmos so in case you didn't know cosmos no ads no i'm kidding i'm kidding right um we really want builders to get into this space right um and cosmos is one of the best ways to do so in case you didn't know you know it's uh it's what binance coin is built on it's what the cosmos hub is built on it's what terra and thor chain are built on um check it out at cosmos.network and if you want to participate in your favorite web3 platform get involved in the community we hire people from the community we fund people in the community and i think that's you know the same for everyone here and let me know for ayden yeah just thank you all for being a part of the conversation and for wanting to you know participate in whatever that future web looks like i mean it really is in all of our hands and just remember that you know it's really early days i mean in 2015 i thought i was too late um so just remember all of you are able to be pivotal parts of the future and it really just happens with a lot of people going into their networks and finding people that have commonalities with one another and building something that they know people need the best thing you can ever do is build something you want and so do that and be proud of it and be courageous enough to take a step into the new web don't accept what people tell you do your own homework read into the structures of these organizations read into the way in which people are doing what they do it all looks great on paper but all it takes is a little bit of research to truly understand how these structures are built so do your own research don't believe you know just the nare the the general narrative but at the same time do have hope and faith that there is a positive intention for doing something a little bit better hopefully two steps forward you know hopefully not just one step forward but we'll have to see and it's up to all of us to make that happen so thank you everyone and i hope you enjoyed you