Web3 Summit: Day One

/ Abbey Titcomb / 10.23.2018 /

Outside the center of Berlin, inside a 1950s GDR-broadcast centre called Funkhaus Berlin are hundreds of builders, thinkers, and creators sitting cross-legged on wooden floors, eating plastic bowls of chili, and learning to pick locks. These individuals are crafting the future of the Web.

Yesterday marked day one of the three-day long Web3 Summit, hosted by the Web3 Foundation. The conference is “organized around a single rallying call: to facilitate a fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web.”. Developers, researchers, investors, and builders coming together and discussing P2P protocols, platform neutral computation language, data distribution protocols, blockchains, transient data/messaging, encrypted storage, protocol-extensible developer APIs and more.

Vlad Zamfir from the Ethereum Foundation talked about governance in Web 3.0, Trent McConaghy from Ocean Protocol laid out a vision for the future data economy, Rachel Hamlin from Status told us how it’s going to be mobile, and Juan Benet from Protocol Labs told us what the f&*% Web 3.0 actually is.

The most intriguing and mesmerizing part about Web3 is that everyone in this room is collectively working towards a shared (for the most part*) vision of the future. Juan Benet, quoting Parity Tech founder, Gavin Wood said it best:

“Consider Web 3.0 to be an executable Magna Carta — the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”

The people here are pioneers, explorers, philosophers, and revolutionaries. They are here, hacking on laptops around whiteboards, discussing protocols over Krombacher Pils, and geeking out over live technical demos. They are building the future. Most importantly, they are working together to build the future.

I’m beyond excited to be immersed in this technical mecca for the next three days. Let the revolution begin.

If you’re at Web3 Summit come find me (@abbey_titcomb) and lets talk about changing the world or something. If you aren’t, follow @web3foundation to find and watch the conference live streams.