In this DLD22 session, Ingo Rübe, founder of KILT Protocol, and investor Mark Cachia of Scytale Ventures discuss the promise of blockchain and web3 with moderator Mike Butcher of TechCrunch.
Butcher begins with a brief look at history, explaining the origins of the Internet and also the emergence of Web 2.0, which was “effectively using the Internet as a platform, as a computer”.
But concentrating a lot of activity on relatively few platforms gave these services “a lot of power, and maybe an unhealthy lot of power”, Rübe observes. “And they gather an unhealthy lot of data from us, also.”
This realization led to a wave of innovation around decentralized solutions, such as cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
A key differentiator of web3 services is that “you don’t need to trust the other person that you’re interacting with”, Mark Cachia explains. “But rather, you have a trust in the system, because the code is open source, and validation is open source.”
There are many digital services today that we cannot live without anymore Rübe points out. “They are needed by everyone. So why are they controlled by companies?”
The promise of web3, he continues, is rebuilding applications “so that the whole world basically owns them.”
But is this vision becoming a reality?
“It feels that we’re now getting more and more chaos”, Butcher says. “And more and more skepticism about whether or not what we’re talking about is a real thing.”
Both Rübe and Cachia acknowledge that it’s early days and there’s much uncertainty surrounding web3.
“It’s not ready for prime time”, Cachia says, “but it will be.” And while the user experience may be “terrible right now”, he has no doubt that web3 will mature into a game-changing technology of the future.
“The economies and the nation states we have are built from an industrial age”, Cachia says. “But we’re moving very rapidly into an information age” in which people and companies interact without ever having met before. “And what blockchain does is make this sort of interaction possible and sustainable.”
