The panelists who joined are: TF Guo, Co-founder of Taxa; Surag Sheth, Business Development of Web3 Foundation; Matt Quinn, Community Operation of Nervos; and Edgar Aroutiounian, Core Protocol Engineer of Harmony.

Below is a selection of their open discussions.

Web 3 in One Sentence

Surag said “It’s an economy around security transactions and be able to verify the validity of the transactions and data plus trust. It’s a user-based Internet.” TF added “Web 3 is the natural trend for the future internet with more decentralization and more trust”. Matt expressed “It’s a new architecture of interface applications that use cryptographic and distributed databases.”

Middleware on the Rise

Matt said “We are moving towards more viable solutions, there are lots of ideas around layer 2, like side chains and state channel and stuff like that. It has been around for a while and solved certain foundational problems. I think you will see the same sort of design in further development.” TF added “Many projects are solving what other projects can’t do or aren’t good at, starting to build the ecosystem.”

Enlightening Privacy Technologies

Edgar expressed: “Privacy is not just about hiding transactions. One approach that Harmony used is the RSA accumulator to replace the extra space for the aggregating number. This is also a privacy technology as it avoids expanding the size of the blockchain. There are a lot of unsolvable problems that we know, but there are tons that creative people haven’t realized the connection between these new tools and existing problems.”

Matt added: “There’s a lot of innovations in the hash algorithm space around like if you are using hash algorithms inside smart circuits actually become more efficient. There’s also a lot of things around marking more flexible circuits so we can do some sort of arbitrage opportunity. We are seeing that the privacy-preserving sector is becoming more usable and useful for things like shielding transactions in Zcash.”

TF said “When we talk about privacy, it’s not the same concept on Layer 1 as that on Layer 2. On Layer 1, privacy is about identity, financial information, and transaction history. Such privacy is being addressed by privacy-centric layer 1 blockchains, aka ‘privacy coins’ such as Zcash, Monero, and Grin. Layer 2 projects are solving different (privacy) problems. For example, how can you keep your data privacy from your service provider? This involves technologies like TEE and MPC. In conclusion, they use different technologies to solve different problems.”

From Invention to Adoption

Surag said “Most people still think that Bitcoin equals Cryptocurrency equals Blockchain. You need to be able to educate these kinds of people what the benefit of this technology really is, and what implications have not been paid attention to.”

Before moving onto the keynotes, the panelists had a Q&A session with the audience.

Check out the panel video here.

Keynote #1: Building Web 3 Applications in a Layered Blockchain Architecture

TF Guo, Co-founder of Taxa Network, illustrated Taxa’s blockchain agnostic approach to achieving developer-friendly, high-performance confidential compute. He demonstrated the coding environment of Taxa’s tService that enables untrusted nodes to process private data while guaranteeing the data privacy is not compromised. He said hackers from the ETHGlobal hackathons got to build very exciting use cases with the alpha release of Taxa SDK. He announced that Taxa’s mainnet and SDK will be public released in this spring, and meanwhile Taxa is set to kick off a series of ecosystem development and community engagement initiatives.

Check out the keynote video here.

Keynote #2: Entering the Multi-Chain

Surag Sheth, Business Development at Web3 Foundation, illustrated that Polkadot is a multi-chain protocol that supports interoperability, shared security, on-chain governance, and parachains, and introduced Substrate as an open-source, modular, and extensible framework for building sovereign blockchains that can connect to Polkadot to benefit from interoperability and shared security, which 95% of Polkadot is built out of. The Web3 Foundation nurtures and stewards technologies and applications in the fields of decentralized web software protocols, particularly those which utilize modern cryptographic methods to safeguard decentralization, to the benefit, and for the stability of the Web3 ecosystem. He finished off by announcing that Kusama, an early unaudited version of Polkadot, has been live for some time now.

Check out the keynote video here.

Keynote #3: Building a Blockchain Community

Matt Quinn, Community Operations at Nervos, thinks trust is an intrinsic part of human nature and increases people’s motivation to work together. In these blockchain communities, we have the opportunity to build trust. He described the healthy blockchain community that Nervos is going to build as a place with no hierarchies, formed by a group of people with shared values and with accepted behavior instead of rules, where no one in charge to enforce the rules. He finished the speech by saying the goal of Nervos is to be decentralized and community-driven, and announcing their grant program for builders.

Check out the keynote video here.

Keynote #4: Ramping Up to Open Staking

Edgar Aroutiounian, Core Protocol Engineer of Harmony, illustrated the core technologies of Harmony, and showed the Testnet — Pangaea with over 3500 signups from 96 countries and over 700 participants. He then talked about their future roadmap on open staking. He defined open staking as the kind of staking without centralization but still allowing compounding and delegation. He said that Harmony is ramping up to open staking and is building community momentum for it.

Check out the keynote video here.