On 10 May the SOS18 came to the its final stage as far as talks go. The last presentations were in the sign of scaling, privacy and encryption. The thoughts were focused on certain ways how to scale public networks and how to protect the data on the network.

Anish Mohammed began the day with a set of thoughts, as he put it, on multiple aspects of cryptoeconomics of data storage. With it he touched on several important topics such as price of current cloud storage and how much it is realistic to expect to charge for similar decentralised solutions, the economics of encryption, attack models and more.

Gregor Žavcer believes ethics will be crucial in forming the new Web 3.0

After Anish was finished Nikola Jokić from DA PowerPlay took the stage. He gave a crisp run through of the technicalities of deploying Ethereum networks on Red Hat OpenShift solutions. The aim of the talk was to show possible steps to achieve production-ready Web3 software deployment.

Ethics will be central to the new web

Third up was Gregor Žavcer from Datafund to present our vision. He expounded on the concept of data as labour; something that can bring revenue to others but is not their property. This concept is important because our digital and physical selves are starting to merge, so it matters who owns the digital side of us i.e. our data.

Ethics, said Žavcer, will be a determining guide in this new world, especially in the Web3 applications. The decentralised apps will basically be unstoppable, that’s why we need to go beyond solely monetary motivations in constructing them.

Privacy on Swarm

Privacy was also the key topic of Daniel Nagy’s talk titled “Privacy on Swarm”. With a basic overview of Swarm’s layered structure and how data chunks work, he then went onto explaining the encryption algorithms and processes Swarm uses to protect data. The topic really engaged the crowd, which led to posing a lot of questions during and after the talk.

Nagy gave an overview of Swarm’s encryption mechanisms.

Software scaling for the next level

Just before the lunch break Thomas Bertani from Oraclize showed us how it would be possible to scale Ethereum with Oraclize and Swarm. He noted that in the blockchain world data source, application and an oracle are three distinct entities, whereas in the Web2 world data providers and data sources are one entity (think Reuters).

Scalability as a function of a second layer, as they see it in Oraclize.

Since oracles provide information to different blockchain dApps Thomas first focused on how Oraclize authenticates the supplied data. He sees services like Oraclize as a second layer upon the public blockchain networks, such as Ethereum, that would gather large amounts of data and would actually be scalable with off-chain processing.

Encryption is king

Balint Gabor’s talk initialised the second part of the day’s talks. It came as a continuation of David’s talk and centred on the implementation of encryption into Swarm with a thorough technical walkthrough.

It was followed by NuCypher’s Michael Negorov who presented the whys and hows of their decentralised key management system, using decentralised proxy re-encryption method.

Negorov’s decentralised proxy re-encryption method reaped a lot of interest.

An interesting take on Swarm use came from Ameer Ahmed in his talk “Ontologies for structured data in Swarm” where he presented an approach to categorising structured data such as museum catalogues.

Deep into Datafund

The talk before last was reserved for Datafund’s lead developer Tadej Fius who dove into the bowels of the consent management application’s architecture. The task ahead is to enable users to take control of their data and share it in an anonymised form on prediction markets, while the tool is transparent for both sides. As Fius explained, Datafund uses a semantic model and a graph database for the user data. The goal is to build a knowledge base with a knowledge graph upon it. In his presentation, he went through these main categories and gave a short demo of our prototype application.

And the day was brought to its end with Julien Bouteloup’s presentation of the Flying Carpet, a decentralised charging station for drones. As he showed the room, Flying Carpet is much more than it looks at first sight since it mixes AI and blockchain in a very unique and clever way.

Datafund’s deeper architecture presented by Tadej Fius.

So, that’s it. The devs have a hackathon ahead of them on Friday and a great trip around Slovenia on Saturday. We had a great time listening to all the great speakers and truly novel ideas from around the world.

See you all next year!