Blockchain, AI, IoT and more – Internet 3.0 is all coming together, so to speak.

The Convergence Alliance is the name of an alliance that's focused on convergence.

The "convergence" part refers to the coming together of next-generation technologies including blockchain, AI, IoT and robotics and to how these work best in synergy rather than as disparate components. The "alliance" part refers to the organisations that are assembling for the purpose of deploying these technologies together.

The Convergence Alliance includes 18 founding members:

It's worth noting that many of these individual members have existing partnerships with each other or contain multiple members themselves. For example, BigchainDB/DEX is built on Ocean Protocol, and MOBI incorporates names like BMW, General Motors and VeChain.

Also in the Outlier Ventures portfolio is Chainlink, Golem, FOAM, RightMesh, Cosmos, Aragon and Botanic.

Why?

"The last 25-year computing cycle has been dominated by The Platform & The Cloud, with obscene value creation for a handful of corporations. However, there is a growing awareness about the trade-offs of the cloud platform and a developed understanding of the benefits of decentralised technology, unlocking a new truly peer-to-peer value exchange. The Alliance is the first manifestation of a counter narrative and a signal of the paradigm shift that’s about to come," said Jamie Burke, the founder of Outlier Ventures.

In other words, giants like Amazon and Google are currently dominating the data space and getting the resulting benefits of a positive feedback loop – the more data you have, the better your IoT, AI and other solutions are, which helps further cement their monopolies and helps them acquire even more data.

This is thoroughly at odds with the ideal vision of everyone owning their own data and a more equitable world through the creation of decentralised networks.

"We're excited to work alongside the Founding members of The Convergence Alliance to accelerate and diffuse a more equitable, scalable and usable Web3.0, centred around a New Data Economy and the cognitive revolution," Burke said.

What?

Facilitated by Outlier Ventures, The Convergence Alliance converged convened for the first time on 2 July 2019 to establish objectives for the alliance.

These include the following:

Standards Peer Group. With the blockchain ecosystem expanding so rapidly, especially at the level of base-level blockchain protocols, interoperability and standardisation are essential.

With the blockchain ecosystem expanding so rapidly, especially at the level of base-level blockchain protocols, interoperability and standardisation are essential. Guidance. The Alliance serves as a place for members to collectively agree and communicate their technical and commercial expertise to help direct innovations in protocols, applications and support services in more focused and practical ways as well as more easily assemble the venture capital required to bring them to market.

The Alliance serves as a place for members to collectively agree and communicate their technical and commercial expertise to help direct innovations in protocols, applications and support services in more focused and practical ways as well as more easily assemble the venture capital required to bring them to market. Dissemination & Education. Open ecosystems are at the heart of Web 3.0 ideals, so education of developers, businesses and technical academia through targeted events, content and research is necessary to accelerate innovation and spur adoption.

How?

The Alliance will initially focus on 15 difference protocols and applications within its "convergence stack". Together, this stack encompasses hardware, routing, distribution, interfacing and the application layer of the Internet.

Outlier Ventures will direct $30 million of support to this stack over the next 3 years, while the Alliance itself will help educate itself and others, and grow, through working groups, summits, developer conferences, research and the creation of educational content.

It aims to help fund these initiatives through annual membership fees, but first and foremost it is all about carefully curating its membership by requiring prospective Convergence Alliance members to demonstrate a meaningful commitment to the initiative through meaningful deployment of technologies from the Convergence Stack.

It's taking applications now.

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Disclosure: The author holds BNB and BTC at the time of writing.

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