Web3 Summit 2024
2024-08-19..2024-08-21
Berlin, Germany
[Web3 Summit 2018, Web3 Summit 2019: Chainlink Oracle HackerNode, Web3 Summit 2024, Web3 Summit 2025, Web3 Summit 2026]
as the organisers put it
Web3 Summit is an open and collaborative space where developers from all around the world gather with one goal in mind; to advance a fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web, web3.
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Opening Remarks | Fabian Gompf | 05m |
Event returns after a five‑year pause (last runs 2018–2020) and is sold out with a capacity crowd, combining open‑source, crypto and crypto‑crypto communities… | ||
| The Prehistory of Blockchain | Bill Laboon | 26m |
Haber and Stornetta introduce a blockchain timestamping scheme and Surety publishes weekly block hashes in the New York Times for 14 years before Bitcoin; Adam… | ||
| Gnosis AI: Onchain agents & longtail predictions markets | Martin Koppelman | 22m |
Agents run fully on-chain, call a dynamic tool registry and use an AI Mech to fetch evidence, scrape ~13 websites and output a P_yes 0.2 for “China invades… | ||
| Games People Play | Billy Rennekamp | 11m |
Argues that onchain games suffer from limited expressivity and block-time lag and proposes a play-first verify-after architecture using handwritten ZK circuits… | ||
| Building blocks for Network Privacy | Will Scott | 27m |
Surveys concrete network-privacy primitives, quantifies gains with k-anonymity and linkability metrics, and compares trade-offs in throughput and latency… | ||
| Decentralized Technologies at the Internet Archive | Arkadiy Kukarkin | 17m |
Internet Archive archives the visible web since 1996 and faces scale limits: tens or hundreds of billions of records break naive IPFS assumptions because… | ||
| Accelerating Coordination for Consumer Crypto and Web3 Services | Wes Floyd | 17m |
Argues that bootstrapping consumer Web3 needs shared security and a marketplace for trust, using EigenLayer-style restaking so operators, restakers and AVS… | ||
| Unpacking the Past, Present, and Future of On-Chain Analysis | Liam Kelly, Jan-Oliver Sell, Jonathan Levin | 26m |
Chainalysis marks a decade and claims blockchain tracing now catches illicit flows more effectively than many legacy banking systems, with the percentage of… | ||
| Onchain Capital Allocation: The Next Frontier | Kevin Owocki | 18m |
Gitcoin delivers about $60 million to open-source developers using quadratic funding and expands toward retroactive public goods funding and a planned Aloe… | ||
| The Chain Mail Gaze | Wassim Z. Alsindi | 23m |
Argues that Bitcoin’s protocol creates an insatiable energy appetite and cites studies comparing its climate impact to gold mining, notes 10.5 million coins… | ||
| Closing Keynote Day 1 | Phil Zimmermann | 01h 02m |
Argues that bottom-up design beats top-down systems and gives concrete examples: an autonomous tape-cartridge agent design, PGP decentralized web of trust… | ||
| The Public Interest Internet | Robin Berjon | 26m |
Argues that software is governance and code becomes a bureaucracy that creates choke points and accountability failures, illustrated by an April 1999 case… | ||
| Building Global Developer Communities | Tamar Menteshashvili, Vicktoria Klisch | 38m |
Groups describe concrete practices: a 24‑hour instag Grant to fund local meetups, weekly developer office hours, and an IRL hackathon called Build Station that… | ||
| Memecoins, Restaking, & Memechains: Where is this all going? | Zaki Manian | 38m |
Argues that real products are yield, volatility, leverage, and payments, and that stablecoins are the clearest product-market fit; claims restaking and staking… | ||
| Unifying Blockchains: Innovations for Seamless Interoperability | Seun Lanlege, Giorgio Zinetti, Friederike Ernst, Shawn Tabrizi, Susannah Evans | 38m |
Panel lays out concrete interoperability options and trade-offs: $2B lost to bridge hacks (Ronin, multichain exploits) pushes focus to ZK light-client bridges… | ||
| Every Chip Counts: Decentralized Cloud Rebellion | Christian Killer | 38m |
Cloud computing is monopolized with 67% market share for the top three providers and 75% for the top six and hundreds of subprocessors listed with access to… | ||
| Crypto-Economic Coprocessors & Their Applications | Seun Lanlege | 38m |
Claims that a blockchain can act as a cryptoeconomic co-processor that runs native on-node computation and attests results via consensus + state proofs… | ||
| Knowledge Token for Global Good | Aaron E Walsh | 38m |
Open-source system that tokenizes discrete learning activities into a learner-specific NFT called the knowledge token, paired with AI tutoring tools and a… | ||
| New Models of Trust on the Frontiers of Authenticity | Jonathan Dotan | 38m |
Starling Lab spends five years building end-to-end authenticity tools: it ingests five petabytes of genocide video, prototypes a camera-tethered notary that… | ||
| Keynote Day 2 | Jaron Lanier | 38m |
Argues that the primary test for web3 and AI is whether real people are better off, not benchmarks, citing decades-long trends (40–50 years) where early… | ||
| Making Blockchain Anarchist Again | Harry Halpin | 27m |
Claims a working decentralized mixnet that mixes individual packets, adds delay and noise, and routes them independently to foil metadata correlation and large… | ||
| Decentralization and the Next Wave of Regulations | Nathalie Boyke, Dr. Joachim Schwerin, Mariana de la Roche Wills, Reid Yager | 33m |
EU regulation MiCA targets stablecoins and classifies a narrow slice of crypto while leaving fully decentralized systems out of scope; the law takes 7 years… | ||
| Why Privacy Is the Missing Link to Web3 Adoption | Alex Pruden | 29m |
Argues that broad Web3 adoption hinges on privacy and offers a pragmatic path: a launch-ready platform (Aleo) built from the Zexe paper with SnarkVM and Leo… | ||
| Wallets and Platforms - Could the Game be Changing? | Bumblefudge | 30m |
Claims that wallets must become interchangeable like browsers and that Wallet Test Framework plus conformance suites are the missing forcing function. Points… | ||
| Web3 Citizenship | Gavin Wood | 01h 05m |
Proposal claims personhood must be engineered, not magically solved, and implements a privacy‑first system using Polkadot pieces: a relay‑chain pub/sub, ring… | ||
| Closing Keynote Day 3 | Richard M. Stallman | 01h 09m |
Contrasts free software (centered on user freedom) with open source (practical, depoliticized); claims large language models are generators not AI that produce… | ||
| Do We Need Network Constitutions? | Tommi Enenkel | 24m |
Argues that networks already have constitutions: code, whitepapers and norms guided real upgrades like the 2010 fix, SegWit and Taproot and Bitcoin signaling… | ||
| Trust-less and Efficient Bridges via Random Sampling | Bhargav Bhatt | 24m |
A protocol that verifies crosschain finality by asking a relayer who claims 2f+1 signatures to reveal a random sample of M signatures, reducing onchain cost… | ||
| From Surfing Giant Waves to Building People Centered Clouds | Matthew Schutte | 28m |
Claims a peer-to-peer app framework that runs on participants’ own devices, not a blockchain and with no global consensus, supporting real-time docs, video… | ||
| State of ZK | Anna Rose | 26m |
A concise chronology from 1985 proofs to 2024 engineering: academic ZK research becomes practical with Groth16 and later PLONK, Halo 2, Nova and Stir; teams… | ||
| Under The Hood of zkID: | Nicolas Mohnblatt | 18m |
Most web2→web3 identity systems reuse a single ZK circuit: verify a signature and match plaintext criteria (hashing, big-int math, elliptic curves, image/regex… | ||
| FRI-Binius: Polynomial Commitments for Tiny Binary Fields | Jim Posen | 22m |
A new polynomial commitment scheme packs tiny-field coefficients into larger embeddings using a tensor-algebra reduction from F2 to a working field and… | ||
| Panel Discussion | Anna Rose, Jim Posen, Nicolas Mohnblatt | 36m |
Survey of 2024 ZK work names specific systems and tradeoffs: evidence for LTIS fold lattice SNARKs as a new cryptographic direction offering post‑quantum… | ||
| Importance of Data Protection & ZK for Scaling Web3 Adoption | Giles Cope | 20m |
Midnight claims to resolve a blockchain trilemma by combining utility, ownership and privacy: five years of work so far yields a devnet now, testnet soon and… | ||
| Recent Developments on Multi-Party Schnorr Signatures | Elizabeth Crites | 28m |
Survey of concrete results and deployments: several schemes (Musig→Musig2, FROST, MuSig2 variants, DWMS, Speedy) move from broken two‑round designs to… | ||
| Privacy Preserving Personal Unique Identifiers | Sebastian Rodriguez Cabrera | 20m |
Claims a privacy-preserving way to prove uniqueness by cryptographically deriving per-context identifiers from a single universal UID (passport or biometric)… | ||
| dApps: How Unstoppable Are They? | Tadej Vengust | 18m |
Uniswap keeps core logic as smart contracts on-chain (no owner controls), while its UI runs via Cloudflare + IPFS front end with each IPFS hash published to… | ||
| Why Don’t We Onboard Users with Their Social Context? | Hira Siddiqui | 21m |
Claim: web3 still suffers from cold start persists because wallets are identifiers without interests, and fractured chains and smart-account varieties fragment… | ||
| Unlocking Web3: Bridging the UX Gap for Crypto-Newcomers | Yeho Hwang | 20m |
Claims that crypto newcomers face a higher cognitive load at signup and onboarding, causing measurable drop-off and conversion loss, and analyzes three… | ||
| Progress In the Decentralized AI Stack | Zoe Meckbach, Lex Sokolin, Hartej Sawhney, Harry Halpin | 32m |
Panel argues that current generative agents are useful but limited—agents act like interns rather than autonomous managers; practical builds include Telegram… | ||
| Manifesto for a Dark Renaissance | Amir Taaki | 23m |
Argues that mainstream crypto surrendered to regulation and that a resilient anti‑surveillance stack is necessary, then shows work: a peer‑to‑peer… | ||
| Aftermovie | 01m | |
Recap footage claims that after years of work the community advances a fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web, showing dozens of demos: identity… | ||
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