Today we wrapped up day 4 at Filecoin Liftoff Week. We heard from builders, entrepreneurs, and activists across the Web3 ecosystem and beyond, including Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, Pinata’s CTO Matt Ober and CEO Kyle Tut, Livepeer founder Doug Petkanics, Carbon Five principal developer Hannah Howard, and Jonathan Dotan of the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research, and more. Here are some highlights from today’s “Store on Filecoin” events, and a snapshot of what’s in store for tomorrow.
🌊 The Coming Wave of Video and Visual Media
Video and visual media were recurring points of discussion in today’s agenda. Livepeer founder and CEO Doug Petkanics talked about Livepeer’s goal of “building humanity’s open video infrastructure.” Video makes up for 60% of the internet’s downstream traffic. A tremendous amount of video is consumed, but not stored. Petkanics emphasized that as more and more video-enabled devices come online (e.g. cars), we are going to see a proliferation of video that needs to be recorded, stored, analyzed, and shared. Today’s infrastructure cannot keep up - societally or financially. From a societal perspective, today’s infrastructure will continue centralizing in a few proprietary platforms that will monopolize online video traffic. Financially, Web3-powered video has proven 10-100x cheaper than alternative centralized options, ensuring access to video infrastructure will remain open in the future. Jonathan Dotan of the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research emphasized the importance of ensuring visual media moves onto a decentralized network. He discussed provenance and resilience as the most critical reasons for a sustainable video solution, and emphasized Filecoin’s opportunity to provide that verifiable infrastructure.
🕸 Making the Internet Whole
Today made clear an underlying and consistent message from the rest of the week: Filecoin’s launch has filled a missing piece in the puzzle of Web3. Founder of the Internet Archive Brewster Kahle talked with Juan Benet about the role of storage in the maintenance of critical internet information. The theme of the talk was that Filecoin’s launch enables the next phase in the Internet Archive’s mission to protect all of humanity’s information. Antoine McGrath and Bill Marczak - founders of CRSReports - emphasized that their mission to make available every Congressional Research Service Reports is arriving at the next phase of evolution with Filecoin and IPFS, which ensures the documents they are making public will exist in perpetuity on a decentralized network.
🔜 Protection for (and of) the Future
As we near the end of Filecoin Liftoff Week, many of the talks and panels have turned an eye towards the future. Brewster Kahle warned that we’re at risk now of witnessing the collapse of open protocols and the preference of centralized platforms. He urged people to invest their time in building “blanks…but decentralized.” Slack, but decentralized. Google docs, but decentralized. The fireside chat ended with the announcement of Filecoin Archives, an effort to begin migrating humanity’s most crucial information onto the decentralized network to ensure its preservation. Jonathan Dotan emphasized the potential of future crises in his talk “From Storage to Justice.” He began with the Nuremberg Trials, which used documentation as evidence of crime to enact wide scale justice for war crimes during World War II, the Holocaust in particular. He compared those trials to recent violence in Syria, during which documentation could not be used as evidence due to rampant global misinformation. He described our current state as “a crisis of truth” and compelled all of us to ensure that emerging decentralized protocols remain powerful and remain full of integrity to restore and protect justice for the future.
Join us for Liftoff Week!
This week is Filecoin Liftoff Week, five days of talks, panels, workshops, demos, and community events. From October 19 - 23, tune in to listen to leaders from across the Web3 ecosystem as we celebrate Filecoin’s launch last week and plan for its continued growth in the months and years to come. Register and join us!
Tomorrow, October 23, is day 5 of Liftoff Week. It’s our last day of the event, and it’s all about the Future of Filecoin. A preview of the agenda:
- 12:00pm PDT: Kickoff our final day with Molly Mackinlay, Jeromy Johnson, and Colin Evran of Protocol Labs and Ryan Zurner of Dialectic.
- 1:00pm PDT: Join Web3 superstars for a panel about Building the New Wave of Web3.
- 1:45pm PDT: Wendy Hanamura of Internet Archive, Jonathan Dotan of Stanford Center for Blockchain Research, and Nathan of the Guardian Project sit down for a panel about why preserving humanity’s most important data is critical in “Guardians of Our Shared History.”
- 2:20pm PDT: “Better Connected: Government Support for Web3.”
- 2:55pm PDT: Round out Liftoff Week with “Meet the Filecoin Foundation” with Web3 leaders from across the ecosystem.
See the Full Agenda
See you tomorrow!