ㅤ

— Web3 Summit defines itself not as a "crypto conference" or a "blockchain trade show”, but as a "festival for digital freedom" and a "working environment for the next Internet". How does this core philosophy shape your operational strategies, infrastructure choices, and the overall experience you design for participants?

— The experience is meant as a celebration and planning point for a freer online future, not a place to shill anything. This has meant that we have tried to do everything in a decentralized way, even when it’s more difficult. A special demo network has been set up for the summit which lets you communicate with each other, provide identity, pay for things, even make your own applications – in an online, decentralized way. We hope that this not only shows what is possible in the future, but also inspires people to start building it today.

Web3 Summit has a no-sponsorship policy, with no advertising of specific projects, no logo placement, no pay-to-play speaker slots. We do not want - and have never wanted - to be a blockchain trade show. Blockchain is one specific technology used to help bring about digital freedom, among many, many others. This conference is about getting people to start controlling their own online destiny and providing them a demonstration of potential tools to do so.

— The summit’s narrative highlights that trust in the systems governing the internet is collapsing, and that cookie banners and consent notices have merely become a theatre for systems designed to observe by default. In your view, where did this structural crisis of trust in the current internet architecture begin, and what specific role does Web3 Foundation embrace to address this phenomenon?

— The seeds of this distrust were born with the Internet itself. The traditional internet architecture was built with a charming sense of naivete. There’s a really great anecdote in Steven Levy’s book “Hackers” about Richard Stallman protesting having passwords on user accounts back in the 1970s.

Today, though, we’ve seen that we can’t just trust anyone on the Internet. You can see this every time you open your Spam folder. You can see this every time on the news, some company’s database gets hacked, and your personal information is stolen. You can see this every time you actually read the terms and conditions of a website, and see the hundreds of companies your data is sold to every time you visit a website.

Web3 Foundation’s mission is to help ensure a decentralized Internet where people are in charge of their data and destiny. It’s to let people keep private what they want to keep private, and to allow people to publish what they want without fear of censorship. It’s to put power back in the hands of the people, and Web3 Summit is a celebration of that.

— Choosing Berlin is clearly no coincidence, given Germany's long-standing sensitivity toward privacy and surveillance, combined with the city's rich history of hacker culture, open-source experimentation, and political imagination. How does Berlin’s one-of-a-kind character impact and enrich Web3 Summit’s techno-cultural ecosystem?

— Web3 Summit has always been held in Berlin - this will be our fifth year there. Of course, the strong hacker culture makes it a perfect place to hold it. Symbolically, Berlin perfectly shows the failure of any broad governmental system to control people. Centralized systems are by their very nature brittle, and perhaps nothing showed that better than the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A centralised failure led to an unforeseen domino effect. Decentralized technology is similar - thousands of people voluntarily opting out of a system that restricts them, and into a system that lets them be their own masters.

— We are seeing AI rapidly accelerating platform concentration and centralization, making it even harder for individuals to maintain ownership of their online identity.How can Web3 primitives and open systems act as a constructive counterweight this AI-driven centralization and data extraction?

— I like to joke that blockchain is the opposite of AI. Blockchain is all about proof - you can easily verify what has happened on-chain. You can’t lie about having bitcoin, or sending it to someone - anyone in the world can mathematically verify that you did. AI is all about lying - everything an LLM ( Large Language Models, the technology behind AI applications like ChatGPT) does is hallucinating, it’s just that most of the time it hallucinates correctly. By their very nature, LLMs act somewhat randomly.

It’s straightforward to put proof on a blockchain that a particular picture, video or text was produced at a certain time. I can have my computer go check every single Bitcoin transaction since 2009 to ensure that they are all valid. Someone might be able to make a fake video starring a generated Bill Laboon, but they won’t be able to sign a message from my Polkadot account. As our slogan puts it, blockchains are all about “less trust, more truth”. Mathematical proof of personhood is becoming increasingly important as major social media sites and many other sites are being flooded with hallucinations from LLM bots. Blockchain and other Web3 technologies give us a way out of that morass.

— The summit frames privacy not as secrecy, but as autonomy, dignity, freedom of association, and control over information. From a technical operations standpoint, how do you keep underlying infrastructure sustainable and scalable while ensuring users maintain genuine digital agency and complete control over how they participate online?

— The problems related to this are engineering problems and just require smart people to work on them. When Bitcoin was designed in 2008, it was astounding… but it was a first attempt at a decentralized network, and to be honest, it shows. It uses more electricity than Switzerland to run. It’s limited to about four transactions per second on the base network. Developing an application on Bitcoin is difficult – for some types of applications even, impossible, but not easy in any way.

We have solutions to these problems, though. We have developed faster, more efficient networks that scale thousands of times beyond Bitcoin. We can use proof-of-stake and other technologies to avoid Bitcoin's massive electricity consumption. We can create much more powerful and usable applications after fifteen years of evolution, even if people don’t always realize it.

We will also be demonstrating easier ways for individuals to produce applications that meet their own needs at the Web3 Summit. If there’s something they need to do, they can do it themselves. We want to give people agency not just to use these technologies, but to help develop them themselves.

— Web3 Summit is explicitly designed as a participatory environment that brings together developers, artists, researchers, activists, and philosophers. How does creating a microcosm of diverse perspectives elevate the atmosphere, and how do insights from non-technical creators reshape the dialogue at the summit?

— There’s the stereotype of the type of nerd who cares about this stuff, but it impacts everyone, not just an obscure subset of developers. Be it the artist being exploited, the researcher who finds themself blocked from accessing data, the activist shadow-banned and censored, or even the ordinary person whose data is recorded without informed consent and sold on, every human using the Internet is affected.

Working together, we can find solutions more easily than if we work in our own silos. The developer who can help journalists receive information from whistleblowers safely. The artist who awakens an idea in a researcher to go down a new path. The activist who helps change laws to allow developers to write code freely. Our fates are all intertwined, and solutions are more likely to come from a mixing of expertise and background.

— The guiding star of this year’s summit is not about claiming to have all the answers, but rather an open invitation to come help explore better possibilities. As people head home after two intensive days at Funkhaus Berlin, what is the single most important question or realization you hope they take away about the future of digital life?

— The key point we want to get across at Web3 Summit is that a digital dystopia is not inevitable. If we collectively care enough, we can bend the arc of history to something that respects individuals more than the current system in which we live. I want people to realize that the future is in their hands – that they have the power and capability to shape it. The problem is well-known; the answer is not. The question I hope they are asking themselves is definitely not “What is going to be done about this?” but rather “What am I going to do about it?”

BOOK YOUR TICKET THE WEB3 SUMMIT NOW