The Third Web

Recently I visited India representing the DFINITY Foundation. The trip was supported by upstart venture production and consulting group, Dunya Labs, and advocacy group, InCrypt. Those ten days altered my understanding of the way technology manifests products and the driving role the needs of high growth nations will have in defining the digital landscape of tomorrow.

In this episode, I’m joined by co-founder of Dunya Labs, Cathy Guo, and co-founders of InCrypt, Nitin Sharma & Sumukh Shetty. We examine the Indian startup, business and regulatory environments. We also look at the growth of telecommunications infrastructure alongside macro demographic trends and the unique business conditions they create.

https://www.incrypt.co/

https://www.dunyalabs.io/

Incrypt

Investment, community building, and policy research and advocacy

Has produced study and guidence on regulation

Dunya Labs

Research Arm

Product specific research

Infrastructiure team connecting applications to protocols

Community and incubatioon

Cathy’s Book

Entrepreneurial philosophy

Corporate responsibility

Emerging tech landscape in India

Emerging startup ecosystem

The way that Indian startups create social and economic value

How do you see blockchain technology beign deployed in india?

Low trust, high administrative friction in india

Middlemen are a big problem

Desire for transparency and automation

More data is moved through Indian infrastructure than the US

Beginning with banks and private ledgers

Supplychain, etc. basic pilots that we are used to seeing in the first phase of blockchain experimentation

Next step is public blockchain

This is limited by the regulatory environment

Look at india for talent, users & capital

The 4g Rollout

India is experiencing a leap frog effect for technology rollout

Tech companies

Indian tech companies are moving from a service based model through a period of optimizing external business models for the indian market to a native innovation model where they will begin exporting technology

There are 18 tech companies valued at over USD1b

It is important not to overestimate the Indian consumer base

There is limited local market protectionism

There may be 1.3 billion people but the number of consumers of tech products may be 30-50 million

Users can’t pay the way that they can in China or the US

Companies survive by being very lean

Talent is cheaper

This makes it a good place to launch

Deep tech is still limited

Need funding and educational support

If we compare the indian market to where it was 10 years ago you see 10 - 100x growth but it is still an order of magnitude lower than china/us

There is a huge impact in reducing fees on increassing addressible market

Almost 50% of indians are under 30

Little legacy infrastructure but high web and mobile penetration

3 million software developers in india with a 50-70% increase in graduates yoy

Legacy

Primacy of agriculture

Fear of automation (computers)

This has changed

What are the business models that will drive the next generation of Indian unicorns

Many current unicorns are already expanding overseas

Enterprised focussed, or SaaS companies can be based in india and address markets abroad - Zoho, Freshworks

A new crop of SaaS companies are emerging with that model

This allows the targeting of specific niches because of the lower cost of talent

Many blockchain projects fit this model

Engineering Education

Theoretical

Lack of innovation focus

Desiged to pass you on to a services company

MOOCs and open source are enabling autodidacts and hackers to innovate

Tertiary education is of variable quality

Brain drain is a major problem

Regulation

Bit Connect took USD3b equiv from India

https://factordaily.com/walmart-turns-to-flipkart-for-tech/

https://www.dunyalabs.io/

https://www.incrypt.co/

In 2015 I interviewed Jack du Rose about Colony - his autonomous platform that could track contribution to a common enterprse and reward tokens representing stake in said enterprise. Three years and two private betas on, we hear from Jack about his experience building a system to revolutionize the way we work together.

Part of what makes Colony facinating is to see the enormity of the events that have taken place in the years since it’s conception and how in spite of these events, the process of product design has proceeded in a linear and systematic fashion, uninfluenced by the white hot speculative market.

Colony is preparing to go live this year if you’d like to learn more visit colony.io, or visit them on twitter https://twitter.com/joincolony

https://twitter.com/the3rdweb

Zilliqa is a Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance based, public, programmable blockchain platform that uses Proof of Work as a syble resistance mechanism. Combining PBFT and PoW is a brilliant trick to bring the state finality required for scaling through network and state sharding.

Amrit Kumar, Head of Research, and Xinshu Dong, CEO, offer an overview of the project.

At the same time, we learn from two of Singapore's innovation magnates of innovation about the advantage provided by both the government and educational institutions of the region. [Especially noteworthy after the success of Project Ubin]

Epicenter episode:

https://epicenter.tv/episode/209/

@the3rdweb

the3rdweb.net

On this episode of Web 3.0, we hear from Brian Behlendorf, the head of the Hyperledger project at the Linux Foundation, and leading figure in the open-source software movement.

Brian began developing open-source code during the mid-1990's and was also the lead developer of Apache Web Server — one of the worlds most used pieces of software.

Today, in the midst of a blockchain boom, Brian’s focus is still on free software development. I spoke with Brian in October. We were both in Cancun for Def Con 3.

thirdweb.net

https://www.hyperledger.org/

"The DFINITY project was formed to research ways of enabling public decentralized networks to host a virtual computer of unlimited capacity. This rests upon a new blockchain computer that is similar in concept to Ethereum but has vastly improved performance and, ultimately, unlimited capacity. The starting requirement was that the systems developed should be useful in joining 1 million or more mining clients."

Huge claims, but the DFINITY project is indeed one of the most interesting infrastructure builds in blockchain today. This episode has been under embargo for almost four months so it's with great pleasure that I finally get to publish.

Dominic Williams, the inventor of many of the technologies employed by DFINITY joins to walk me through the consensus paper. This is a highly technical episode, but as the white paper is now available it will make a valuable companion.

Thirdweb.net

Artificial Intelligence Researcher Ben Goertzal and Blockchain Solution Architect, Simone Vulpem discuss the SingularityNet artificial intelligence marketplace. Currently, the market for artificial intelligence is dominated by industry giants with huge monolithic offerings with features far beyond the often niche applications may businesses have a need for.

Smaller organisations provide bespoke solutions but these can be expensive and configuration heavy.

SingularityNet gives independent developers the ability to place their purpose specific components in a wrapper which can be plugged into a global network of AI components. These components can be hired to perform tasks, and may outsource tasks to one another through the use of a reputation system. This allows an optimal configuration of independent components to self assemble.

What is really exciting about SingularityNet is the sheer demand it places on blockchain systems. Applications like this are creating economic pressure to solve the scalable blockchain problem in a way that is effective not only as a PR tool, but also in practical applications.

thirdweb.net

In today’s episode we look at spank chain, an adult industry cryptocurrency payment system built using Ethereum. Currently, financial intermediaries in the adult entertainment industry exploiting their position to impose arbitrary rules on content by refusing to serve participants who produce content a specific payment processor finds objectionable.

The effect of this is to persecute already marginalized groups like trans men and women and as well as severing the income of both individuals and businesses in a one hundred Billion dollar industry.

Using payment channels and a novel ethereum based tech stack, Ameen Soleimani and Janice Griffith aim to liberate the adult industry from exploitation by evil financial intermediaries. Soon there may be a place so spend ether.

This episode contains graphic descriptions of pornographic content so if that makes you feel uncomfortable you’ll want to give this one a miss. Take a moment now to stop this recording.

For more visit thirdweb.net

spankchain.com

Today we are taking a quick look at a range of problems and their solutions through the lens of a little known project known as Gazecoin. Under the gaze coin banner are a range of projects, among them, a virtual world with purchasable real estate which serves as a content delivery channel.

I first encountered Gazecoin when founder Jonny peters invited me to check out the project’s pilot content-creation studio in Sydney.

Jonny is an accomplished entrepreneur who made his first move in the entertainment tech space in 1998. He began looking into transmedia and virtual worlds in the mid 2000, and hosted cryptocon, a cryptocurrency summit in 2014. His vision for a narrative driven virtual world and economy enters around one simple input: measuring a users direction of gaze.

Bok Khoo is the legendary Australian Ethereum developer tasked with making Jonny’s vision a reality. This requires a range of tools and is the subject of our discussion today.

Video, mobile first, open APIs, an existing two-sided market, and a userbase already transacting digitally. The YouNow live video platform is an ideal candidate for a monetary network-based business. YouNow’s Props project aims to achieve just this.

Decentralized economies will reshape digital media.

Decentralized monetary networks work well when applied to existing producer-consumer networks.

Today digital media is a producer-consumer network with despotic intermediaries like youtube, Spotify, existing live video sites, etc.

It may be possible to build a new type of business that can compete symmetrically with these intermediaries using a monetary network.

Which businesses can adopt the micro-economic business model?

Two-sided marketplaces

Established digital economies

Network-based businesses

https://www.younow.com/

https://propsproject.com/

thirdweb.net

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-third-web/id899090462?mt=2

Joshua Ashley Klayman, co-founded the blockchain and smart contracts working group at the law firm Morrison and Foerster and the WSBA’s Legal Working Group. We caught up in person at a Cafe in Central Park to discuss gender disparity in tech and ICO regulation, a subject of considerable significance right now.

Women in blockchain:

Social barriers to entry,

Counterproductive responses to gender disparity in blockchain,

Public displays of bigotry.

ICO Regulation:

What percentage of ICOs are legal?

How do “facts and circumstances” bear on the Howy test?

Analyzing the SEC ruling that TheDAO was a security

Regulatory focus on preserving the innovation space

Fear of fraud, scams and terrorist financing

Most ICO tokens are securities

The utility token misunderstanding

The Swiss foundation model and the challenges of separation of governance

Is it irresponsible for ICOs to be raising $200MM in funding?

Thirdweb.net