Berlin Blockchain Week is always a very intense and densely packed ten days. Despite the week being a bit quieter than in 2022 (cue: “bear markets are for builders”), the “hallway track” rivaled even the highest quality main stage talks at the week’s proceedings.
Safe{Con}
The week kicked off with a nice 1-day intensive on “smart wallets” convened by Safe, the most widely recognizable product to spin out of the Gnosis ecosystem. The morning began with Safe co-founder Lukas Schor highlighting the need for smart wallet interop. They have proposed Safe{Core} as a starting point for the road to standards.
After that, Sandeep Nailwal from Polygon prompted the audience to reconsider “trustless” apps as a more critical aim than pure decentralization for its own sake. Tired: dApps. Wired: tApps? Punk6529 rounded out the morning keynotes with a strong case for improving the UX and optionality of self-custody — and why conference talks should never be done remotely.
The two big highlights from the rest of the day were:
- Andreas from Fileverse (who just so happens to utilize UCAN’s) discussing the importance of non-financial use cases and community computers.
- Evin from Disco moderating a panel on Wicked Problems of AA along with Kristof Gazso of Pimlico — one of the co-authors of EIP-4337 — and others. There are some spicy takes in this one, so stay tuned for the video!
DappCon
Sadly, DappCon was missing a stage on a boat this year. That said, walking up and down the venue's stairs really kept the mind focused. And we did get at least one new trilemma.
On Tuesday, I was delighted to debut Secure Design’s Legible Authorization workshop. It was a modest crowd, but great things happen in small rooms. It was fantastic to meet and talk with Thomas from Minerva Wallet about some shared concerns regarding authorization/permissions in the wallet and dApp space.
Wednesday also featured an excellent deep dive into Livepeer’s video transcoding and streaming infrastructure and how to incorporate it into an app seamlessly. Another great project leveraging our beloved UCANs for authorization.
Broadcast Summit
Leaning into the modular and composable spirit of web3, there was a conference inside a conference. On the upper deck of DappCon’s Radial System venue, a fascinating panel and mixer focused on the role of onchain media facilitated by @rafathebuilder. It was great to be introduced to interactive video company MuseMe, which has a broad knowledge of the broadcast media industry, from how the bits stream all the way into the nitty gritty of IP rights.
SchellingPoint / DAO Death Ritual
The round table discussions at Schelling Point were rich, but it was Other Internet’s DAO Death Ritual that offered the most catharsis.
Circles Entroy
In support of Circles UBI announcing new capabilities, they assembled a mind-blowing panel of folks:
- Brett Scott - author of Cloud Money and economic anthropologist
- Julio Linares - cofounder of Circles Entropy, economic anthropologist
- Jaya Klarra Brekke - philosopher of technology and Chief Strategist NYM
- Max Hampshire - Senior Developer Relations NYM
- Chris Goes - co-founder of Anoma Network
- Yulia Khalniyazova - Researcher at Anoma Network
ProtocolBerg
The day of the true giga-brains. If there is one day of sessions to try and watch in full once the videos are posted, this is the one. Props to Kaan Uzdoğan for the gorgeous white-paper chic conference design aesthetic.
I will not attempt to summarize the big ideas expertly landed during Protocol Berg. Just go review the agenda. I am happy to report that I successfully got radicle running on my machine during their workshop.
Ethereum Meetup @ c-base
Last but not least, a night of interesting talks with the homies at C-base. Joshua Davila introduced his new book Blockchain Radicals, which proposes a few counter-narratives to the typical read of what’s happening in the blockchain space. Juan Caballero gave a great introduction to the mission of the Chain Agnostic Standards Alliance, which was followed by a super entertaining dive into the blockchain-based games that social-dist0rtion-protocol has built.
Human Made: ntnt x Bright Moment
One last thing …
Berlin Art Week runs simultaneously, and I was lucky to work on a collage alongside the ntnt collective and their AI named Jan. It was a beautifully installed and crafted installation and performance of human+machine co-creation. I texted an AI, shook a magic 8-ball, and flipped a few coins. But most of all, I did my best to channel the Fission team’s aggregate.
Here’s the gem that chance, curated choice, and expert hand-crafting gave us:
