Fission co-founder and CTO Brooklyn Zelenka presented a lightning talk at BlueYard's On | Off Chain side event at ETHCC in Paris in July 2022.

The guiding question was:

Where is the line between smart contract virtual machines and other decentralized computation and data storage systems? What can and should run and be stored on-chain in the future? How do we choose?

Fission's off-chain identity, data, and compute stack is a core part of spreading "web3" everywhere. It is built on similar foundations and technologies as blockchains, but focuses on a superset of edge computing use cases. Brooklyn's "Edge of Tomorrow" presentation is subtitled Dark Forests, Relativistic Computing & How to Power a New Internet, and is a speed run through the challenges and opportunities we see in connecting on- and off-chain.


First of all, we don't think that the hyperclouds of today should run the entire future of computing – and that's where things are heading if we don't work together to improve things.

What should we be aiming for with web3?

And with Web3 we do have a growing toolbox of options – that need to work together.

The speed of light as a hard limit means that we need to go to the edge – or the far edge of directly on device – to meet certain latency limits for use cases.

And yes, we will insert this image of causal islands – the speed of light limiting information spread. Thinking about where major hypercloud data centers are, and how close they are to population density, is another fun piece of data to examine.

Once we give up on the idea of a single consistent view of data, and that storing it in many places is needed. we are in the Dark Forest: we should be encrypting the data everywhere so it can travel across many different kinds of networks, including fully public. And, that different people have different access to parts of the data – both from access and from latency syncing.

Fission has implemented this as the Web Native File System (WNFS) – an encrypted file system on top of IPFS.

Distributed computation has a lot of history. We're very excited by the growth and potential of WebAssembly, and even more so when it is combined with the global IPFS network and the concept of content addressing. Stay tuned for more around the IPVM and IPLI.

Lastly, Brooklyn wrapped up her talk with a requirements diagram for all of Web3. This is the stack of what we all have to work on building and making interoperable together:

Video & Other Resources

Check out the full presentation slides: The Edge of Tomorrow

Fission's Webnative SDK that is working towards providing a turn key system for front end devs to build edge apps is live today. Start with the Fission developer guide, and drop by our Discord »

If you're interested in more presentations like this, sign up for events from our working group community calls and tech talks in the Fission Luma community »


Thanks to BlueYard for hosting a great set of conversations. You can find the full recap with all the videos on the BlueYard Capital blog »