Protocol Labs recently brought the PL network together in Lisbon for a distributed conference. Here's our recap of the event.
PL Summit
LabWeek22 kicked off with the PL Summit. Juan Benet, founder and CEO of Protocol Labs, gave the opening address on his vision for the future. During the five-day speaker series, attendees heard from CEOs, CTOs, and engineers in the Protocol Labs network as they shared their successes, product innovations, and more.
Research & Development took center stage during the Impact talk, demonstrating how innovation in the PLN helps grow many early research projects into fully fledged production networks.
Our CEO Boris Mann gave a brief overview of IPVM and the other projects that Fission is working on. You can watch his presentation, cued up below.
It was also there that Protocol Labs announced the winners of a $100K prize pool. We were delighted that IPVM was selected as a grant recipient!
Hacker Base
The Fission x Filecoin Foundation x Lightshift Hacker Base opened for co-working, workshops, and demos. Throughout the week we hosted an Open Metaverse Meetup with Mona Galleries, Danny O'Brien's Decentralize All the Things! talk, a Filecoin Accounts Working Group session, web3storage's UCAN Build Apps with IPFS workshop, an FVM Open Hack Day, a Web3 Creators meetup, a Filecoin Private Data co-working event, and demo sessions from CASA, SpruceId, Ceramic, and MetaPals.
Meetups
Fission attended a CASA Mini-Gathering and folks from Metamask, WalletConnect, web3.storage, SpruceID, and Ceramic were all in attendance. We continued the discussion on the CAIP-25 RPC Methods proposal that was initiated at Dappcon.
Our co-founder and CTO Brooklyn Zelenka enjoyed participating in the "Move The Bytes" Working Group. This group is focused on making IPFS faster and more reliable by building a protocol that can replace bitswap, and aren't waiting for any specific team to lead the way. They are true go-getters!
We always try to host community socials whenever we're around for a conference, and this time was no different. We partnered with the lovely folks at web3storage for a Happy Hour at our favorite rooftop bar.
IPFS Camp
On Day 5 of LabWeek22, IPFS Camp 2022 kicked off by gathering the IPFS community for talks, workshops, discussion circles, hacking time, and more, all focused on celebrating recent wins and looking ahead to the future of the IPFS protocol.
Boris gave a presentation on Fission's Webnative SDK, and how we are making far edge app development much easier with identity, data, and compute solutions.
Boris also live-tweeted his experience throughout LabWeek22 and IPFS Camp.
Our CTO Brooklyn Zelenka participated in a panel on ways to improve the developer experience. She shared how Fission's stack does the heavy lifting on encryption and access control so developers can focus on the features and benefits of the app they want to produce.
FIL Lisbon
On Day 8 The Filecoin Foundation kicked off the FIL Lisbon conference with speakers, panel discussions, and interactive workshops with storage providers, users, and builders from the Filecoin ecosystem. Topics included FVM, NFTs, the Metaverse, and more.
It was announced that Filecoin Foundation, Protocol Labs, AMD, Seagate, and EY are coming together to form the Decentralized Storage Alliance. The Alliance is focused on supporting the adoption of decentralized technologies by helping organizations make the transition to Web3. Through education, advocacy, and sharing and establishing best practices, the goal is to increase the use of Filecoin, IPFS, and libp2p technologies.
Conversations & Next Steps
UCAN continues to unexpectedly show up in lots of places, which warms our hearts at Fission. Lots of people are building new products, or trying to make their custom tech run on IPFS, and we are delighted that UCANs are becoming the go-to tool when it comes to passwordless authentication.
We also had some great conversations around identity and capabilities, where the idea for WhoCANs came about. WhoCANs are a way to delegate from a name to a key. This is really useful where we want to share something with someone, but don't know their key in advance, or where we want to be able to rotate our keys without rotating everything. The permissions can be tied to a long term name (like an email address), and you can get new keys if you can prove that you control the address!
Since the conference, Blaine and other UCAN community collaborators have been working on the early stages of WhoCANs. Be sure to attend the UCAN community calls to learn more or lend a hand!
It was so great getting to meet everyone and reconnect with the PL community. We look forward to seeing everyone again next year!