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 C

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 contact@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 blockch

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

Welcome to the Third Web. A podcast about the technologies powering the next generation of human civilisation. I’m your host, Arthur Falls. This podcast is targeted at industry observers looking for a technical examination of issues on the frontier of what has become known as the blockchain space. However, for those less versed in the field, supplementary content will be published in anticipation of each episode. Failing that, I’ll add links in the notes to help along the casual listener. Blockchain technology, and specifically, the idea of a value-transport enabled internet is no longer new. Looking at the recent history of the space, we see a hockey stick of innovation and investment. In 2014, just as the first ICO boom launched, I began producing my first podcast, Beyond Bitcoin. It explored the explosion of new blockchain platforms and other innovations in the space. As exciting as this technology was, common problems existed across all platforms: scaling to support broad adoption, and providing a

The founders of Attores, Gorang Torvekar and David Moskowitz discuss their notion of “smart contracts as a service”.  The platform is currently being piloted by nanyang polytechnic in Singapore as a digital diploma registry. This is being extended into a full professional network platform called Indorse, which ran an ICO earlier this year. In addition to the above we discuss the birth of the Ethereum Kovan testnet, which has it’s origins in a pub, just outside the Attores/Ethereum Foundation/Digix co-working space in Singapore. http://www.attores.com/ etherreview.info https://itunes.apple.com//podcast/the-ether-review/id899090462?mt=2

Current solutions for decentralized data processing like Golem or Truebit provide part of a data services solution. Storj, Filecoin, Sia, and others offer storage solutions.  Streamer tokenizes the value in streams of Data. Using the same interface for both data delivery and payment, Streamr hopes to create a two sided market for data. This rounds out the basic data services portfolio, operating synergistically with existing projects.  CEO Henri Pihkala and COO Risto Karjalainen explain. etherreview.info https://itunes.apple.com//podcast/the-ether-review/id899090462?mt=2

Element Group is a full service investment bank for the crypto-token markets. Stan Miroshnik has a background in traditional finance. After watching the crypto-markets form, Stan and his colleagues began working to understand these new markets and build a traditional finance business to serve the space. We discuss the maturity of the companies using the token launch fundraising mechanism, and those investing in the tokens. Stan sees an emerging market with strong similarities to traditional capital markets and opportunities for institutions used to investing there. The entry of organizations like Element Group into the crypto-asset space indicates the fulfillment of the prophetic prediction of a super fluid economy Joe Lubin expounded in an episode of Beyond Bitcoin three years ago. It is also a harbinger of a stable paradigm for Ethereum: Capital markets 2.0 etherreview.info https://itunes.apple.com//podcast/the-ether-review/id899090462?mt=2

Today we hear from Ted Livingston, who founded Kik interactive in 2009 to address the problem of chat between blackberry, android and iPhone. Since then their chat app, Kik, has exploded in popularity, experiencing use by up to 40% of US teenagers. In 2015 Tencent, the builder of Chinese chat giant Wechat, purchased a 5% stake in the company at a Billion dollar valuation. A move that some are saying has anointed Kik as the Wechat of the west. It’s interesting to see the youth focus with One Direction leading their award winning marketing campaign of 2014 . Kik is a somewhat anonymous platform, with it’s own economy in which stickers are traded and users can be charged for access to certain chat rooms. By launching the Kik in-app currency, Kin, as a cryptocurrency, Kik interactive aims to enable the Kik micro-economy to grow independently and organically. The Token launch ended recently with nearly one hundred million USD equivalent raised. No surprises there. What is interesting is that registered contributor

Between re-constructing TheDAO and building his own governance platform Governex (once Boardroom), ConsenSys developer Nick Dodson is building a portfolio of powerful Ethereum based tools. Disappointingly, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance instantiation of Governx is not up for discussion. However, we do dig into the abstract structure of governance tools, data-driven design, the flaws of The DAO, and what can be salvaged from that project. Ares DAO is a joint project between Nick and shadowy Ethereum community member Dino Mark. By applying the research conducted during the development of Governex, and lessons learned from watching DAOs in the wild, the two man team has repaired and refactored TheDAO. In doing so curators have been removed, direct democracy has been implemented, and the proposal deposit has been raised significantly.  The team plan to launch a charity DAO to test the Ares DAO’s functionality. We also chat about the demise of the nation state and the role of tribalism in the evolution of blockc

In today's long overdue, landmark episode we are joined by an international panel of leaders in fin-tech and blockchain law: Claire Wivell, Hannah Glass (Australia), Alex Simms (New Zealand), Peter van Valkenburgh (USA), and James Duchenne (USA/Mauritius) The theme for the discussion was regulatory sandboxes — frameworks for enabling businesses to operate in a deregulated environment. The goal is to allow legislative bodies to develop an understanding of new businesses before regulating them. We have seen a successful example in the United Kingdom, but Australia’s efforts to replicate this have not been so successful. Claire Wivell explains why. We follow this with a discussion of the unique environments of Australia, Mauritius, Singapore and Dubai. New Zealand unfortunately is not so interesting at this stage (both Alex Simms and myself have independently been involved in some interesting conversations since this episode was recorded so watch this space). We conclude that a US regulatory sandbox is impossibl

Lee Weiss of the US law firm BernsWeiss discusses the Coinbase/IRS dispute. The dispute began in November 2016, when the IRS summoned Coinbase to hand over data about all users who were active on the exchange from 2013 to 2015, with a view to investigating the tax compliance of individuals who have transacted in cryptocurrencies. On behalf of one or more anonymous Coinbase users, BernsWeiss took the issue to court and was recently granted permission to argue against the summons, which among other things demanded access to users’ public and private keys. If complied with, this would effectively give the IRS access to all customer funds, making it a clear and easy target for hackers. This is an unprecedented use of the John Doe summons procedure, which was intended for situations where the IRS has identified specific tax avoidance but can’t identify the specific parties who have engaged in that illicit conduct. If determined to be legal, this summons would set a precedent under which the IRS could demand the

David Bailey, CEO of BTC Media, discusses the recent shutdown of BTC-e and its mysterious connection to the MtGox hack which led to the exchange’s demise in 2014. He also introduces Po.et, a revolutionary proof-of-existence blockchain platform. The arrest of Alexander Vinnik and seizure of the BTC-e website by the FBI in late July shed some long-awaited light on the cold case of the 650,000 bitcoins which went missing from MtGox over several years from 2011 to 2013. Upon his arrest, WizSec released a comprehensive report detailing their findings on the matter, and stating that “Vinnik is [their] chief suspect for involvement in the MtGox theft (or the laundering of the proceeds thereof).” Bailey also talks about BTC Media’s partnership with Po.et, whose proof-of-existence mechanism uses hashing to allow media producers to timestamp and license their content in an unalterable system which will verify and automatically issue digital ownership. Po.et combines this timestamp with metadata about the published co

Luka Müller and Dianne Schepers of MME - the Swiss law firm famous for running the Ethereum crowdsale - discuss jurisdictional constraints, Crypto Valley, novel crypto-asset classes and the “second wave” of tokenization. With 25 previous “token generating events” and 60 pending projects, MME is a clear leader in the crypto law realm. The firm is now welcoming a “second wave” of clients; companies from the legacy economy which are seeking ways to enter the blockchain world through tokenizing their pre-existing equity. In this discussion Luka outlines some of the major distinctions between US and Swiss law in relation to token issuance, looking at securities law, donations, and the commonly used foundation model. These and other regulatory differences, compounded by the stable and already-decentralized nature of Swiss government, make Switzerland the ideal jurisdiction for Crypto Valley, the rapidly growing successor to Silicon Valley based in Zug, a financial center. Alongside its long list of clients, MME