Author：Dime Tamara
On October 31st 2022, Arweave hosted a full day event in Lisbon featuring insightful presentations from Arweave and project founders within the ecosystem.
0x499 invited some guests for DeTalks on November 4th 2022. The topic was “Some News From Arweave in Lisbon” and the following were invited to join the event as guest speakers:
Sebastian — COO of Arweave, Olivier — Marketing Manager of EverVision, Tate Berenbaum — Founder of Community Labs, Pascal — Co-founder of Akord, Falco Sun — Founder of Metaweave, Axel — Metaweave Team, Archie — Investment Analyst at Hansa Network, Amelia — COO of Bundlr Network, Pierre — Arweave News and Jakub — Founder of Redstone Defi. The event was hosted by Romain, an Arweave lover and 0x499 contributor.
Romain: I think every single person here saw that a few days ago there was that meta news where they were kind of using Arweave and in the comments Section of the tweet I saw something that was pretty interesting which was that no one understood what Arweave really is. Everyone thinks it is just data storage. So this question is for Tate. Can you just explain for these people in a brief way, “What is Arweave and why is it not just a Data Storage?”
Tate: Sure, I think that at a higher level, Arweave was originally created to store newspaper articles but as people started joining the community and building On top of Arweave, we began to realize that you could build much more than just Data Storage systems on top of it. For example I know that Jakub is working on Warp which allows people to write smart contracts on Arweave. We also have a component of Arweave called the Prima lab which is the easy way to go about accessing data on Arweave and so because Arweave is not opinionated, you can store any type of Data. Another thing that people are doing on Arweave right now is storing Applications. This involves storing the HTML CSS and JavaScript of these web applications and uploading it to Prima Labs, thereby effectively creating applications that can live forever. If you pair that with Warp contracts, you have this entirely native full stack Prima lab application that is completely owner list and can just be out there and live forever.
Jakub: Thank you Tate for the great overview. We at Akord believe that we need to do something more by actually unlocking the possibilities of different amazing products that are in the space to interact with each other through our smart contracts platform. In a more complete way it is a protocol that has its own token and can use other tokens to incentivise users among other things. Recently, we are seeing more and more super interesting and amazing apps that combine a few different projects and resources together. So the system is becoming more and more rich and robust and I think that is good for us, especially for the end users.
Pascal: We can just say that Arweave is conceived to be public and open and what we are doing at Akord is bringing in a privacy layer. We do encryption so your data can be publicly stored on Arweave or completely private where you own the keys.
Romain: Arweave in Lisbon was actually hosted by Bundlr Network, so Amelia was like the Mastermind of the whole thing. So Amelia, what is your take on Arweave in Lisbon and do you think that these kinds of events are a must in this community? Do you think we need more of it?
Amelia: Thank you. It really was not just me though. It was a group effort so definitely I will not take credit for the Arweave ecosystem coming together. Everyone came together to make it possible. Concerning doing these kinds of events, I think it is very important that we meet as a community in person. There are countless people who have come up to me to tell me how educational such events are and how much they learnt. So I think our AMAs and Articles are good but there is something more about person to person interactions. I think it is super impactful to be able to show what we are building in action and in demonstrating synergy among different ecosystem players. I think it is important to have these events.
Axel: I think that human connection is really important. We have moved to Lisbon since January of February and we have witnessed how the city is growing with different communities. For example Near protocol is represented in Lisbon and other projects like Polygon and other people that are passionate about web3 and crypto and many other projects are there. I think that it is great that Arweave organized something here because it can create a bigger impact. What I noticed is that in Arweave, we are building a lot more than showing ourselves out, so I think it is really good to have this event. So, thank you very much Amelia for organizing this event.
Olivier: I have been to many crypto events this year, but what I specially noticed about Arweave in Lisbon is that it is one of the only ones in which people actually joined the speaker room and are paying attention. No one left during the Demos and no one was distracted with their phones and this really showed the interest in the ecosystem.
Romain: Let us go through the Demos. The first talker was actually Sam and he talked about this kind of like four Dao system which they want to introduce, So what can you Devs here say about that and how it can be a game changer for the ecosystem?
Falco: Basically what I think is super cool with Arweave is that it enables developers to really use their full advantage on Arweave to deploy their applications easily and very fast and that is what I feel is a game changer that distinguishes Arweave. So on main Arweave for example, we like to build full stack hyper apps and this is really easy and cost efficient because you can just bundle your web application into a transaction and that can exist forever on Arweave.
Tate: So I think the name is evolutionary apps or evolutionary applications. At a higher level, the idea of evolutionary apps comes with the challenges associated with coordination of work in traditional decentralized environments, like DAOs for example. While there are strategies you can try to employ to make work coordinated it is very difficult to do that without centralizing everything or several components of that Dao. Evolutionary Apps introduces something called Fair Forks which Samuel evolved from Arweave and wrote a really good paper on it. So instead of asking people to coordinate work, why don’t we just make it as easy as possible to fork applications, make changes that they want to make and then put those changes out for the community to decide which is the better version. So the idea of evolutionary apps incentivises the builders to fork applications and publish versions that are supposed to be better than the original and also incentivizes the end users to also test these forks and help decide which is the better application.
Pascal: It was a really interesting presentation. I am always excited to hear about the latest projects because Corp and Arweave are like a factory of ideas. As a product designer my mind was on the user and some of the challenges to overcome. For example if we have developers forking multiple times then I have several versions of the app to review and so questions coming to my mind was as a user do I want to be reviewing the app, how frequently do I have to be reviewing the app to decide which is the best version? There is another Feature in another fork and so how do I decide which is better?
Romain: Here is a question for Sabastian regarding evolutionary apps. How can we make evolutionary apps and these events the ecosystem is planning. Do you think there is a way we can make them coexist and help the apps continue growing?
Sebastian: I think the power behind evolutionary apps is that the developer does not have to be worried about someone else doing something different to what you have been building. People can build on your work and improve it and you still get attribution for the base work you created. When you think about it, this provides a way in which people can cooperate. Sometimes the team could get distracted and the users are waiting for more capabilities that the project can provide and someone can come along and add to the base work for the users to decide if it is improved. The developer of the initial base does not feel bad because they still get attribution for it. Just as Tate said, it is a great way of coordinating work and it is really an awesome idea and a cool way of developing apps further.
Romain: So I have a question for Archie from Hansa. What do you look for in projects? What makes the Arweave ecosystem stand out from other ecosystems?
Archie: I guess when we think about investments, we kind of go back to the first principles of value. I think this whole idea of Evolutionary apps suits that. People being able to create these sorts of applications that anyone else can build on and the infrastructure that enables that makes Arweave really attractive. As we get into this point now, Arweave seems to be on the flattening curve of actual protocol upgrade and it is now evolving towards the stage of being friendly towards people building on it.
Romain: I want to talk about upcoming events. Emilia, What event is coming up on the 5th of November.
Amelia: So the event tomorrow, we are hosting a decentralized infrastructure leadership event with three different panels. It includes the Arweave ecosystem players as well and a few other projects aside Arweave. So we have Disco, ceramic, someone representing Lens, World coin, Live Peer which is a really big project. Essentially, we are going to be hosting leadership panels that are focussed on a few hot topics within the infrastructure space. The first one is going to be following experiences with privacy, access control and identity and our dear friends at the cord — Richard is going to be participating in that one, alongside Elvin from Disco and Jewel from ceramic, so that should be an interesting conversation about some of our privacy and access controls infrastructure which we should begin to start thinking about adopting in the web3 space. The next panel is going to be about the web3 tech start and that will be moderated by Kyle. The last panel will be about web3 structure so we will be removing unnecessary details from the dApps that we are creating.
Olivier: I am briefly going to take over because I noticed that Romain has disconnected. Is there a need for people in Lisbon to apply for these events?
Amelia: Well we are currently at 530 people who have registered and we only have capacity for 250, so I can say I can add you to the list but you better show up early because we are doing it on a first come first serve basis. I am hoping that people are interested about decentralized structure because it is going to be an interesting conversation.
Romain: Going on to the next question, let us go back to the Demos. We had about 9 Demos and we talked about Sam’s Demo but have not talked about Bradstone’s Demo. Mr Jakub, can you give us a little insight on that?
Jakub: I think that a lot of us have Demos today so I will be really quick. The detail that we wanted to show during the Demo is the ability to interact with warp contracts using metamask. I think the ease of access to optimizing products and in Arweave ecosystem we have those that are currently used by more than 30 million users. I think that there is some incredible stuff built on Arweave and we just need to fix the onboarding process to allow more people to be able to discover all that we have built here.
Tate: For the presentation that I gave, I was mainly introducing a project that we were working on in Community labs called execution machine. I was specifically comparing and contrasting the difference between smart weave contracts on Arweave and serverless functions in web2. There was a surprising and interesting correlation in the way those are sort of written and interacted with. So an execution machine for those who do not know is basically a service that you can use to write permanent serverless applications all powered by Arweave, that contain a state. In web2, we have a problem when trying to build Serverless functions and this is that they are stateless inherently. This means that there is no memory associated with serverless functions. In web2, people get around this by connecting it to a database like Mango, but that is an entirely different infrastructure that increases the complexity of the application. So what we are doing with execution machine is exploring what it looks like to use the state of what will traditionally be a smart contract and enable people to interact with that state on Arweave without needing to understand crypto or blockchain. So we are abstracting concepts like public or private keys and concepts like blocks on the execution machine.
Romain: I want to ask more questions about that but we have more. Falco, can you go ahead and talk about what you presented?
Falco: For us, the goal of the presentation was to explain the philosophy of Main Arweave and how we are building on the Permawear. Such as how to use Arweave as a hosting solution and as a way to interact with main Arweave. Just like social interaction between Arweavers. We also tried to build some tools for the ecosystem like our profile which allows you to link an identity to the wallet. That was basically what we tried to show during the Demo.
Archie: Just to put it more clearly, we had two Demo and they were the Demo of Arweave, our main project and also the Demo of our profile. So for our profile, it appears that we need full main Arweave in order to have a human friendly way to see each other since we are talking between wallet addresses.
Romain: Pascal, I know Richard was the one that talked about everything, but if you can pitch in, we all want to hear.
Pascal: Richard presented mainly a case study on a partner that we are working on with Gina bank. Gina bank works with researchers in laboratories which deals with medical data and specifically genetic data. The problem they have is that I think 80% or researchers reported a shortage in sample as the biggest limiting factor in their work. For example, 90% of people would give their support and donate blood if they were sure that their data was properly handled and if they trusted the party associated. So Gina bank is basically working on Bio NFTs and securing consent and medical data of patients. That was the concept we were introducing around the storage and cord vote concept. So you have control and privacy using the Gina bank example.
Romain: Pierre, can you tell us about what you were presenting?
Pierre: We were in Lisbon basically in a dual capacity. First from Arweave news and from descendants. We presented on how the identities and social media will eventually evolve into a permanent beast on Arweave. On Arweave news, from a media outlet perspective, these kinds of offline events are a gold mine because we can actually interview in person a lot of builders in the ecosystem. In a couple of days, we are doing an entire revamp of permacast for that to be able to directly broadcast on permacast from the permaweb data content. From the descendant perspective, we are basically creating a bunch of infrastructure just like a protocol that allows other web3 protocols to be able to connect their identities from those silos and communities that are like mushrooms all over web3 and making them able to basically link it with a permanent identity on Arweave that can be almost passed to the next generations. We will see more about that in maybe 2 to 3 weeks.
Amelia: So the Demo that was done by the CEO and founder, Josh was really actually the same with what we presented in Singapore which is around our vision of decentralizing the world’s data by creating different infrastructures and we focused on one specific problem which is social media data being centralized in the hands of the centralized providers and not providing the ownership back to the end users. So what Josh actually demonstrated is how we can create decentralized social platforms and by integrating other dApps that were created. He took the audience through three steps of integration, pay and upload and what he used in his specific demo was a front end with Javascript from lens protocol. He encouraged everyone to start building today and that was Josh’s demo on Monday.
Romain: So now that we have gone through the Demos, here is the next question for the guests. What is the next step and what should we be doing to attract amazing Devs to these meetups and keep the community growing?
Sebastian: Arweave is a protocol and so projects build on top of Arweave. So, if projects that build on top of Arweave are hosting an event, it does not need to be from the central Arweave team because we all make up the community. Going forward, I think it is important to keep engaging the community and if you are somewhere and you are using Arweave in a meaningful way, you could propose an event that all of us can participate in. We are all members of the same community and participants and what matters is that we make sure that we are bringing everyone together.
Amelia: What I recommend is that Bundlr and Metaweave host in-person events. We are looking for an office space here because Lisbon has become such a great web3 and crypto community. Something I would love to see is us inviting people to come have pizza and snacks at the office and get to know each other better. I would prefer to see that happen than having to travel around to different places. Arweave is based in Berlin for the most part and I think we need to continue having these impactful conversations.
Axel: So this is a very interesting question because onboarding more people is very important and Developers are especially valuable. From my perspective, what we discovered with Metaveave, there are two main axis. The first one is that the ecosystem is really nice and it is simple to build little things that make a change on the top of Arweave and we can extend it in the future. Like this concept of hyper Apps where you can build with native HTML, CSS and Javascript and then push it as a transaction and it becomes a permanent application. I think this is a good way to onboard developers with any type of experience. It is something that we are experimenting right now and any developers listening can go to out Metaveave github where we could accept your requests and if you are eligible, you can get a grant. I think there are many other things that can be extended in the future. There is also this composability which is what we do now with our profile which is used by ecosystem developers and uses global storage. The second axis is like what we experienced in Lisbon which is that all the other projects are doing meet ups and parties and this is very attractive because the vibes, food and music leads to ideas popping out. That is also something that I think is important for human connection.
Romain: We will take the last comment from Jakub and if anyone wants to come up to ask a question, they can do that then.
Jakub: Well for us, there was a project that my friend in Asia worked on. It is called Academy.warp.cc and it is actually like a set of introductions, resources and tutorials to Arweave and smartweave. I think that is another important aspect to focus on and I would recommend it to everyone since we want to encourage building and enable more Devs to onboard into this space. Taking them by hand and showing them step by step about how they can build on Arweave will lead to a better onboarding into the ecosystem.