“What's the name of that famous museum in Paris? The Louvre? I went through that place in 20 minutes.” - Peter Falk

I went to 39 conferences, panels and keynotes during Paris Blockchain Week.

Does that make me a masochist?

Possibly.

It was painful at times.

Thankfully, there was plenty to take my mind off the cramp.

Croissants, for example. And coffee so bad you’d rather drink river water from David Hasselhoff’s manky Covid mask.

But more than the dietary disappointment of a city that mistakenly prides itself on breakfast, there was the blockchain.

Web3 in all its European glory.

Culture, finance, identity, sustainability, charity, scaling solutions, marketing, storytelling, ZK Proofs.

Common threads and repetition? You bet.

Shining, glimmering and baying for attention like the monuments of the City of Lights.

Here are 14 web3 trends from Paris Blockchain Week, along with links so you can learn, think, write and read about them yourself.

Because the future is calling.

And you’re dedicated to it.

** Disclaimer **

Before I begin, as a sci-fi nerd and fan of Snow Crash, I have to say Michael Amar’s interview with Neil Stephenson was my personal highlight. And proof, if you ever needed it, that sci-fi writers are a different breed when it comes to explaining what technology means for culture.

**Prologue ** Regulation.

For the love of God, let’s get regulation out the way first.

“Openness, interoperability and theoretical wandering on what web3 will end up being are driving the conversation. Is this at the expense of the values, ethics and philosophy we need to build the future around?”

I attended two talks on ethics in the metaverse. It’s not enough, but it’s something. With all the talk of ZK-proofs and KYCs, here’s a question for you: do we have the right to be forgotten?

If you answered yes, that isn’t so compatible with immutability.

Hence the need for conversation.

Protocols with catchy names like Polygon Labs EVMS, Consensys ZkEVM and ZkSync ZkEVM were all the rage at Paris Blockchain Week.

Some are saying this Summer will be one of Layer 2’s. With ZK Sync, Layer 0, Starknet, Scroll and eighty billion other EVMs and scaling solutions getting Airdrop Farmers scrabbling in bizarre test-nets for gas change, what is clear: you need to get up to speed.

Mrig P wrote a great introduction for Third Web here.

Or you could start here with ZKP Science, a web3 website that was mentioned more than five times during various talks.

Know your customer? I barely know myself.

Who am I?

Who are you?

Have we met?

What used to be a yawn is a reality we now have to wake up to.

Especially as ZK-proofs might not be the solution we all thought.

Every pitch mentioned KYC. Most talks alluded to it, or mentioned it with the volume of their not-mentioning it.

Does that make sense?

Who doesn’t love the paradox of digital identity?

The world is unevenly divided into two groups.

The three billion people who can’t access the internet and get a digital identity and the three billion who can’t escape theirs.

Define Irony.

People mentioned Estonia a lot.

“Account abstraction enables smart contracts to initiate transactions themselves, so that any logic that the user wishes to implement can be coded into the smart contract wallet itself and executed on Ethereum.” - .org

Account Abstraction. Oh god.

That’s what the geeks and the smart people were talking about at Paris Blockchain Week: Account Abstraction.

Reading between the lines, If this list was in order of importance (it isn’t, it’s a random pattern) I’d have AA in the top three.

More of an idea. And I don’t remember who said this, but it’s a healthy way to think about it.

Utility isn’t a sentence. Don’t just say ‘utility’ over and over again like some kind of broken down seismograph tripping over after-quakes, think about product-market fit and the challenges you’re trying to fix and what your audience craves.

Focus on benefits, forget the tech. Be like Steve Jobs and reverse engineer. Something you’ve all been shouting from the pulpit on LinkedIn and Twitter and Mirror and Discord for some time. 

Go you.

Celebrate yourself.

You deserve it.

“Soulbound tokens and their host Souls allow individuals, clubs, DAOs, brands and companies to establish and track reputation in web3. This can be used for a variety of purposes, from verifying an artist’s legitimacy, securing loans, proving education, offering customers exclusive experience and rewards to season tickets for sports clubs or verifying a candidates employment history.”

Soulbound tokens, last year’s niche have become this year’s fashion statement.

All the cool people at Paris Blockchain Week were talking about them.

But there was actually more excitement and immediate utility around…

“Unlike traditional NFTs, which have a fixed set of metadata, Dynamic NFTS can change their metadata -whilst keeping its unique identifier – based on external events by using smart contracts to execute pre-set demands based on received data from a blockchain Oracle. Chain-link, we’re looking at you.

This opens up a wide range of utility and application of NFTS in the real and virtual world. Car deeds, house deeds, death deeds, the story of your life engraved on the blockchain.

DNFTs got everyone at Paris Blockchain Week weak at the knees.

NFTs gifts and airdrops? Speak to Rich Tella or Greg The Younger about this.

Neither of them were at Paris Blockchain Week, both of them could have added depth, warmth and knowledge to the many many conversations about NFT gifting, cross brand collaboration, bi-directional value exchange, artist-fan relationships, building an audience and creating value and excitement around IP and content without worrying about the clammy fingers of those dreaded third parties coming in and taking 87%.

Make no mistake, DeFi is the beast driving the blockchain truck, but up back, the building blocks of a cultural shift are sliding around.

Web3 is culture.

Say this again.

So you remember.

Web3 is Culture.

But DeFi is driving the minibus.

Go on those dApps and move fictional virtual currency between chains.

Been there, done that.

You know when you’re reading Cointelegraph or the Whale Watcher and they say X exchange has moved 8 trillion dog coins? They’re not using Binance. They’re using OTC trading.

Those three billion? They won’t be getting laptops and spawning into Decentraland anytime soon. Many of them have mobile phones though. And once Elon Musk covers the globe in a network of satellites that are affordable to those on a dollar a day, they’ll come online.

And that’s when the fun really starts.

“What's the name of that famous museum in Paris? The Louvre? I went through that place in 20 minutes.” - Peter Falk

I went to 39 conferences, panels and keynotes during Paris Blockchain Week.

Does that make me a masochist?

Possibly.

It was painful at times.

Thankfully, there was plenty to take my mind off the cramp.

Croissants, for example. And coffee so bad you’d rather drink river water from David Hasselhoff’s manky Covid mask.

But more than the dietary disappointment of a city that mistakenly prides itself on breakfast, there was the blockchain.

Web3 in all its European glory.

Culture, finance, identity, sustainability, charity, scaling solutions, marketing, storytelling, ZK Proofs.

Common threads and repetition? You bet.

Shining, glimmering and baying for attention like the monuments of the City of Lights.

Here are 14 web3 trends from Paris Blockchain Week, along with links so you can learn, think, write and read about them yourself.

Because the future is calling.

And you’re dedicated to it.

** Disclaimer **

Before I begin, as a sci-fi nerd and fan of Snow Crash, I have to say Michael Amar’s interview with Neil Stephenson was my personal highlight. And proof, if you ever needed it, that sci-fi writers are a different breed when it comes to explaining what technology means for culture.

**Prologue ** Regulation.

For the love of God, let’s get regulation out the way first.

“Openness, interoperability and theoretical wandering on what web3 will end up being are driving the conversation. Is this at the expense of the values, ethics and philosophy we need to build the future around?”

I attended two talks on ethics in the metaverse. It’s not enough, but it’s something. With all the talk of ZK-proofs and KYCs, here’s a question for you: do we have the right to be forgotten?

If you answered yes, that isn’t so compatible with immutability.

Hence the need for conversation.

Protocols with catchy names like Polygon Labs EVMS, Consensys ZkEVM and ZkSync ZkEVM were all the rage at Paris Blockchain Week.

Some are saying this Summer will be one of Layer 2’s. With ZK Sync, Layer 0, Starknet, Scroll and eighty billion other EVMs and scaling solutions getting Airdrop Farmers scrabbling in bizarre test-nets for gas change, what is clear: you need to get up to speed.

Mrig P wrote a great introduction for Third Web here.

Or you could start here with ZKP Science, a web3 website that was mentioned more than five times during various talks.

Know your customer? I barely know myself.

Who am I?

Who are you?

Have we met?

What used to be a yawn is a reality we now have to wake up to.

Especially as ZK-proofs might not be the solution we all thought.

Every pitch mentioned KYC. Most talks alluded to it, or mentioned it with the volume of their not-mentioning it.

Does that make sense?

Who doesn’t love the paradox of digital identity?

The world is unevenly divided into two groups.

The three billion people who can’t access the internet and get a digital identity and the three billion who can’t escape theirs.

Define Irony.

People mentioned Estonia a lot.

“Account abstraction enables smart contracts to initiate transactions themselves, so that any logic that the user wishes to implement can be coded into the smart contract wallet itself and executed on Ethereum.” - .org

Account Abstraction. Oh god.

That’s what the geeks and the smart people were talking about at Paris Blockchain Week: Account Abstraction.

Reading between the lines, If this list was in order of importance (it isn’t, it’s a random pattern) I’d have AA in the top three.

More of an idea. And I don’t remember who said this, but it’s a healthy way to think about it.

Utility isn’t a sentence. Don’t just say ‘utility’ over and over again like some kind of broken down seismograph tripping over after-quakes, think about product-market fit and the challenges you’re trying to fix and what your audience craves.

Focus on benefits, forget the tech. Be like Steve Jobs and reverse engineer. Something you’ve all been shouting from the pulpit on LinkedIn and Twitter and Mirror and Discord for some time. 

Go you.

Celebrate yourself.

You deserve it.

“Soulbound tokens and their host Souls allow individuals, clubs, DAOs, brands and companies to establish and track reputation in web3. This can be used for a variety of purposes, from verifying an artist’s legitimacy, securing loans, proving education, offering customers exclusive experience and rewards to season tickets for sports clubs or verifying a candidates employment history.”

Soulbound tokens, last year’s niche have become this year’s fashion statement.

All the cool people at Paris Blockchain Week were talking about them.

But there was actually more excitement and immediate utility around…

“Unlike traditional NFTs, which have a fixed set of metadata, Dynamic NFTS can change their metadata -whilst keeping its unique identifier – based on external events by using smart contracts to execute pre-set demands based on received data from a blockchain Oracle. Chain-link, we’re looking at you.

This opens up a wide range of utility and application of NFTS in the real and virtual world. Car deeds, house deeds, death deeds, the story of your life engraved on the blockchain.

DNFTs got everyone at Paris Blockchain Week weak at the knees.

NFTs gifts and airdrops? Speak to Rich Tella or Greg The Younger about this.

Neither of them were at Paris Blockchain Week, both of them could have added depth, warmth and knowledge to the many many conversations about NFT gifting, cross brand collaboration, bi-directional value exchange, artist-fan relationships, building an audience and creating value and excitement around IP and content without worrying about the clammy fingers of those dreaded third parties coming in and taking 87%.

Make no mistake, DeFi is the beast driving the blockchain truck, but up back, the building blocks of a cultural shift are sliding around.

Web3 is culture.

Say this again.

So you remember.

Web3 is Culture.

But DeFi is driving the minibus.

Go on those dApps and move fictional virtual currency between chains.

Been there, done that.

You know when you’re reading Cointelegraph or the Whale Watcher and they say X exchange has moved 8 trillion dog coins? They’re not using Binance. They’re using OTC trading.

Those three billion? They won’t be getting laptops and spawning into Decentraland anytime soon. Many of them have mobile phones though. And once Elon Musk covers the globe in a network of satellites that are affordable to those on a dollar a day, they’ll come online.

And that’s when the fun really starts.