05-27, 15:30–16:25 (CET), Seed
Today main focus of Web3 is on DeFi, especially when it comes to privacy. Early cypherpunks and Web3 evangelists always promised data ownerships as one of the key values, but we never got it. I usually put Web3 and the cypherpunk movement under the same umbrella “The Open Web” - not the case today and we have to start looking into how do we rebuild the internet stack(non-defi) in a Web3 way.
- worked at big tech (google/facebook) joined the web3 space (near protocol as early infra engineer) because of passion for rebuilding normal apps like social, messaging and regular apps we use on a daily basis which arent financial to reflect the Web3 values.
- motivated the by the early cypherpunks to go back to early days and have a fully encrypted P2P internet which never has to trust or depend on any singular third party and look into alternative solutions which arent blockchain, but rather blockchain adjecent.
Oleksandr Kurbatov, Lead of Cryptography, Rarimo Protocol.
Oleksandr is a cryptographer specializing in zero-knowledge proofs, decentralized identity, and applied cryptography. He has co-authored Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) with Vitalik Buterin: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7812; and authored dozens of well-recognized research papers: https://github.com/distributed-lab/papers, contributing to advancements in privacy-preserving technologies.
An engineer by background, which worked at Google, Facebook, became passionate about the idea of the Open Web (not so much defi, but learned to appreciate it as well later) and joined NEAR protocol as early infrastructure engineer. After NEAR started Calimero with the idea of building a solution for enabling private data in Web3.
Daniel Nagy's longstanding interest in cryptocurrencies was initially purely academic: reading and publishing papers on the topic, participating in conferences and teaching cryptography at ELTE Budapest University of Sciences. While somewhat active in the Bitcoin community beginning with 2010, his involvement in the industry became full-time with joining Ethereum in 2014, after the token sale, but before the genesis block. His most widely used contribution is ERC-681, the standard for encoding Ethereum transaction requests in URLs and QR-codes. His project, Swarm -- the decentralized storage layer for Ethereum -- became a separate project in 2020, of which he was vice president until 2023. Since resigning from Swarm, he has been involved in various DeFi projects of smaller scope, in advisory roles and as an investor.