Mission

Mission

WEB3 is the vision of the serverless internet and the decentralised web; an internet where users are in control of their own data and identity.

The Web3 Foundation, based in Zug, Switzerland, nurtures and stewards technologies and applications in the fields of decentralised web software protocols, particularly those which utilize modern cryptographic methods to safeguard decentralisation, to the benefit and for the stability of the Web3 ecosystem.

Function

A dominating, but not exclusive focus for the Web3 Foundation is set on the research, development, deployment and maintenance of the "Web 3.0" technologies. Much of this is comprised by the "Polkadot (project)" multi-chain protocol, the "Webchain” smart contract platform, and the "Shh" messaging protocols.

The Web3 Foundation identifies these technologies and their varying related products and middleware, as well as the advocacy, education, developer-adoption, and base-layer/demonstration application relating to this protocol set as their primary objectives.

The Foundation was created to support and finance appropriate research and development activities and projects, promote and educate the public on Web 3.0 protocols (including Polkadot, Swarm/IPFS, Webchain, and Whisper/Shh) to the benefit and for the stability of the Web 3.0 ecosystem.

The creation of a layer of communication between multiple functioning public and private (or permissioned) systems, many with different objectives and with varying methods of consensus, is aimed at interlinking presently proprietary blockchain technologies.

Initiatives

Advocacy:

General support for the education and adoption of decentralized technology.

Collaborative Community Efforts:

To find alignments and solutions for decentralization by facilitating collaboration across teams with common aims.

Grant Programs:

The Foundation will set aside funds for research and development initiatives led by third parties that address general ecosystem issues.

Web3 Foundation will align with other projects and Foundations to deploy funds towards further ecosystem research and development through a joint effort.

Research & Future Work:

The Web3 Foundation will build out a research team to work on topics that are central to the development of Web 3.0. Some of the focuses are stated to be:

• Network Dynamics

• Cryptography (secret transactions and contracts, succinct proofs, subjective proofs)

• Governance models

• Consensus Algorithms

• Policy Learning and Reputation Systems

• Statistical Modeling and Anomaly Detection

• Secure Computation Hardware

• Unique Item Identification

• Blockchain scalability technologies

• Smart Contract Development Tools

• Testing Frameworks

Council

1. President: Dr. Gavin Wood

Dr. Wood is the co-founder and current director of Parity Technologies Ltd. He has designed state-of-­the-art analysis tools and programming languages, as well as co­-founded several technology start­ups. Dr. Wood has presented to numerous audiences around the world from keynotes at regional technology conferences to musings on the future of legal systems at Harvard. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of York.

Previously, he was the Chief Technology Officer and co­-founder of the Ethereum Project. He is the co-designer of the Ethereum Protocol, author of its formal specification, and created and wrote the first functional Ethereum implementation. Dr. Wood designed and stewarded the Solidity language, was the project chief of the IDE, and designed and implemented the Whisper protocol.

2. Vice President: Dr. Aeron Buchanan

Dr. Aeron Buchanan has been involved with the Web 3.0 vision since its inception, joining the Ethereum project as a mathematical modeller in 2014 and going on to be Head of European Operations and Regulatory Compliance. He received his doctorate from the Robotics Department of Oxford University in the field of Computer Vision after working as algorithm designer for the special effects industry, and read Engineering and Computer Science for his undergraduate degree.

He has designed algorithms for UAVs, started tech companies building light-show controllers and blockchain technology, and acted as a consultant to economics and ecological research laboratories. He is currently an advisor to several important blockchain projects aiming to continue the advancements in consensus platform technology and more readily bring the benefits to society and the economy.

3. Executive Director: Peter Czaban

Peter oversees a team in Zug and abroad tasked with building out the interconnected web for use by permissioned and permissionless ledgers. He and the Web3 Foundation staff support the development of next generation distributed technologies through partner projects.

Peter obtained his Masters of Engineering degree at the University of Oxford, reading Engineering Science where he focused on Bayesian Machine Learning. He held the position of Systems Engineer at BAE Systems, where he worked on the next generation of tactical mesh networks and distributed knowledge bases. Due to his interest in economics, Peter joined Bluecrest Capital where he worked on developing quantitative pricing models for variety of derivative products. He engaged in business and machine learning consulting for a number of Oxford based startups, including Invrea and Gyana.

Within blockchain he first worked at Purse.io to build a Bitcoin marketplace. Then as a principal engineer at Parity Technologies, he contributed to the Parity Ethereum Client development, in particular looking at consensus algorithms, as well as driving enterprise solutions built on the Parity technology stack. He has given multiple talks at conferences (BPASE, DevCon, EdCon) and meetups.

With a realization that public chains are driven primarily by functionality, and permissioned layers by financial application and privacy, Peter became involved with the effort to create a communication layer between chains aims to enable interaction in a trustless manner and to accomplish each of these goals in a secure fashion.

Peter became discovered this space through an interest in machine learning and developing protocols beyond Bitcoin’s functionality, and in his current role with the Web3 Foundation, Peter aims to help to create an environment in which partner organisations with the right talent and purpose are have their efforts supported, and the Web 3.0 ecosystem as a whole can develop and flourish.

Council Members

1. Reto Trinkler

Reto Trinkler is the Chairman and Co-Founder of Melonport AG; blockchain software that seeks to enable participants to set up, manage and invest in technology regulated digital investment funds.

With a background in mathematics from ETH Zurich, he has been developing Ethereum smart contracts since the platform's inception. Prior to that, Reto developed a profitable trading algorithm for sport betting exchanges in C++.

He also serves as advisor to the trade association MAMA, the Multichain Asset Management Association.

2. Ryan Zurrer (Polychain Capital)

Ryan is the Principal and Venture Partner at Polychain Capital. He has been an active investor and miner in the blockchain ecosystem since 2012. For five years, Ryan was the CEO of Brazilian renewables firm 958MW portfolio. Prior to that, Ryan worked in investment banking focused on financial technology.

Polychain invests in blockchain technologies and blockchain-based incentive systems, and was founded in August 2016 by Olaf Carlson-Wee.

Glossary

• Block Headers — the method by with distributed ledgers (blockchains) identify block position, number, or height, and notate where in the chain a block belongs.

• Connectivity Management — managing network connections to connect only to relevant parties: e.g. collators or validators

• Contracts Repo — an open-source code repository, located on github, in which Polkadot keeps smart contracts used by the client.

• Devp2p — the backbone of Ethereum, working as a secure networking system or communication layer that allows for peer-to-peer connection and more while remaining simple in nature.

• Full Mode — a complete validation state, akin to a full node on another chain.

• Interpreter — a program that directly executes code without precompiling into another application or machine learning program.

• IPFS[1] — a distributed file system aimed at world-wide connection for use as a database or subsystem like HTTP with the potential to realize a serverless internet.

• Kademlia [2] — a technology used to back file peer-to-peer sharing systems like IPFS and bittorrent using decentralization and denial of service resistance.

• Kovan — a Parity Technologies-built public Ethereum test network.

• Libp2p — a modular, feature rich networking stack (computer networking suite). It backs a technology called IPFS (InterPlanetary File System). This more advanced system seeks to power a distributed web that treats web data a bit like bittorrent handles files.

• Multiplexing — mechanism that will be used to connect devp2p to libp2p.

• Ping Protocol — times the round-trip for sent and received messages.

• Polkadot Networking Protocol — a protocol for exchanging blocks, transactions, block candidates, consensus messages, and more over the network.

• Proof of Authority (PoA) [3] — a replacement for Proof-of-Work often used for private blockchains. It does not depend on a distributed set of users and nodes to solve arbitrarily difficult mathematical problems (how Proof-of-Work functions), but instead uses a set of “authorities” — nodes that are explicitly allowed to create new blocks and secure the blockchain.

• Proof of Concept (PoC-1) — an early experimental version of our application that demonstrates feasibility and early functionality.

• Pwasm — Parity’s version of a WebAssembly environment which can be used for blockchain execution.

• Relay Chain Contract — One of the contracts deployed on the Relay Chain that govern the behaviour of Polkadot.

• Rust[4] — an open source programming language similar to C++, but intended to provide better memory safety while maintaining performance.

• WebAssembly (wasm) — a quick, web-centric coding language with roots in javascript, ideal for in-browser client-side use, with support for compilation from C and C++, and Rust among other languages.

References

^ IPFS

^ Kademlia

^ https://github.com/paritytech/parity/wiki/Proof-of-Authority-Chains

^ Rust (programming language)