Mask’s “The Future of Human Connection” event celebrated the post-merge Ethereum community at DevCon, Bogota
Bogotá, Colombia, 12 October 2022 — In line with Ethereum Foundation’s visions, Mask Network co-hosted a side event with Carv and Delysium in Bogota and invited a global family reunion to celebrate innovations, post-merge ethos, and human connections for all. The event was honorably sponsored by RSS3, Ubiloan, Smart Token Lab, Sending.me, and Karavate.
This event, titled “The Future of Human Connection,” was geared toward Ethereum and Web3 builders, thinkers, and game developers who wish to shape the future world and how humans connect to each other through DIDs, games, and other web3 innovations. The lineup at “The Future of Human Connection” took a holistic approach and engaged 500 attendees through six feature talks, three panels, and three after-party lightning talks.
Highlighted panels included: “Decentralized identities in the post-Merge era”; “Transformative Force, the Future of Web3 and Gaming”; “How Web3 Change Communication & Identity?” The keynote speaks themed around AI games, gaming identity, personal data ownership, and how to collaborate with local communities in South America.
Important panel content recap:
In the panel titled “Decentralized identities in the post-Merge era,” we featured Next.ID’s head of growth, Hannah Shen, Mask’s product marketing lead Afra, RSS3’s co-founder, Usagi, and Miguel from a Bogota local community who’s been working for a web3 game Flight of Legends.
Afra kick-started the first question with the morale after Ethereum’s major upgrade. The Merge as the energy at Devcon is electric, the community clearly took a victory lap after this huge success. Hannah said the merge itself didn’t impact Next.ID, but it generated awareness of Ethereum’s working mechanism and welcomed mass adoptions. In anticipation of more users coming to Web3, DIDs become even more pertinent in addressing privacy and security issues around users’ data and assets. Miguel believed the Merge showed an optimistic future for tech improvements. RSS3’s Usagi said, the Merge gave him some personal impact: finally the Merge was completed by reducing the blockchain’s ecological footprint.
The panel also discussed as thousands of ENS badges were printed for DevCon attendees daily, all the major players claimed they were working on “identity”. What will be the end game for DIDs?
Hannah started with Next.ID on building a technology stack that defines an open protocol and way to shape the future identity. Next.ID as a DID service could empower DApps in order to enable a future where businesses are transacted, and people’s data and privacy are protected. As ENS is more of an NFT, and as many builders in the field claim they are making a new DID, Next.ID wants to be the infrastructure layer that allows all kinds of DIDs to flourish.
Later in the event, Afra and Hannah gave two presentations on the products they are building — — Firefly App and Next.ID. It’s the first time the Firefly App ever got introduced to the world.
Firefly App is a pre-beta stage mobile app: it is the next generation, decentralized Twitter for Web3 savvy users. It’s built on top of Next.ID, aims to reimagine how social networks are built, providing a utility for both off-chain and on-chain information streams and giving users the freedom to consume information without exploitation. Afra suggests that the Firefly app takes a realistic approach — — by serving a small niche of Web3 natives, it hopes to onboard more regular Web2 users to the world of Web3.
Hannah introduced some major findings around use cases during Next.ID’s alpha testing phase and upcoming product roadmap. Based on interviews with dApp developers during the Alpha testing phase, Next.ID recognized that identity aggregation and authentication are growing demand for projects to combat phishing and scams, as well as building enriched user profiles and social discovery experiences. The enhanced ProofService can ensure data integrity with cryptography and expand to an Authentication Service that allows users to onboard with Web2 credentials but use Next.ID’s DID call Avatar to later manage their identities across different platforms. RelationService is Next.ID’s identity graph database increases the usability and utility of DIDs by aggregating binding proofs of identities across 10+ open data sources. With 130k+ identity graph mapped, Next.ID team has developed a front-end demo, Web5.bio, to showcase the powerful search and display capabilities of RelationService.
Other involvements at DevCon:
At DeFi Bogota 2022 Summit, hosted by Dystopia Labs, featuring speakers including Stani Kulechov, CEO of AAVE, Hart Lambur, Co-founder of UMA, Next.ID’s head of growth, Hannah, delivered a speech on DID as the foundation for Web3’s massive adoption and shared Next.ID’s thesis on what functionalities and applications are needed for DID projects
To watch the event recap on YouTube, please use this link.
