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PL Genesis x Flow x Filecoin: Secure Sovereign Systems
Recorded: June 19, 2025 Duration: 1:01:28Space Recording
Short Summary
The PL Genesis hackathon, launched in partnership with Flow and Filecoin, aims to drive innovation in secure sovereign systems with a total prize pool of $25,000. This event highlights the growing trend towards user sovereignty in the blockchain space, supported by various grants and funding opportunities.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, hello everyone.
Mic check, mic check.
Please give me a thumbs up if you can hear my voice.
Thank you very much.
And I think we can mic check the rest of our speakers. Ali?
Mic check, mic check.
Perfect. Can hear you well. And Clara?
Hello, mic check.
Loud and clear. Loud and clear. Thank you so much.
And yes, I see that the Protocol Labs main account has joined.
Thank you, Jen.
Let's just give it a few more minutes, three to four minutes, to blast out this Spaces link and make sure everyone
that would benefit from this has joined.
I'm also going to bring Nikki up on stage to mic check as speaker.
Thank you all for joining. It is a Thursday morning, afternoon,
evening, wherever you're tuning in from. So thank you for taking the time out of your day to join
us here. And yeah, really exciting discussion ahead. So super excited for that. I can see Joanna. Welcome, welcome.
Hello.
Perfect. Can hear you loud and clear, Nikki. Thanks for joining.
And while we wait, I'm just gonna play our music, our elevator music as we invite everyone in.
Thank you for joining. Thank you. I'm just looking to kick off at the five minute mark.
So if there's any folks here who are leading communities that are participating in the
PL Genesis Hackathon or have not heard of it and might be interested in participating
please do share the link to the spaces invite them to join
i'm going to start pinning a couple tweets to our jumbotron at the top of this space
for more information information. Welcome to the OneDev community.
Thank you. All right, we are at 6.05 European time, and it is currently 4 p.m. UTC, 4.05 UTC. I think we are good to start.
Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining the PL Genesis Twitter space with Flow and Filecoin.
Today, we are talking about secure sovereign systems. Brief intro, I'm Noma, your host for today. I am leading the marketing side of the PL Genesis
Hackathon. And before we jump into our discussion, just want to give a brief background on the
Hackathon, what it means, why it's important, why you should participate. So the PL Genesis
series is the flagship hackathon series for Protocol Labs.
You probably have heard of Protocol Labs.
Protocol Labs has been leading different breakthroughs across different domains.
So across Web3, crypto, developing breakthroughs in VR, AR, AI, and accelerating, you know, more recently, safe neurotech breakthroughs. So,
Protocol Labs is a pretty large ecosystem stewarding over 600 teams. You probably have
heard of IPFS Project or Filecoin, and, you know, really aligned across various aspects of network
infrastructure. And all that has sort of culminated into this hackathon that is themed this year around modular worlds and is prompting builders to think about every layer of the stack of the web as we know it and think about how to drive us forward.
somewhat of an inflection point as it relates to technological innovation and upheaval.
And this hackathon is asking us to think about what it takes to get to the next level,
to nudge civilization forward toward more freedom and less control by corporations.
Really thinking about building systems that will power our future, secure systems,
sovereign systems,
intelligent and open by design. I'm joined here today by Ali from Flow and Clara from Filecoin. Flow is a blockchain designed for high throughput, user-friendly applications and quite
aligned with the overarching theme of modular worlds. And Filecoin is really the backbone of
verifiable persistent storage and really is
an essential pillar of any sovereign internet stack.
So I'm really, really excited to have you guys here and looking forward to hearing from
you.
But before I go any further, I would like to call on Nikki to speak a little bit more
about the tracks of this hackathon, especially the Secure Sovereign Systems track.
Hey, Noma. Thanks for kicking that off. about the tracks of this hackathon, especially the Secure Sovereign Systems track.
Hey, Noma. Thanks for kicking that off. Very excited to be speaking to all these amazing builders who are already a part of our hackathon or hopefully will be a part of our hackathon.
This is the first hackathon in the PL Genesis series. And a brief, super brief background about me, I run the hackathons
program for Protocol Labs and have been doing so since early 2022. And over the years, I have seen
the type of projects that we get evolve. And I feel like almost proud of the kind of narrative
that the present hackathon that we are hosting
has evolved into, right?
From the early days of where,
hey, use this tool to do X and use that tool to do Y
or like, let's create this fun NFT marketplace.
We've seen a million of those projects, right?
We have come to this place
where we are at this critical moment in time
where WebTree and crypto
and all the other innovative spaces
where, you know, Protocol Labs drives breakthroughs.
It's like a critical moment because we really need some problems to be solved and I'm I I really like the fact that through this hackathon
we are trying to build that narrative and you see that in the in the way our tracks are articulated.
So the track that we are talking about today,
secure sovereign systems,
evolves around those core Web3 values that we started with, like maybe back in 2018, 2019.
And we wanted to build a a more robust more secure internet we wanted to build systems
that were censorship resistant they that that you know would survive even if calamities come in or
they protect the privacy of the users and it's like user first and it gives module it's like modularly built so anybody could
pick any part of uh of any system that was built and and you know do whatever they want with it
and in some sense we have realized parts of the dream like for example the ipfs project is like
so modular and then there are several projects in the ecosystem that use parts of the IPFS stack.
And there are several implementations. So some parts have come true, but there's like a lot of different directions that we have gone into.
And with this track, we just want to like focus again on those core Web3 values.
I just posted a tweet to our um our spaces right now it's it's an old talk from
juan uh that i always get reminded of when when we are on the subject of secure sovereign systems
and yeah i encourage you and all the listeners to go back to that youtube talk from 2019
and hopefully that inspires you to build something.
Yeah, that's a brief overview from my side.
Thank you so much, Nikki.
Absolutely, you know, this track really inviting builders
to think about moving away from, you know,
the centralized choke points that we've grown accustomed to
and, you know, the internet as we know it today
and further toward infra that is user owned, where you can unplug the truth,
users can actually control their data, their identity, which is growing more
crucial by the day with the rise of AI and so on.
So we'll get more into the weeds with those discussions.
And we had a really riveting discussion yesterday
on AI and infrastructure,
and really excited to dive in today.
Without further ado, I would love to call on
our speakers today to introduce themselves.
Maybe we could start with Clara.
I would love to hear from you about Filecoin Foundation's goals,
and really honing in on the challenge prompt within PL Genesis.
Thank you so much for having me.
This is so exciting to be part of this hackathon,
and I'm so excited to also see the great innovations that come out of it.
As many of you guys know, Filecoin is the world's largest decentralized storage network.
We've been around for over a decade, really with this mission that in order
for us to really solve some of the key problems that the Web3 movement is trying to solve,
we have to start with storage first and really bring data ownership back in the hands of people.
So at the Filecoin Foundation, our mission is to store humanity's most important information.
A lot of people don't realize how fragile the web is
and how much data that we take for granted is stored online can be actually lost. And to use
a real world example, there is one case study a few years ago showing that 50% of the links
on Supreme Court documents today go through a phenomenon that Jonathan Zittrain from the
Harvard Berkman Center calls link rot, where that link just stops working. Because what happens when
you rely on a centralized storage solution, someone forgets to pay their AWS bill. And the beauty of
decentralized storage and specifically building on projects like Filecoin is you get that resiliency
of never losing your data when you have a network
of decentralized storage providers all around the world building and running their own type
of data center and being able to store all kinds of files from hot storage to archival storage
to even Web3 use cases like NFTs. So today, if you own an NFT, you're most likely already using IPFS and Filecoin on the
back end. So I'm super excited about our challenge and prompt for this hackathon. We have a total
prize amount of $15,000. And we want to encourage all of you guys to build with programmable storage
on Filecoin. So one thing that happened around two years, a year and a half ago already, is Filecoin
is going fully on chain.
This actually allows us to build even more applications and also be able to do a lot
more than we have in the past.
You can store and retrieve data based off of smart contract logic.
You can enable new payment flows like usage-based billing, escrow,
or perpetual storage funding.
You can also build developer-first tooling or explore impactful use cases
like a data DAO, where instead of one person paying for storage of data,
you could have multiple people co-own data together.
You can also do innovation and archives,
verifiable AI, when you think about challenges in AI today,
content integrity and being able to prove the source of data is going to be more
important than ever. And you can also look at AI training data.
So we have so many different use cases that we would love to see all of you guys
innovate around. So I will pause there and turn back
to Namona.
Thank you so much, Clara. Yeah,
really, you know, identify and absolutely agree with that sentiment that I think decentralized data storage is an increasing sort of crucial need with the way and the velocity at
which technology is advancing. I'd also love to hear
from Ali introducing Flo's perspective on sovereign infrastructure and especially the
bounty focus, which I know is pretty broad, but would love to hear your perspective.
Absolutely. And also, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm super excited for today's chat.
So, yeah, my name is Ali. I am a Devra lead at the Flow Foundation. And Flow is at its heart,
a consumer blockchain built by builders for builders. Really, if we want the value of
blockchain and Web3 to maximize its potential.
It needs to be adopted by everyday people.
We need to get into consumer minds and applications.
So there's a quote by the co-founder and chief architect of Flow, Dieter Shirley,
where he said that Flow is a computer that anyone can use. Everyone can trust and no one can shut down.
I think that quote pretty much summarizes really nicely just how we see ourselves
as well as, you know, the theme overall for this hackathon stream.
Um, now in terms of bounties, we're giving 10K in bounties for building
10K in bounties for building the next killer potential app.
the next killer potential app.
Now, when I say killer app, I'm not talking about Skynet or anything scary.
What I mean is I want you to build magic.
Now, I know that also sounds strange, but there's a saying that I love quoting by Arthur C.
Clark, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
In fact, it goes deeper.
The etymology of the word magic comes from the Indo-European word math, which means to
be able and to help.
Now, the core of what we're building over this month as hackers, the core of sovereign
systems is to enable people.
When you have that mindset, when you're ready to push boundaries, you really can
create something in one month of hacking that changes the world. The reason I'm talking right
now with you guys here is because of a hackathon. CryptoKitties, the first viral Web3 app,
was launched at ETH Waterloo. And it took up something like 25% of all Ethereum transactions.
It increased gas fees up by 10 X.
Like people were like, who are these crazy cat people?
Why are they putting cats on chain?
There's one thing we learned from the internet.
It's that cats dominate anywhere that they go.
Now, all the L2s, all the L3s you see today in one way or another came from
the scalability issues that that incident revealed.
So whether you're a hacker building a game, whether you're doing infra,
whether you're creating the next generation of consumer AI agents, a new
DeFi primitive or an autonomous system, what we're looking for is to get you to
think about how does it enable people and what will the future look like as a
result of your product.
Also remember that what you're building during this hackathon, you know, it's,
it's not as important as what you do after the hackathon.
And this is something I love about the framework that PL Genesis has in store.
It's, it's structured to actually help you get to the next level where, wherever you
are, if you're an existing project or brand new, offering support and opportunities
post-hack. And this is something that we're also super passionate about. And in fact,
we've decided to align our entire ecosystem grants application deadline to be at around
the same time that this hackathon ends so that we can also try to give as much additional
support as possible.
Incredible and really amazing to hear that Flow has quite the focus on consumer applications, user-friendly applications that can actually make sovereignty usable at scale. And I would
love to double click on more of the technical aspects of Flow that actually make these things.
Things like, you know, the cadence smart contract language, anything that is happening under the hood that allows developers to make that a reality.
Absolutely.
So Flow is a blockchain with two virtual machines. There's Cadence and then there's Flow EVM. On the Cadence side, assets are actually stored directly inside user accounts. They're not just represented as pointers like in the EVM model. And this is a major architectural and philosophical shift that supports our goals around true ownership,
security, and digital sovereignty.
This ownership model is rooted in something we call resource oriented programming, and
it's a core part of the cadence language.
And it also manifests in a unique account model that we have.
Again, now this account model and the language support digital assets
that are real digital resources, not just references.
They're stored directly in the user's actual account storage.
Again, this is something I think a lot of users in Web3 automatically
just assume when they're on a blockchain, but isn't actually the case
when you look under the hood.
And also helping users access these resources
through account owners, explicitly exposed interfaces.
We have something called capabilities
and you could think of these capabilities and cadence
as fine-tuned permissioning and access control.
Similar to if you've ever used AWS IAM controls.
So you could specify who has access to what specific resources.
Like imagine you're building an AI agent.
One of the biggest, two of the biggest problems that we have with agents are the problems of inference.
Like they're pretty much like children.
They could easily be confused.
They could easily be manipulated. And then the second
problem is liveness. What happens when someone stops paying the AWS credits? So one really cool
thing that you can guarantee, like, you know, control of those resources with capabilities is,
you know, you could literally just specify that an agent can only control
X amount of resources for X time, or they can only receive, you know, this type of crypto,
but they can't send to anyone that type of crypto.
We also allow things like account linking, which to simplify, you could think of it almost
like Google Drive folder access control.
You know how, when you have a Google Drive folder, you create a child folder, and then I could specify that Clara has access to the resources, whether they're Google Sheets
or Google Docs in this folder, and then this other person has access to those. It makes it very easy
to do that as well. So you can have these agents that are whirling up constantly, like different
child accounts that only the end user has access to.
And if the owner of that LLM stops paying for credits because of that account linking, the end users always can access the resources that the agents were controlling.
You don't lose access to those resources.
So there's a lot of really cool things that revolve around like true ownership and making sure that people can fine tune
permissioning at every length of the spectrum. What does this practically mean? It means that
you can't lose an NFT due to a smart contract bug unless you explicitly move it. You own the asset
independently of any dapper smart contract. And lastly, assets are not intermediary held or tracked by a central registry contract,
as you typically see in ERC721 or ERC20. That being said, we are two VMs on our blockchain.
So if you did want to use EVM, if you did want to deploy your Solidity contracts,
it's a seamless experience. We're really trying to meet builders where they're at. Incredible. And I love how that sort of infrastructure enables
equitable access at scale, meeting builders where they're at, providing the tool stack to make
their dreams a reality. I'd love to switch gears to the ideation aspect. So essentially Filecoin ensures that even if front ends fail, even if front ends are subject to regulatory takedowns and so on, the truth is still online and accessible and provable.
We espouse these values of like provenance, longevity, permanence in this solutions. And I heard a little bit
from Clara about Filecoin going on chain. I'd love for you to, you know, tell us how you've seen
folks integrate different aspects of the Filecoin stack into their storage solutions for applications
that they're building, technologies that they're building, and what stands out the most to you from what you've seen as integrations?
Yeah, we have so many. As you know, Filecoin is really an open source protocol layer anyone can
build on. And especially in the past year, we've really helped enable builders and also startups
on the Filecoin ecosystem be able to go down different
niche areas of storage. To take a step back, a lot of people think about storage as one size fits all,
but there is probably around 18 different categories of storage you can imagine,
from hot storage to archival storage to NFT storage to also new kinds of storage that we're
going to start to see as agent-to agent to agent communication becomes a thing with AI.
And the data at the end of the day still has to be stored somewhere.
And so there's so many different kinds of companies and startups that are building through our builder's pipeline to ensure we can have perpetual
storage on Filecoin and building the rails to make it easier to build an IPS and Filecoin.
There's also companies like Akave. Their team actually came from the traditional enterprise
storage space where they're actually trying to look at how do you more easily take existing data that might come from AWS S3 or other Web2 storage platforms and move them very easily over to decentralized storage.
Because a lot of people might be really interested in decentralized storage, but if the actual egress fees or ability to port over data becomes too challenging, it becomes more
of a dream than reality.
And so Akave is doing a lot of work in really thinking about enterprises needs today and
making sure that Filecoin can be a terrific place to offer all kinds of secure storage
that certain enterprise customers might need.
And they're also looking at how do we think about opportunities
like enterprise data on-chain, right?
And today there's a lot of restrictions of why we haven't seen
that adoption happen just yet.
And then finally, there's companies like Sriracha.
Sriracha offers hot storage.
So that's why they're called Storacha.
And one of the most exciting partnerships they just announced this month is their Blue Sky backup app. So if you guys have ever used Blue Sky, I or your account on Blue Sky goes down. And they have a
powerful tool that lets users back it up. And this includes their posts, follows, profiles, and more.
And so that they can fully control all their data in case there is censorship or whether there might
be other incidents where they want to really protect their data. And so those are just instances
where we can see so many different kinds of applications today on Filecoin. I talked about
a few other upcoming examples that I think are really exciting. I'm super thrilled around all
the innovation that people are thinking about today in the concept of data DAOs, where a lot of the challenges is data
is just becoming more and more expensive for everyone to own. And sometimes people want
to share ownership, even large enterprises that we've talked to or financial institutions,
they don't even have full controls or data. And instead, a lot of the times the data is
locked up in contractors that they use. And when they want that data in
full access of their control, the vendors refuse to give them the data unless they renew their
contract. So you see all kinds of challenges when you don't really have control over the entire
access of how data might be owned and shared. And so I think data DAOs is another area that a lot of companies building on Filecoin
are thinking about and really thinking about the future.
There's also obviously more practical means
of storage on-ramps that certain companies are thinking about,
like the Dropbox or Google Drive version interfaces
where people can drag and drop all kinds of files.
There was a company last year that really offered, they're called Ghost Drive, but they offered you to completely back up all
the photos and documents from your iPhone in case someone throws your device into a pool
and you don't want to necessarily have to pay Apple for the full backup, right? Even they offer it, sometimes that data
becomes so insurmountable in size, the cost just becomes really high over time. So those are just
a couple of examples. And then we've also seen so many great ideas coming out from the builder
community of even new innovations that we haven't thought about before. There's also other integrations with other different chains.
So for example, one hackathon idea that came out a few months ago, that idea actually led
to our partnership with Avalanche for us to be able to back up Avalanche data onto Filecoin
and really building those bridges to make that really easy for developers
from other chains to be able to easily work with us.
And maybe there's something we can even do with Flow that we haven't explored.
So those are just a couple of examples.
Incredible insight there.
And much to think about, I think, you know, from what I hear from you, any type of app that might need secure, persistent, verifiable, decentralized storage
is a good fit for this bounty and for Filecoin in general. And it's quite relatable to me as well,
because I have a background in geospatial engineering, did a lot of work with remote sensing, ArcGIS, had a short stint at NASA.
And I was involved on the fringes with my alma mater with a project that I think was funded by Protocol Labs to bring all this GIS data on chain and actually make geographic data possible on the blockchain,
and actually make geographic data possible on the blockchain,
which unlocks a host of applications and use cases that people,
like what do you need geographic data for?
You can use it for mapping, remote sensing, disaster response,
all sorts of things, if that data is actually accessible on chain
and is stored in a decentralized way.
And there's much to think about in
terms of data integrity and backup. I think, you know, U.S. users had a massive wake-up call when
TikTok all of a sudden was taken down and folks were thinking, oh, wow, like, I'm really kind of,
you know, dependent on this platform and I don't really own any of the videos that I have, you
know, painstakingly uploaded there for the past
however many years. So do I really own any of my content if they're able to flip a switch and
take all this stuff down? And I think more and more people are starting to think about how they
can really own the assets that they are putting out on the internet in real life and so on.
So across different domains from data integrity and backup,
media and NFTs, AI, you know, thinking about open training data so that things aren't locked up
behind these massive corporations that don't really serve the best interests of everyday users.
Data provenance tools, scientific research tools, and even, you know, just thinking about your
personal life, your day-to-day, what are the places where you might need better storage,
more permanence, more assuredness that if someone flips a switch on the back end in a walled garden,
you're not going to lose everything that you've worked for so far. So, you know, much to think about in that sense.
And I also want to shoot this question to Ali.
If you can, you know, think about if you had a magic wand,
what types of consumer applications could folks build on Flow
that would really embody that sense of sovereignty
and make the best use of the tools that Flow has to offer us?
Oh, man, that's such a tough question.
There's a famous saying by Ford where I'm sure many of you have heard it.
He said something along the lines of, if I asked my customers what they wanted,
they would have said a faster horse.
I don't want to bias filters because killer apps can come
from many different places.
But I do think that applications that have sovereignty
at their core are great killer app potentials.
And sovereignty is the heart of the Web3 ethos,
in my opinion.
I'm just gonna give a couple of stories
to kind of like highlight like experiences
that I personally faced and then kind of potentially hint at what I think a killer app or a product might look like.
So I remember when I was doing my first internship, I was at SAP. I was super excited. I was working in like a startup like environment in their, in their predictive analytics team.
And we were working with like most of the fortune 500 companies.
And I was like, oh my God, this internship, I'm not just delivering coffee.
I'm getting paid like God bless Canada for paid internships.
Um, I remember I saved up for months and months to make a big purchase.
And when I went to the bank to take out my hard earned money, they told me that I had
a limit on how much I could withdraw. I was like, WTF? Like, what? And then they went on to interrogate me, they asked me what I plan to use the money for. And it really internalized in me, like this idea that you don't actually control the funds that we spend the best years of our lives securing. And that kind of felt wrong it felt like an integral human
right was violated um similarly like in university because i each one of my grandparents come from a
different culture and i got super excited about 23andme and it was one of the most popular ancestry
and genetic um platforms in the world now that genetic data of millions of users was put up for auction when they
declared bankruptcy this year.
And just think for a second, there really isn't any kind of data that
could be more personal and more sensitive than the data of you.
Now, this is an example of infrastructure that didn't prioritize ownership data by the end users and instead saw it as a moat and an asset for their startup.
A few years before that, same company, 23andMe, had a massive data breach where millions of users' data was stolen.
This is another different example of infrastructure that is faulty with single points of failure, like centralized databases, et cetera, two different ways that one company.
Didn't promote sovereignty in their architecture that led to unfixable damages to millions of people.
Like we don't, we don't even see the results of that damage yet.
We're probably going to see it years down the line.
Probably going to see it years down the line.
To pull it all together, I think that that killer product that I'd love to see,
it uses all the core aspects of software and infrastructure that align with human values.
It involves building apps or systems or agents or tech or platforms that facilitate control of data,
as in you decide who has access to your data, where it is stored, how it's used.
It could be an art, game achievements, health data, social media data that you can easily
and interoperably move between platforms and control.
You control your digital identity.
That's the second point I think it might have.
The third point is you guarantee infrastructure independence.
A great example of this is decentralized apps along with the digital identity piece.
And lastly, governance autonomy, like where you're essentially creating systems that are governed by stakeholders instead of external corporations or institutions.
Good examples could be like looking at network state models like Zulu or how a lot of DAOs are formed. But no matter what, I think the next killer app and the products that I'd love to see
will incorporate one or more of those core attributes of sovereign infrastructure.
Amazing.
And, you know, really true to the sentiment of the hackathon at large, which is modular worlds, thinking about the tools,
the infrastructure that underpines, you know, a lot of what we're building here today or what
we're looking to build. And I've spoken a lot about thinking of it as like Lego. So what does
modular mean? It means, you know, configurable in a few different ways, multiple different ways.
configurable in a few different ways, multiple different ways.
I can see some potential synergies that might come to mind with participants to integrate
Falcone, to integrate Flow and leverage persistent storage with infrastructure that enables
sovereign consumer applications.
So really massive design space here for people to think on, to work on,
and to come up with something that, you know, addresses the challenge adequately.
We've spent quite some time speaking, so I would love to open up the floor to audience questions.
If anyone on stage, if anyone in the audience has any ideas in mind or anywhere that they might need more color, more clarification, please feel free to request to speak or drop a comment.
On the lower right hand side, you will see a speech bubble. You can always just text there if you're unable to speak right now.
But yeah, I'm, you know,
personally, I'm really excited
about the potential for killer apps
on the consumer front.
Like I really enjoy the idea of,
for example, like more on-chain gaming aspects.
I think we've under-indexed there
and we haven't really seen too much coming.
Subscription models on-chain, like wallet super apps.
These are like different things that I've seen folks like, you know, approach or try to tackle.
But maybe today, I think might be much easier to do than ever before.
And really, I think we talk a lot about onboarding the next
billion users and how do we do that. It's by allowing sovereignty to be accessible at scale,
leveraging the tools that we have here. So I'm really grateful to you guys for joining,
to shed more light on what your respective projects are offering to participants.
I also want to hammer on the point that we're looking for interesting prototypes.
Hackathons are definitely never enough time to build a full-fledged product and to make
it perfect and complete.
We're looking for the folks that are tackling the challenges and integrating our partner
technologies adequately
and meaningfully. And from there, you know, like Ali had mentioned, there are places for you to go
after the hackathon to continue on that activity, to build upon that momentum. The Founders Forge
Bootcamp will give you access to mentorship, to resources that really allow you take your idea
to the next level. So it doesn't have to be perfect. You just have to start, you could start,
you know, submitting, start a draft submission and complete the hackathon project before July 6th,
which is the submission deadline, which aligns with, you know, a few other deadlines like Ali
spoke about with the ETH Global CAN hackathon deadline. So you can really kind of, you know,
approach these in a very sort of modular way as well. And yeah, I think I see a request from Nikki,
would love to hear from you as well. Yeah, thanks, Noma. And thanks, Ali and Clara.
I think great discussion.
Just wanted to double click on the follow through opportunities after the hackathon ends.
Like it's a four week long hackathon.
So that is also a pretty good time to, you know, spin up an MVP.
But if four weeks isn't enough, great things aren't made in four weeks, then in addition to
Founders Forge that Numa already talked about, there are lots of other opportunities in the
PL network. Early on, we mentioned that we are a big network of 600 companies.
And there are several companies within the network who offer grant programs, even if you know you are not going down the startup route.
There's also open source contributor programs, such as the Protocol Labs Dev Guild program, where you can receive retrospective rewards for open source contributions that you make to the projects in the ecosystem. So there's a lot of opportunities out there
and PL Genesis offers a place
where you can meet a lot of these people
who can help you find whatever path
and resources that you're looking for.
Amazing. Thank you so much for the input, Nikki.
Yeah, as you can see, landscape is rife with opportunity. I really hope that you guys listening in live or listening back
in the recording can see the value, take some time to register, go through the challenges,
think about the different technologies that you can stack.
The hackathon, you know, is really looking to welcome a builder base across the entire ecosystem.
That's why our partner set is pretty diverse. We're welcoming existing code. So using this
hackathon actually as a way to re-engage hackers, builders across the ecosystem.
If you have something you're already working on,
if you have an idea that you've been thinking about for quite some time
and maybe have like drafted in some ways,
you can actually use this as a launch pad,
a jumping off point to take that a step further and make some new progress
there.
So yeah, it's just it's really exciting opportunity.
I'm seeing some questions also coming in chat from Nia Kumari says,
how can we leverage this PL Genesis track flow and Filecoin tech
to build utility driven impact for the scientific community?
Maybe Ali or Clara, if you want to hit on the point about
the scientific community, if there's any apps that you've seen within your respective ecosystems
that support that aspect. I can jump in first. Decentralized science is definitely a space where
we've actually seen the biggest adoption of use of Filecoin that really is not only around moving something that is centralized data to aotech or scientific research, one of the biggest challenge is making sure that they're working off of the same data set.
And when you think about a more globalized scientific community, this becomes really challenging because if you're just using the wrong set of large data set to do an experiment and someone's trying to replicate that exact experiment, there's a high chance of error.
And sometimes this can be millions of dollars of scientific research that might go lost if there is an error in that place where replication of an experiment just goes wrong.
of an experiment just goes wrong.
So actually the scientific community is a huge opportunity
for adoption of all kinds of Filecoin tooling and apps.
And also to be able to verify when we talked earlier
about the beauty of decentralized storage
is that ability to prove and verify
where that storage comes from.
And so you can actually see improve
every time a dataset is changed.
You can also sometimes have much cheaper options for storage than on centralized storage models, especially if you're a scientist working in a global research ecosystem.
And last but not least, we truly believe in open and shareable data that everyone can build off of.
Unfortunately, for many years, a lot of scientific communities, they have a paywall for people to access critical research and information.
And so our model is really for those that really believe in free and democratized access to all kinds of research and information, especially when it comes to key medical or
scientific data. And so there are so many things you can build at the application layer that really
leverages these. Today, we're seeing more and more scientific data become more open.
And you definitely can explore programmable storage, payment for storage and retrieval options,
ability for scientists to more quickly
retrieve or store data on top of decentralized storage solutions. So I'll just pause there,
but just to give you guys a couple more ideas here, I think there's a lot to unpack there.
And most governments actually do open up a lot of scientific data. So there's so much more that
you can do today with AI and decentralized storage to make
even archives of open data even easier to find. And we've had a lot of examples of people building,
for example, a few months ago, we worked with another decentralized AI agent company,
Etheric, to build a CIA agent on top of a nonprofit we support
called MuckRock on top of their data archive. And they're able to actually pull out new
information about all this open data and research that hasn't been able to be as easily accessed
in the past. So you can also not necessarily have to look at new data generated. You can also look at previous scientific research data and helping scientists be able to make more sense of that and also to make sure that that data can be verified and also stored in a decentralized way.
said, and I agree with everything she mentioned.
Besides something that I'm personally super passionate and excited about ever since I
listened to a podcast with Balaji talking about lots of different examples, like, I mean,
how many Luke McIntyres are there in the world in academia?
And these guys are, you know, creating publications and writing articles across dozens of different
journals.
How do you know that the Luke McIntyre that, you know, wrote this article in the Journal of
Anthropology is the same Luke McIntyre or a different one in this completely different
journal? Like all these different journals are in a lot of ways, they're all walled gardens.
It is, it's very difficult. Now, there are exciting ways that you could use cryptography,
you could assign a hash to the identity of an individual author, you know, regardless of where
that content was produced, or where that, that, that contribution to the body of academia came
from, that it was that person who created it. And similarly, like, to the analogy that Clara gave about the challenges with citations,
something like 20% of all new papers or something like 80% of all new papers cite from the same core body of 20% of the existing papers that are out there.
And so whether you're in health economics and outcomes research, or you're doing your PhD, you tend to go down these rabbit holes of when you're looking at a citation, who was the first person that made that citation.
And a lot of the times, whether it's through human error, whether it's through nefarious intent, like those, like it's hard to actually find the original citation or it was inaccurate.
And a common example is Popeyes.
Like we all think that spinach is super healthy for us and disproportionately a superfood.
We see almost like steroids, you know, cartoons of Popeyes eating a can of spinach.
I don't know who eats cans of spinach, but, um, and then his biceps start blowing up. And apparently like one of the reasons for that massive, um, society-wide
perception that, that spinach is extremely high in iron and a superfood is because there was one
academic paper, I think in the seventies or so that had a misplaced decimal point, um, indicating nutrients in spinach.
And so like something as small, like as that could literally impact the entire world.
Um, that being said, like decentralized science has so many different applications
in so many different places, um, from health data.
Um, we gave the analogy of 23andMe earlier,
like during the internal hackathon at Flow,
I was playing around with what happens
if you encrypt your genetic data,
put it on chain and allow an ecosystem
of modular apps to be built
that you have full ownership of that data.
They don't control it.
They can't store it.
They can't access it, but you could still derive benefits to, to be able to, you know, find
things like what kind of supplements you should take, or is keto right for you, et cetera.
Now, from a technical perspective, what we're doing at flow is we're working towards allowing
individual user accounts to store up to a petabyte of data.
That's going to be important for a lot of different DSI applications because, you know, you're essentially going to be working with tons and tons and tons of health data that you are owning or other forms of data.
Like I mentioned earlier, that fine grained permissioning, allowing who can access what data that you control and for how long and what are the conditions that need to be met,
precondition and post condition wise, is going to be essential. And it's really easy to do that on flow.
I think zero knowledge also plays a big role, but I'm going to I'm going to leave it at that.
Fantastic. Really interesting insights, especially on the science aspect, which I'm also pretty
passionate about, you know, seeing applications that really do advance open knowledge. Just think
about how much further we could go as a society, as a global society, if we have these immutable records for experiments that could be reproduced at scale,
like a much wider peer-to-peer like checker network for these things that we're experimenting
on or like, for example, crowdsource data where we might require some persistent and
accessible storage, being able to store articles, raw research on chain
that anyone from anywhere could tap into
and really just drive forward that notion of open knowledge.
Yeah, we've had quite a bit to chew on in this space
and really want to thank our speakers here again
who are partnered with us on this hackathon.
Really appreciate your time. Just take a moment if you have not registered
for the PL Genesis hackathon,
you will see the tweet at the top of this space.
Click into that.
And it's really, really easy to get started.
We have our Discord channel,
which has our partner specific channels
where you can send a direct mention
to a representative
from each project to answer your questions and solve your blockers and so on and before I move
on we have just one more question from Mintu in chat Mintu was just giving us a brief background
of the project that they're building which is is, you know, the world's truly, first truly
unstoppable communication network. I think I have a request from Mintu. So if we could,
okay, I lost that request. So I'm going to summarize this question really quickly.
Essentially, it's called Phoenix Protocol. When governments shut down the internet,
the app that Mintu is building automatically switches to mesh networks.
So you're still getting messages through Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, LoRa radio, and so on.
They've managed to combine both flow for identity and incentives with Filecoin's global storage to create this network that gets stronger during crisis.
get stronger during crisis.
So think like WhatsApp that works when there is a total internet blackout
with crypto incentives, ensuring the mesh networks grows and thrives.
And Mintru is concerned that they will not be able to complete all the parts of
this project during the duration of the hackathon.
And then looking to see what types of MVP or what level of an
MVP we expect. I think, Mintu, it sounds like you have a pretty decent prototype going there.
And however much you're able to advance this MVP up until July 6th, we'll take it.
And there's ample opportunity from each of our partners, from Flow to Filecoin,
and then internally at StableLab to help you advance
that further even after the hackathon. So, you know, don't be too anxious about how much you
can get done in MVP stage. I think, you know, as long as you're working consistently for the
duration of the hackathon, the mission that adequately addresses those challenges, I think you're good to go.
So, yeah, I think we are now nearing the end of our space.
I just want to give you something for, you know, any wrap-up thoughts from anyone on stage, if you have any.
I got one ship it
exactly ship it um i know like we mentioned it a couple times but like i i couldn't agree more like don't lose heart if you're not able to finish on time there's a lot of opportunities
like to to take what you're building.
As long as you're building something that solves a real pain.
Like the hackathon is a battle, it's not the war.
And there's a lot of different battles and opportunities out there for you to grow.
Like I mentioned on Flowside, like the grant DAO, um it was also mentioned like etc and canes and like even even
if you're not one of the top like 0.1 of projects here if you if you put something forward if you
worked on it like talk to us talk to the sponsors talk to the organizers of the hackathon if you're
passionate about making it happen and i'm sure that we could point you in the right direction for opportunities.
Yeah, and I just wanted to jump in to say I spent a lot of time in hackathons early in my career
and absolutely love building stuff in my free time.
But one thing that is obviously challenging in the Web3 and blockchain space
is sometimes documentation
is hard to find or it gets updated so quickly.
Sometimes it might be quickly outdated.
So if you run into any bottlenecks or hardships with using different tools, definitely feel
free to reach out to Nikki from our side, from the Filecoin side, or just ask for help. Don't be afraid to do that because
that perseverance to keep trying and figuring out how to get things working, we want to be there
to offer as low of a lift. And I'm sure Ali can help with everything from the Flow side if there's
challenges with implementing anything related to Flow. We also have a ton of people that went through different
hackathons. And so it's more around like networking with other peers participating or other builders.
Sometimes remote hackathons could be less intense because not everyone's crammed in one room. But I
know this is a longer time horizon where you can build more meaningful projects. So I definitely would say like rely on also the other people in the community building
with you to also ask questions to them as well.
I can't wait to see all the amazing projects that you guys are able to ship.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to hear anything from the last... We can hear you.
Clara, we heard you too.
I'm just going to let Nikki...
Oh, I stopped.
Oh, no.
We heard you, Clara.
It's okay.
Yeah, we heard you. Oh, good. Okay. Just checking my sanity. I was you, Clara. It's okay. Yeah, we heard you.
Oh, good.
Okay.
Just checking my sanity.
I was like, everyone stop talking after me.
Wait.
Can the main account hear anyone?
Yeah.
It sounds like she can't hear anyone.
Maybe Noma is having a classic technical glitch.
I mean, we didn't have a single one throughout the spaces.
So here it comes.
But I think it's a wrap.
Thanks, everyone, for joining.
Yeah, thank you, everyone, for joining.
This was so much fun.
And happy Juneteenth for those that celebrate in the U.S.
Thank you, everyone.
Happy Juneteenth for those that celebrate in the US. Thank you everyone. Happy Juneteenth.
Bye.
