NBT & Weeve's blockchain and cryptoeconomics researcher, Clément Bihorel, recently attended the Web3 Summit in Berlin.

He reported back with these industry updates and reflections:

Parity founder and Ethereum cofounder Gavin Wood announced that its new development tool called Substrate would be released within the next few weeks. At the conference, Wood unpacked a brand new Macbook from which he deployed a blockchain in less than 60 minutes in front of the crowd.

The new tech, developed by Parity, aims at making it possible for developers to create and launch their own chain much faster than with any tool available at the moment. Substrate will be running on a tree-type structure using Polkadot’s chains, allowing for “infinite scalability”. Polkadot is a product developed by Parity that allows the development and deployment of smart contracts on a multi-chain platform.

With Substrate, one feature will make it possible to easily update the software with simple vote from token holders without having to go through hard forks processes that can be very challenging and time consuming.

“Having undefined governance doesn’t bestow power onto everyone, all it does is make obscure and opaque who are the real decision makers,” says Wood.

More reflections:

• "Bootstrapping monetary systems from zero might be the greatest investment opportunity of all time" said Polychain Capital Founder.
• The decentralized web needs to focus on UI/UX challenges if we want it to be adopted by the masses, and many companies including Brave are working towards that.
• Token ecosystems also need to focus on building more "entertaining" software; the popularity of Fortnite was used as example.
• People also mentioned the fact that the difference between infrastructure and apps is getting ever thinner in the industry.

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