AI And Web3: A Symbiosis For Future Revolution

As a Democratic Media practitioner, I was always interested in the experiments of Democratic Finance, which started in 2009 with the mysterious techie Satoshi Nakamoto. The developer invented the Blockchain technology but still remains anonymous. 

 The promise of Blockchain/Web3 was to create a more equal world with decentralised money exchanges with no central banks required. This was such a revolutionary idea that it was feared that the current beneficiaries might harm the new system and its proponents. 

 So, when I got an offer last year in November to attend the DevConnect conference of the Ethereum Foundation as a scholar, I readily accepted. Ethereum was built on Blockchain over the years to expand the role of Blockchain technology to areas beyond finance. 

 The sudden change of stance by the Donald Trump administration on cryptocurrency has made the subject topical. Trump had dismissed Blockchain in his first presidency by calling it “based on thin air”, but now, he is trying to make the US the “crypto capital of the world”. 

 World Liberty Financial is the Crypto company owned by the Trump family that is in close touch with the Pakistan Crypto Council, a government body that aims to make Pakistan the Crypto capital of Asia. Recent bonhomie between the US and Pakistan relationship is also rumoured to be linked. 

While I was leaving for the conference, a friend who is knowledgeable of the Web3 world and has also earned some money by investing, told me:“You will meet 90 per cent scamsters there.” Until then, I had only read stories related to crypto scams in the country in the press.  

 The reason Buenos Aires, at the other end of the world, was chosen as the venue was that now more than 20 per cent of Argentinians use cryptocurrency as the Argentinian Peso is in very bad shape and gives very little return in the international exchange. 

 It was expected to see posters of Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi all over as soon as I came out of Buenos Aires airport, but what was new was posters about crypto. My eyes were also looking for any signs of Che Guevara, the international revolutionary poster boy.  

 I met fellow scholar Prof Hank Korth from Lehigh University in the US, who also teaches Blockchain to his students. “Post Trump 2, now it’s not a question of IF anymore but WHEN Crypto becomes mainstream in the US, and it will have an effect in countries like yours as well,” he said.  

At the DevConnect venue, the sheer energy was palpable. Ninety per cent of these people can’t be scamsters, I thought. There was too much technology in all the sessions in the first few days, which was way beyond my comprehension, but the enthusiasm among developers was quite visible. The only thing that I understood was that all of them were trying to make new tools over Nakamoto.  

 There were 90 scholars like me from over 40 countries participating in the conference. Indians were the biggest contingent. I found quite a few students who came with tickets bought from their own pocket in anticipation of covering it by winning the hackathons! 

 Indians told me that after years of the country expressing discomfort with the cryptocurrency ecosystem, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has recently said that countries would have to ‘prepare to engage’ with Crypto whether they welcome the change or not. I told them about me reading only about Crypto scams in Indian newspapers. “Yes, they are the early adopters as in any technology, but things should change with little support from the government. And you should check out the ReGen stalls here,” they told me. 

I was hearing about DeFi (Decentralised Finance) against TradFi (Traditional Finance) in the last few days, which this community was trying to work, on but ReFi (Regenerative Finance) was new. I also found stalls of DeSci (Decentralised Science) and was more intrigued. 

 Kit Blake from Holland was tall, sported a pony tail and looked like a hippie as others in the crowd in that stall. “When I see good-meaning people gather around a campfire, I pay attention,” he told me. It was surprising to see new hippies in a Crypto meeting. 

 I spent the next few days circling around Web3 hippies from all over. What they were talking about was not new to me, but it was indeed surprising that they were talking about the same hallucinating revolutionary stuff on top of Blockchain! 

 There were talks about saving the forest, coffee cooperatives, generating decentralised funding for science for impact and whatnot. They were also talking about a borderless world, like borderless currency. It all sounded very naïve, but it was nice at least that they were talking. 

In the last few days of the conference, I went back to the main halls talking about Artificial Intelligence+Web3. “AI is centralised, and Blockchain can help make it decentralised. And AI can make Blockchain user-friendly, which is too much confined with techies at the moment”, was the overall theme.   

 DevConnect has decided to assemble in Mumbai later this year, which is surprising, looking at the situation of Crypto regulation in India today. “India will soon have the largest number of Blockchain developers in the world”, the announcement said, “and we can’t ignore it”. 

 They are far from where Nakamoto wanted to go, I realised, and was wondering if Nakamoto was around in this crowd of 15,000 people. It was good to know that the Ethereum Foundation, the organiser of DevConnect, is still a non-profit, unlike OpenAI. 

 Human civilisation has achieved democratic politics in the last few centuries, which looks robust. Ambedkar had said while inaugurating the Indian democratic Constitution that political democracy cannot go too far unless other sections of our society also democratise. 

The work on Democratic Media, where I work, is in its infancy. But it was very heartening to see so much energy in Democratic Finance. Like we are hoping AI can make Democratic Media a reality, similarly, AI can also help Web3 be more human-friendly. 

 We can ignore these technologies only at our own peril, I feel. There will be efforts to appropriate them, but they indeed look revolutionary types minus guns! Che, 21st- century style? 

(Views expressed are personal)