Web3 Summit At MIT Shows Tech’s Enthusiasm For Crypto Is Unabated Despite Crypto Bear

Despite the chilly winter storm depressing cryptocurrency prices, digital asset entrepreneurs, developers, venture capitalists and enthusiasts gathered in Cambridge MA today for Link Venture’s Imagination in Action Web3 Summit where the movers and shakers ranged from Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta, co-founders of blockchain technology to Web 2.0 grand dame Esther Dyson and Ben Mezerich, author of Bitcoin
BTC
Billionaires and the book that inspired the Academy Award winning Social Network.

Hosted at the top floor of MIT’s Media Lab, the Imagination in Action Web3 Summit brought together over 580 Web3 developers, investors, creators, and academics to discuss the future of web3 technology. The list of speakers was brimming including John Wu of Ava Labs, Bill Barhdyt of Abra, Yat Siu of Animoca, MIT Media Lab’s Ramesh Raskar, Kleiner Perkins Bing Gordon and Mike Federle, CEO of Forbes.

“I wanted all the speakers to be ‘imaginators,’” said John Werner, founder of Imagination in Action. “These are challenging times, [a] down economy, so we need people with imagination,” he added. Alongside Sandy Pentland, director of MIT Connection Science, Werner started the Imagination in Action summit with the goal of facilitating conversations between investors, creators amongst panelists and attendees. Today’s conference marked the first of a series of three in the coming year, with a planned summit in San Francisco in October and one in Davos in January of 2023.

The summit was separated into three different sessions – Imaginators, Explorers and Web3 Pioneers – and started by bringing everyone back to the 1990s with the start of the blockchain. Speaking with Forbes’ Michael Del Castillo, blockchain creators Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta took it back to the mid 1990s and the start of blockchain, building a system that decentralized trust. While blockchain technology was largely silent until Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008, Haber’s and Stornetta’s creation has served as the basis for the $861.67 billion cryptocurrency market that at its peak hit a market capitalization of $3 trillion in 2021.

While most of the talks had an upbeat tone there were some words of concern over the current state of the crypto market.

“It’s a cascading comedy of errors,” said Bill Barhydt, founder and CEO of Abra, speaking on a panel about Web 3 and the economy. He pointed specifically to the Terra/LUNA
LUNA
collapse of early May and Celsius’ recent liquidity problems, as well as the collapse of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.

As the Web 3 enthusiasts gathered, Bitcoin dipped below $20,000 today to $18,000 for the second time this month, Singapore-based hedge fund Three Arrows Capital was ordered to liquidate by a British Virgin Islands court yesterday and FTX CEO billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried admitted to Forbes that some crypto exchanges are already insolvent.

While to some this may be too volatile, others argue this is the time to build.

“Web 3, to me, is the internet of value,” said John Wu, President of Ava Labs, which created the Avalanche
AVAX
blockchain. “We have to ride these [market] ups and downs.”

“The current downturn is a good time to step back and think ‘what does society really need?’” says Ramesh Raskar, Associated Professor at MIT’s Media Lab.