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Journalist
Sead Fadilpašić
Journalist
Sead Fadilpašić
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Why Trust Cryptonews
Cryptonews Podcast host Matt Zahab sat down for an exclusive interview with Bill Laboon, the Director of Education and Governance Initiatives at the Web3 Foundation, a not-for-profit entity supporting the Polkadot ecosystem.
Laboon discussed everything Polkadot and various aspects of its ecosystem, the real competitors to Polkadot and the Web3 Foundation, and how the Foundation and Parity turned out to be centralized points in a decentralized project.
He talked about the community reaching a whopping 1,000 referendums and crypto needing more end-user-focused apps if it’s to go mainstream.
Will the Real Competitor Please Stand Up
Web3 Foundation is a not-for-profit company, meaning it doesn’t aim to make money. It has funds that the team uses for day-to-day operating expenses.
Instead, the Foundation was founded to bring about the decentralized internet, a world where people own their own data, Laboon told Matt.
One of the many ways they’re accomplishing this is by supporting the Polkadot ecosystem.
To help shepherd Polkadot, the Foundation provides education, outreach, and grants. It also does coordination and interacts with the community.
Furthermore, they do research and produce papers that are useful to the entire ecosystem.
Notably, the team has talked to people from various other ecosystems, including Cosmos, Ethereum, and Cardano, in an effort to bring them together.
These are not Polkadot’s competitors, Laboon said. “We’re working towards the same goal in different ways, and we do a lot of interoperability with them.”
Actually, argued the director, “our competitor really is the Web2 world. We have different ways of going about our way of winning.”
Moreover, while Web3 Foundation focuses on Polkadot, it always had a “broader mandate.”
Therefore, they have provided funding to people building other projects and researching other ecosystems, which doesn’t directly benefit Polkadot but is more generalized.
1000 Referendums: Experience in Democracy
In July, the Polkadot community celebrated its 1,000th referendum.
Anyone can issue a referendum. The large community of DOT holders makes all decisions by voting.
The ecosystem is “entirely decentralized,” Laboon said. “The control is entirely in the hands of the DOT holders,” including any upgrades, updates, or spending from the treasury.
Polkadot has its OpenGov governance system where one DOT equals one vote.
“It’s just a very direct democracy. And this has been very challenging,” Laboon remarked.
Importantly, there is no dependency on developers to implement referendums.
Instead, users issue referendums in code, which will execute following a successful vote – and “can actually change the rules of the blockchain, which I think is really neat.”
“There’s no way to stop it,” Laboon added.
Web3 Foundation does look through referenda, double-checking if something seems malicious.
They interact with governance teams and answer people’s questions, but they prefer not to share opinions unless something is dangerous.
Furthermore, “we’ve figured out what the community does and what they’re interested in versus what’s actually good for the long-term health of the network,” the director noted. “It’s been a very interesting experience in democracy.”
Even if the Foundation expresses a positive opinion on a referendum, the community can vote it down. They recently did just that, arguing that an upgrade should run longer on the testnet.
This allowed more time for the wallets to understand the upgrade, given that Polkadot is not a single blockchain but a system of 51 blockchains (aka parachains).
“Three weeks later, [the referendum] was reissued, and the network was upgraded,” Laboon said.
Sprinkling a Bit of Blockchain Dust Doesn’t Make It a Blockchain App
The crypto market needs useful and user-facing apps, Laboon argued.
We have plenty of infrastructure in the space and many people “building really cool tech for the developers.”
“What we don’t always have is people that are building things that are useful for the end user on top of that stuff that the nerds are building,” the director pointed out.
And this is necessary for the process of adoption.
Developers often promise “smart contracts and immutability,” creating “unstoppable” applications, but then they go and code their smart contracts to actually be stoppable, argued Laboon.
There is a lot of dependence on the teams building projects. This makes the project vulnerable and is generally an issue.
This vulnerability is not only in the form of devs abandoning a project; it could also be something much more malicious.
Therefore, projects need teams that will ensure they’re “actually creating unstoppable applications and not something that somebody sprinkled a little blockchain dust on and said, okay, well, now it’s a blockchain application.”
As explained above, Polkadot is unstoppable. Even if Parity, the main engineering team behind Polkadot, were to just up and leave, it would not be the project’s end. Polkadot would be able to find another team, Laboon claimed.
Centralized Points in the Decentralized Ecosystem
Polkadot established the Decentralized Futures grant program last year, allocating $20 million and 5 million DOT to kickstart economically independent, active participants in the Polkadot ecosystem.
“The basic outline,” Laboon said, is “we give them cake, they build good products.”
Last year, the team came to a major realization. Web3 Foundation and Parity were actually “centralized points in the ecosystem we wanted to decentralize.”
Centralized entities within a system, no matter how far they distance themselves from decision-making, still maintain “soft power in the ecosystem.”
Therefore, to turn themselves into decentralized elements, they established various teams.
These include marketing, business development, education, documentation, investments, and more.
These are small teams with great products, which needed funding to start. When receiving the grant from the program, they agree to several milestones, getting a portion of the grant with each milestone reached.
“So far, it’s been great. We’ve had some really good successes coming out of that,” Laboon commented.
They had 250 applications and gave out exactly 20% (50 grants).
The Decentralized Futures program is now over, but “we may have another one in the future,” he concluded.
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That’s not all.
In this interview, Laboon also discussed:
- the Web3 Foundation supporting the Polkadot ecosystem;
- their approach to funding, education, and development within the decentralized environment;
- doing Web3 education and providing funds to various groups in Latin America;
- crypto foundations setting up in Zug, Switzerland;
- difference between political systems in Switzerland and the USA, and how does that affect crypto;
- the US presidential elections.
You can watch the full podcast episode here.
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About Bill Laboon
Bill Laboon is the Director of Education and Governance Initiatives at the Web3 Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports the Polkadot ecosystem.
He spent the previous five years teaching Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Laboon is the author of two books: ‘A Friendly Introduction to Software Testing,’ an undergraduate textbook, and ‘Strength in Numbers: A Novel of Cryptocurrency,’ a near-future novel set in a world where cryptocurrency has eliminated traditional money.
