From 40+ “Super Brains”, We Found the Beauty of Web3 | GWEI 2022 – Singapore

On July 14, the first “GWEI 2022 – Global Web3 Eco Innovation Summit – Singapore” was held at the Marina Bay Sands Convention and Exhibition Centre in Singapore, co-organized by Singapore’s Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) and SUSS Node for Inclusive Financial Technologies (SUSS NiFT), and 8BTC’s new overseas brand “DeFiDAONews”.

The summit is titled sponsored by OKX, the world’s leading Web3 ecosystem builder.

In this summit, nearly 80 experts from financial management departments, financial service institutions, research universities, trading platforms, investment institutions, games and DAO and other Web3 fields took the stage to share their views. Their judgments on Web3 practices and future trends accurately portrayed the historical picture of today’s Web3 waves.

In the eyes of these global “super brains”, what is the beauty of Web3? We have excerpted some of the best quotes from the guest speakers to help you quickly capture and find the opportunities of Web3.

Professor Cheong Hee Kiat, the founding President of SUSS:

Web3 involves the convergence of many technologies, blockchain, the Metaverse, cryptos, non fungible tokens, decentralized autonomous organizations, AI, decentralized finance, cloud computing, and so on. The Web3 concept of more linked, more secure, more decentralized, and user centric new internet brings endless possibilities, very exciting, very motivational. We will look forward to an enriched interactive experience. New businesses will bloom. Many will be financially enriched. Entertainment will be out of this world. Living will be most convenient and enjoyable. Production and services will take on new forms, range, and creativity.

Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief FinTech Officer of MAS:

Web1 and Web2, while they have provided us remarkable technology, they did not solve the wealth distribution problem. Web3 is going to solve, in my mind, the wealth distribution problem. Let’s work towards it. While the Web3 technology talks about smart contracts, which enforces self governance and the DAOs and the protocol layers, but still it is designed and written by human beings. So there has to be some mechanism to ensure those protocol layers are reviewed for ethics, good behavior and good outcome.

David Lee, Chairman of Global Fintech Institute(GFI):

I think one very important point is that our youngsters in singapore has a very interesting mindset. They’re passionate, they have good habits, they work with heart, and that’s very important. You must have compassion, you must have creativity. You must think about the community, which is what that I always talk about.

Gavin Qu, partner of 8BTC:

The current hot Web3 revolution is more like a renaissance after injecting native economic blood into the Cyberspace, and the Web3 infrastructure is still in the very early stages of development, which means new opportunities.

Lennix Lai, OKX Financial Markets Director:

Web3 will not fully replace the Web2 profit model for the time being, but it will have a huge impact on it inevitably, and users’ sense of privacy at the personal data level cannot be reversed.

Tansaya Kunaratskul, Senior Specialist at the Office of Corporate Strategy at the Bank of Thailand:

There may be new digital currencies or any better payment methods in the future, but the CBDC may be the open infrastructure that all of these currencies can be built on. Cash, electronic money, and privately issued bonds can coexist, and in the future digital currencies can coexist with each other.

Chua Tju Liang, General Counsel of Ethereum Foundation：

The biggest risk I see are regulators in trying to force blockchain and cryptocurrency activities into a box, which it doesn’t fit. The biggest risk, I think, has been regulators trying to regulate blockchain as if it were traditional business. The blockchain industry has been very hopeful for appropriate regulation, for regulation that is tuned to the particular characteristics of how blockchain works.

Ciara Sun, Founder and Managing Partner of C² Ventures:

Don’t use leverage if you’re not a professional trader. Retail investors can buy and hold, while builders should use bear markets to keep learning.

Arthur Cheong, Founder of DeFiance Capital:

I think one of the downside of crypto is that a lot of things are too financialized. The excitement and passion increase with bull market and decrease with bear market. I think, just focus on the use cases you feel excited about and then don’t care about the market condition that much. I tend to see a lot more of interest in NFT right now, because I think it’s a lot more cultural in the sense that people make money and people speculate on NFT but there’s a lot more call passion investment element.

Benson, Partner of OKX Blockdream Ventures:

OKX will continue to focus on multiple Web3 infrastructure areas. Web3 builders should not rush to scale up or issue coins, but focus on building products that fit with the market. In the next cycle, we continue to be bullish on blockchain gaming.

Leo Zhang, Founder and CEO of Alkimiya:

If blockchain becomes one of the core infrastructures in the digital economy, then blockspace is one of its most important resources, which will also generate its own capital market in the future, thus helping blockspace producers to balance the unequal relationship between costs and benefits, and helping long-term users to smooth out the costs.

Tommy Deng , Director of Beosin:

Common hacking methods of Web3 include contract vulnerabilities, flash loans, Rug Pull runs, etc. But the Web3 industry is thriving, and we will continue to build security supervision technology and security assurance systems to continue to protect the security development of the Web3 ecosystem.

David Lee, CEO of GreaterHeat:

In the Web3 era, the production, control, realization, and use of digital content will be decentralized, and monopolies will be directly broken, with endless applications such as Ethereum and Filecoin providing the market with lower cost and better service computing and storage resources.

Jesse Johnson, Founder and COO of Aavegotchi:

There is a lot of great stuff happening in the Web3 space and we should be looking for ways to build things that we couldn’t build before, it would be boring without the blockchain. Building games in the form of DAOs is extremely exciting, DAOs bring strangers together and allow the best ideas to be born, collaboration is everything.

Federico Tenga, RGB contributor:

RGB is a protocol that was been created to enable the issuance and transfer of tokens on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. And do it also by providing some higher scalability, privacy and smart contract capabilities compared to some of their alternatives. Even if you’re not necessarily too interested in token and asset, it is still a very interesting technology to to explore and to try.

Zuo Changbo, Director of Cobo Ventures:

When entering Web3, firstly don’t have your own historical baggage. Secondly understand that this market is really very young. You have to be more confident and not be afraid of bullying from the established giants; there is a relatively very open and fair entrepreneurial environment here.

Dr. Yu Jianing, President of Huobi University:

At present, there are only more than 200 million users of Web3 in the world, and it is predicted that there will be at least 1 billion people in 2024-2025. The most certainty of Web3 is the education market. 5% of hundreds of millions of people also have tens of millions. This is a very crazy market.

David He, MotorN Founder:

The Metaverse has to solve the technical, and even ethical, moral, legal and regulatory challenges, probably for another 5 years and 10 years. What we are doing now with Web3 is preparing for the Metaverse.

Zack, JoJoWorld Founder:

The Metaverse industry needs to address three challenges, lowering the industry threshold, increasing services and applications that are friendly to the small, retail users and continuing to improve regulation and compliance.

Wang Chao, Individual Web3 Researcher and BanklessDAO/FWB/SeedClub Contributor:

DAOs suffer from imperfect governance, insufficient collaboration efficiency, insufficient incentive programs, and compliance in a gray area, but compared to the 400-year-old corporate system, the infant DAOs still bring a fundamental change in organizational form and are the starting point of a brand new era.

DAOctor, Co-founder of DAOrayaki:

How to run a DAO well? Different types of DAOs will consider different key points, but two points can be abstracted: build a decentralized collaboration mechanism and practice it. Special attention and emphasis must be placed on governance.

Mia Bao, The PASS Founder:

There is no need to set up a lot of rules and regulations before starting a DAO, the most important thing for a DAO to succeed is probably two things. The first is mission, and the second is to make the governance process of the DAO more transparent.

Shawn, Mirror DAO / SeeDAO Core Contributor:

Most DAOs are currently going through a process of progressive decentralization and are indeed encountering problems. It is precisely the health index and capability of a viable DAO that is reflected in its ability to solve problems and evolve when it encounters these problems. It is too idealistic for all DAOs to be completely decentralized.

Ping Feng, Podcast Co-host:

Is it unreasonable for a DAO to be governed by people to a certain degree of centralisation? I think it is normal for the initial stages of a DAO, and may even be a more reasonable way to start.

Zinan, Investment Director of Kucoin:

Does everything need to be decentralized? From a product perspective, it’s important to think about what exactly using decentralization to bring value-added revenue to this type of product is something we should consider. So Web3 and Web2 will coexist, you can also call it Web5, but it must coexist with Web2.

Du Jun, Co-Founder of Huobi Global:

We are fortunate to be able to invest money to support some people who have dreams and are willing to change the world and make products. We hope that in the next 1-2 years no one will talk about what Web3 is, but the public can feel its convenience and efficiency in using Web3 products. As a practitioner, we should try our best to make products that belong to Web3.

Wilson Cheng, Head of East Asia Institutional Sales of Coinbase:

It’s a bear market, and wealth accumulation often starts in a bear market, so you should do two things regarding investment. One is risk management, blockchain project investment is similar to investing in startup projects, most of them will fail. The second is to do good due diligence, researching 1 project is more valuable than browsing 100 projects.

Debbie Lee, Founder and CEO of TechStorm:

We have the ability to promote that to our 19 million audience across 11 territories, which are really passionate and curious about Web3. We let the data speak for itself, we are patient, we take a long term view to the ecosystem. We’re not in a hurry, the ecosystem needs some time to stabilize and iterate upon itself. We hope to be here for the long term play.

Cynthia Ding, Founding Partner of Yincubator:

NFTs are not just limited to the speculations of arts, of sports, or of anything. Actually non fungible token can create a completely different class asset. After this storm, I think that will be true, valuable class asset get discovered. So as a venture capitalist, you need to be optimistic, as always. I guess that’s for the life we choose.

Steven Lim, CEO & Co-Founder of RSTN Consulting:

The strength of Singapore is that we have been a worldwide financial hub for a long time, and very successful reputation. Second, our legal framework is very good. So those are the strength for institutionalized digital asset. But when it comes to commercial or retail digital asset, the market is simply just too small. Regulation is a double-edged sword. Over regulation will frighten all people away. But without regulation, there will be chaos.

Eugene Goh, Deputy Director (FinTech & Innovation Group) of MAS:

The aim is how to use Web3, not just for empowering the linkages for financial institutions itself, but also to empower the end users. And a big case for end users that’s being underserved are small and, medium sized enterprises.

Ong Suan Hwee, Head of Marketing & Operations of Global Fintech Institute (GFI):

I think there’s a beauty of Web3 and the opportunities presents for inclusivity and getting the unbanked and socially excluded people to come together to access information and excess knowledge, to help them understand why are they in this? Why do they have to know this? And eventually be able to take a lower risk approach to and undergo digital transformation more gracefully, and with eyes open and well informed.

Dr Ernie Teo, Co-founder and CTO of Dedoco:

There’s a keyword for Web3 for me, that is ownership. And it’s not just about ownership of financial assets, it’s ownership of data and ownership of documents. SMEs are not gonna participate in Web3 world by issuing tokens. But they have a lot of business processes that need to be taken account of.

Saurav Bhattacharyya, CEO of Proxtera:

We see Web3 as an enabler. If you look at the concept behind Web3, one of the core competence beyond ownership is there are no intermediaries. Disintermediating is a very important aspect regarding Web3 innnovation.

Roland Schwinn, Managing Director of Sygnum Bank:

I think the most important lessons learned out of the recent turmoils is that the infrastructure has shown to be resilient, but not for all protocols.

John Gu, CEO of AlphaLab Capital:

The people who stay and the people who enter the space during times like these, where the probability of making a quick dollar is lower, are the ones who are really gonna, I think, shine and build.

Darius Sit, Co-Founder of QCP Capital:

Historically, the bear cycles are the best times to start to build projects and build infrastructure in the space.

Jack Lee, Managing Partner of HCM Capital:

We will build a digital asset world, a more decentralized world in the future. But at this moment we are still at a very early stage. The more important thing we need to do is to build the real decentralized infrastructure as the cornerstone.

Joseph Thompson, CEO & Co-Founder of AID:Tech:

I think convergence needs to happen. But I don’t think Web3 is ready. And I think the biggest problem so far is user experience is atrocious. Convergence is not happening until that barriers are crossed in my opinion.

Dr Boyd Cohen, CEO & Co-Founder of IoMob Tech:

Crypto and Web3 are poised to truly disrupt so many industries, because it’s just superior when you create a model that is inclusive in how it shares the wealth with the people who create value instead of extracting that value out of those individuals around the world who contribute value and bringing it only to the venture funds and the founders of the big companies.

Anthony Lim, Director of Cyber Managed Ops & Project Chief Security Officer of NCS Group:

The intent of Web3 is to not converge with Web2. I see it more as an evolution and not convergence.