📺 Today’s recommended deep-dive video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHwVljhq7NQ

The Verifiable Web: Building the Next 80 Years of Computing

In this visionary talk, Juan Benet explores how Web3 is not just a technological shift but a fundamental upgrade to human coordination. By embedding trust and verifiability into our digital infrastructure, we can reclaim the internet from centralized surveillance and create a permanent foundation for humanity’s information.

Core Question: How can we transition from a web based on blind trust to one rooted in cryptographic verifiability?

Highlights

• Computing is viewed as a “phase transition” for the human species, radically transforming us in just 80 years.
• The shift from Web 2.0 to Web3 replaces the “surveillance model” with a “verifiability model.”
• Modularity is the key to longevity, as seen in the separation of Libp2p, IPFS, and Filecoin.
• Filecoin has reached “cloud scale” capacity, surpassing 1.2 exabytes of storage in its early months.

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From Surveillance to Verifiability

Computing as a Species Upgrade

Computing has radically transformed humanity over the last 80 years, turning us into a different species that walks around with supercomputers in our pockets and coordinates across the globe in real-time. We now live in a magical environment where software grants us superpowers, yet the current Web 2.0 model has a fatal flaw: it is built on a model of surveillance and centralized control that we must outgrow.

The transition to Web3 is about introducing critical properties like trust and verifiability through cryptographic primitives and game-theoretical incentives. Instead of relying on intermediaries who can subvert systems or manipulate social data, we are building infrastructures that are inherently safe by design. This move allows for sovereign storage and freedom of transaction, ensuring that the digital mediums we rely on for assembly and speech cannot be easily silenced by power structures.

We must intentionally lock these values into our code today to prevent a future of digital borders and total control.

💡 Digging Deeper

Q: Why is “verifiability” the core theme?
A: Because it removes the need to trust a central party; you can check the math yourself to ensure the system hasn’t been subverted.

Q: How does this relate to AI and the future?
A: As we move toward AGI and robotics, having a trustable, verifiable computing layer becomes a safety requirement for the species.

The Modular Stack Strategy

Breaking the Monolith

Protocol Labs focuses on a modular approach rather than building monolithic applications like the peer-to-peer projects of the early 2000s. By breaking the stack into reusable components like Libp2p for networking and IPFS for content addressing, developers can build interoperable systems that don’t need to reinvent the wheel. This strategy ensures that the technology remains flexible and capable of evolving alongside the rapidly changing landscape of the decentralized web.

Libp2p has already become the standard networking layer for major blockchains, facilitating a common framework for the entire industry.

IPFS changes the way we find data by using cryptographic hashes instead of location-based URLs. This simple shift grants content integrity and allows information to move through peer-to-peer rails rather than centralized gateways, making the web more resilient and less dependent on specific server availability. When you address content by “what” it is rather than “where” it is, you remove the power of the middleman to delete or alter that data.

Scaling the Storage Economy

The Airbnb for Data

Filecoin represents the next step in this evolution, creating a decentralized storage market where anyone can provide services and be paid in cryptocurrency. It operates much like an “Airbnb for storage,” allowing smaller providers to compete with massive data monopolies by aggregating their resources into a single, robust network. This creates a more efficient and competitive market that isn’t beholden to the pricing or policies of a few large corporations.

The network recently surpassed 1.2 exabytes of storage capacity, a milestone that signals the beginning of its ability to compete at true cloud scale.

While it will take time to match the feature sets of established providers like AWS, the core primitive of cryptographic proofs—verifying that data is actually stored over time—is a game-changer that centralized clouds simply do not offer. This foundation is essential for creating a permanent home for humanity’s most important information, ensuring it survives long-term regardless of which specific companies stay in business.

The road ahead involves onboarding massive amounts of client data and refining the retrieval markets to handle high-traffic CDN needs.

Key Takeaways

The next twelve months will witness a massive wave of Web3 applications as next-generation blockchains and storage layers mature. We are currently in the “pioneering moment” similar to the early days of Ethereum, where the infrastructure is ready, and the first generation of truly scalable decentralized apps is being built.

Success in this space requires moving away from silos. By using modular tools like Libp2p and IPFS, the community can ensure interoperability across different chains and platforms. The goal is to create a web where users own their data, transactions are free from censorship, and the world’s information is stored verifiably for the long term.

Q&A

Q1: How much of the IPFS toolset was planned versus organic?
A1: The networking layer (Libp2p) and content routing were clear from the start, but much of the tooling around JavaScript and browser integration grew organically. One oversight was not making “PubSub” and IPLD (linked data) a bigger part of the initial design.

Q2: What are the most exciting uses for Drand (distributed randomness) outside of blockchain?
A2: A randomness beacon is a fundamental primitive. Beyond leader election in blockchains, it could be used for public lotteries and any application that requires fair, unbiasable randomness that the public can trust.

Q3: If the whole world used Filecoin tomorrow, what would be the biggest blocker?
A3: The interface tooling and the retrieval market. While storage capacity is massive, scaling the traffic for high-speed data retrieval (like a CDN) is the next big engineering challenge for the ecosystem.

Q4: How does browser adoption look for IPFS?
A4: It’s moving faster than expected. Brave is now embedding a full IPFS node directly into the browser, which is a major milestone for decentralized web access that was originally expected to take much longer.

Q5: What is the significance of the partnership with ChainSafe?
A5: ChainSafe took a major bet on the ecosystem by building an alternative implementation of the Filecoin protocol, which is critical for network resilience and decentralization.

Q6: Why does “verifiability” matter for daily users?
A6: It allows for things like seeing the mutating history of a newspaper article over time. You can know exactly when data was changed and be certain the information you’re citing is permanent and immutability-checked.

Q7: How do you compete with data monopolies?
A7: By creating a market that allows smaller players to join together. Just as Airbnb allowed individuals to compete with hotel chains, Filecoin allows smaller storage providers to compete with the “Big Three” cloud providers.