3Box’s Danny Zuckerman on Web3’s data infrastructure

“The conversation around identity in Web3 happens in spurts,” said 3Box co-founder Danny Zuckerman. He was speaking to Orchid’s Derek Silva on this week’s episode of the Priv8 Podcast.

“Every 18 months, builders in the Web3 space hit a limit in terms of what they can do without better versions of decentralized identity,” he said. “Then the cycle repeats itself. Everybody talks about identity for a bit, and then the conversation slowly dies down – usually in a bear market – before it eventually comes back.

“But I think that the critical thing about identity in Web3 actually has less to do with identity itself, and has more to do with the data stack,” he continued.

“Blockchains have a lot of problems. Even though people can still deploy DeFi and NFT projects on them pretty dependably, the data infrastructure to support the Web3 vision of composable, user-centric data does not yet exist in a completely reliable way.”

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Danny said that this infrastructure is being built, although relatively slowly. “For instance, The Graph is getting more sophisticated for the querying side of data, and projects like Spruce, Privvy, and many others are building the core standards that are going to need to align throughout the entire stack.

“But at the foundation of it all, Web3 data needs raw storage. Reliable storage infrastructure is going to allow people to build things they haven’t been able to build before, like Web3 social networks and really sophisticated collaboration tools,” Danny said.

“It’s all about creating better ways of collaborating across flexible groups. And there are already a lot of fantastic applications already out there that are waiting for Web3’s data stack to mature – and so that maturation is what I think is going to need to happen next.

“We think of the future of Web3 data as ‘data that developers can build on,’” Danny said. “And the identity reputation that emerges from that data will grant people the ability to control their personal information, participate in governance, and make use of their reputations. That's the important trend we're going to see in the next few months.”

Check out the entire conversation with Danny here. And don’t forget to subscribe to Priv8 on your favorite streaming service.