This Year Web3 Foundation Championed Blockchain as a Verifiable Source of Truth

Twitter icon  •  Published 1年前  •  Hassan Maishera

We live, it is said, in a post-truth society. An age in which nothing is believed, everyone is skeptical, and stories too outré for our liking are dismissed as “fake news.” This year, growing media mistrust and the rise of AI gave web denizens cause to question what was real and what was fake.

As this heady brew of paranoia, incredulity, and cynicism simmered, blockchain emerged as the final boss for establishing trust in a trustless world. While a blockchain can’t vouch for the validity of the information stored on it, it can vouch for its integrity: that it hasn’t been tampered with or altered in any way. In summer 2022, Polkadot incubator Web3 Foundation showed its support for a project restructuring the news and media industries with the aid of blockchain.

Publishing Industry Meets Web3

Web3 is centered around the concepts of privacy, security, and self-sovereignty of data. It’s all about handing control over the internet back to its users, wrestling it away from the grasp of the tech oligarchs that define web2 and everything that’s wrong with it. Web3 Foundation is leading this charge, and so it leaped at the opportunity to showcase web3 technology as a means of determining trusted news sources.

Web3 has the potential to support authentic news publishing and to increase trust in media – something which has been at historic lows in the fake news era. In August, Web3 Foundation provided funding for a pilot that ran between October and December this year in conjunction with Oxford Internet Institute’s David Tomchak and the World Association of News Publishers. The aim of the program was to find ways for local and international news publishers to utilize web3 technologies to better effect.

Web3 Foundation Hits New Funding Record

Around the same time that Web3 Foundation was funding bursaries for a media programme embracing decentralized technologies, it was hitting a new milestone for project grants. In early August, it was revealed that Web3 Foundation had surpassed 400 grants on Polkadot. The financial aid was disbursed to hundreds of projects building on Polkadot.

More than 1,000 projects applied for a grant, with Web3 Foundation awarding just over 400 of this funding up until August 2022. Of the successful grant recipients, 181 teams have completed at least one project, and 300 have successfully delivered their first milestone.

Blockchain technology is now being utilized in a number of ways by both mainstream and grassroots media entities. While distributed ledgers can be used to verify publishing dates and authors with cryptographic proof, they can also be used to archive stories to ensure they are always accessible. Improvements in decentralized storage have enabled web3 developers to offer cloud storage that can not be easily censored or deleted. It’s yet another way in which decentralized tech is being utilized as a source of truth in a world that is starting to question everything.

Author

Hassan Maishera

Hassan is a Nigeria-based financial content creator that has invested in many different blockchain projects, including Bitcoin, Ether, Stellar Lumens, Cardano, VeChain and Solana. He currently works as a financial markets and cryptocurrency writer and has contributed to a large number of the leading FX, stock and cryptocurrency blogs in the world.