Last Friday, Chainlink kicked off its annual spring hackathon with a virtual presentation featuring Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov, who quoted United States President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 “Citizens in a Republic” address.
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;”
In advance of $530,000 in prizes that will be awarded across more than a dozen categories when the hackathon concludes in June, Nazarov praised participants for simply “taking the leap” towards building something that could reinvent how the world works.
He described a tipping point, stemming from mounting inflation and institutional failures, which creates a unique opportunity to invent a new world order based on cryptographic guarantees.
Nazarov said a shift of this magnitude happens less than once in a lifetime, which is why he believes those building web3 have entered the “world’s biggest arena.”
“We find ourselves in the arena where all of the world’s value is being reconsidered,” he said, acknowledging that while such conditions will cause temporary loss and disruption, “they do provide an opportunity for people to realize a better way – and that better way is really what our industry is about.”
Nazarov addressed the audience’s developers, “Not only do I want to congratulate you for taking the step into the arena of building and actually making something useful, but also I think that the arena you’re in is really the world’s biggest arena of how the world’s value and economic relationships work across all categories.”
He emphasized the limitations of web2 when it comes to codifying relationships between peers as well as between peers and institutions, and highlighted web3 – not as something “that will kill web2,” but as something that will allow web2 applications “to upgrade into a reliable form” of transactions, relationships, and guarantees.
“What our industry is saying is that you can have a cryptographically guaranteed deal about everything,” he elaborated. “You don’t need to rely on the word of institutions; you only need to rely on encryption.”
Speaking particularly to web2 developers who are joining web3 by participating in the Chainlink Spring 2022 Hackathon, Nazarov explained why web3 is about much more than creating ownership in the form of tokenization or even building DeFi applications around those digital assets.
For Nazarov, the task at hand is building a better internet and a world powered by truth instead of false assumptions.
As the web3 industry’s leading oracle solution, Chainlink is continuously providing decentralized data feeds and services such as random number generation through Chainlink VRF and smart contract automation through Chainlink Keepers. Nazarov said new infrastructure – such as Keepers, which went live on mainnet last summer – enables hackathon participants to invent entirely new use cases for smart contracts “that weren’t possible even a year ago.”
Emphasizing that web3 is still in its earliest stages of development, Nazarov underscored the “hundreds of trillions in value” that may be reformatted as cryptocurrency “if the world continues to fail people” through inflation and unfulfilled institutional promises.
He concluded his address on an inspirational note for web3 developers.
“It might seem like you’re part of a two trillion dollar industry. You’re actually part of a hundreds of trillions of dollars industry. That’s what this is about.”
Watch Sergey Nazarov’s full presentation during the Chainlink Spring 2022 Hackathon Opening Ceremony.