On Wednesday, September 13th, 2023, Gloria Kimbwala presented “DWeb and Civil Society: An Introduction For Makers.” Gloria is a renowned tech industry leader, specializing in quadratic funding, regenerative cryptoeconomics, DAOs, and inclusive financial structures. As a technical advisor on the board of directors for the Black Women Blockchain Council, she's recognized as one of the Top Ten Women in Fintech. Gloria is also a speaker and mentor, sharing her expertise and empowering marginalized voices through hackathons and social justice causes.
In this webinar, Gloria presented Blockchains 101, providing an overview of the technical features of blockchains specifically for nondeveloper audiences. She gave easy-to-understand explanations of many of the key characteristics and concepts underlying blockchains: decentralizations, consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, public vs. private blockchains, tokens, and cryptocurrencies.
She also offered explanations of the advantages afforded by these technical features, such as immutability (tamper-proof), transparency, security, and autonomy, as well as some of the limitations, including scalability, privacy, and latency.
Gloria covered a wide range of topics but also dove deep, especially into buzzword topics like cryptocurrencies, in order to demystify them. In the mainstream, we hear people talk about everything from large profits from trading cryptocurrencies to huge losses, theft, and scams. Gloria covered the steps people can take to actually interact with these technologies themselves — in the safest, most secure way possible — so that they can better understand them and form more informed opinions. For example, Gloria showed screenshots of apps that serve as digital wallets and exchanges along with the step-by-step guide to buying, selling, storing, and sending cryptocurrencies.
Many people probably hear a lot about the blockchain protocols, bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH), among others. However, they might not actually understand that protocols are basically a set of foundational rules and standards that govern these networks. These distinct qualities are what differentiate each protocol and makes one well suited for some use cases over others. For example, Gloria explained how bitcoin is well suited and commonly used for use cases involving peer-to-peer digital cash transactions while ethereum is often used for smart contracts and decentralized applications.
Finally, for those in the audience who might be developers or knowledgeable about programming languages, Gloria also covered the common languages — including Solidity, C/C++, Rust, Python, and Javascript — used to develop these different blockchains and their corresponding features.
All in all, Gloria’s presentation covered a wide range of topics under the DWeb umbrella and made many of the core concepts understandable for people at all levels of technical capacity. She gave everyone — from active users to curious minds — crucial insights and tips for navigating the world of blockchains, a latent and sometimes intimidating space.
As users of this technology and participants in these peer-to-peer networks, we can all remember this one important piece of advice Gloria left us with to help us mitigate risk: secure our private keys! Our private keys are the most critical piece of information when it comes to cryptocurrency security. Gloria reminds us to never share them, use strong passwords, and enable two-factor authentication, which is something for us to be mindful of everywhere on the web, decentralized and not.
If you missed Gloria’s presentation, you can watch the playback.
And be sure to connect with Gloria on Twitter or LinkedIn to learn more about her amazing work. Thanks for reading and being part of the Maker community.