Web 5 - Hackathon Article

I started on this journey on the 17th of November 2023. I had seen a tweet on X from one of the top entrepreneurs in Nigeria about taking part in the Web 5 Hackathon, I did not immediately sign on because I thought I did not have the required technical skills. Later on in the day, the guy tweeted again encouraging people without technical skills to sign up. I thought, "well, I didn't have anything to lose". So I signed up.

On signing up, I quickly posted a message in the Slack channel that I wanted to join a team as a PM with little coding experience. Luckily for me, I teamed up with some lovely people who I have gotten on well with, so far..

Web 5, hmmn... I started reading about it, watching videos on YouTube, joined the webinar organised by the Hackathon organisers, poring over any article I could get that had made a reference to Web 5. So far, I think it is a brilliant idea based on the guiding principles stated below:

• DId: Decentralised Identifiers

• VCs: Verifiable Credentials

• DWNs: Decentralised Web Nodes

Coming from a country where everything is disorganised and people are extorted to access their own information, I am sold on the idea of Web5 already. However, I fear that this concept is maybe for the developed world. Why? You ask. This is because, in my country, most data are still managed/stored manually. If data is being stored manually and majority of the population are still illiterates, how do you get to the point where data is in a digital format and people are to think about creating their DIds?

Don't get me wrong, as mentioned above, it is a brilliant idea and when we get to the point where the world is ready for it, it'll be a game changer in all sectors. For example, it could be used to solve immigration issues where or in the financial sector, identity fraud issues. But we need a joined up/ connected world for this to fully achieve the proposed benefits of Web5.