Even if most of the investors and project founders strongly support both the right to privacy and business independence in the web3 sector, there are obvious limits to such an approach.
Web3 platforms aim at freedom but cannot avoid good cooperation with government entities. Conversely, this shouldn’t open up to an extremely close and invasive partnership between state/corporate entities and web3 projects in general.
In this quick interview, the expert Nicole Fortunato from the law firm Morais Leitão, Galvão Teles, Soares da Silva & Associados | Morais Leitão (exclusive member of the PrivacyRules alliance for Portugal), joins a web summit 2022 panel on anonymity, privacy and regulations in the Web3 sector.
As an outcome of the session, the experts agreed that the level of government involvement in regulating the sector will increase, as this is a required step for this sector to flourish. In fact, Web3 still needs to gain trust, and trust can be achieved only through the right laws.
Additionally, the interaction between governments and businesses in the field may become a new business opportunity. Apart from the self-regulations created by crypto companies, there is a lot of confusion about how this sector is handled. For this reason, there is a need for a strong progression and cooperation without ego between authorities and businesses, as this is the only way to have a working environment.
The other issue is data sovereignty and decentralization. Do people really want sovereignty over their data?
The biggest problem here is related to liability. By providing people with higher sovereignty over their data, we will also charge them with a higher level of liability. However, this sector seems not yet ready to leave people empowered with the capacity to decide fully by themselves, so there is also a need for the right compromise between the government, businesses and individuals intervention.
Finally, it is extremely important to mention that the complexity of this field requires a combination of expertise, solutions and taking some risks. There is no binary solution to something growing as the Web3, businesses that want to succeed need to put together different experts, such as programmers and legal, and to always handle risks by minimising them. There is no pre-structured path, so this makes things much more difficult.