Last Sunday I arrived in Brussels for the first time. The first impressions I formed included wow everything tastes amazing here and all the buildings are beautiful.

Throughout the week I slowly met what felt like most of the people there who were also attending IPFS þing. Meeting almost everyone there was possible because there were only a little over a hundred people there. Some of my favorite people included Jorropo, Adin, another fellow Canadian Lodge, and Cade -all magnetic people in their unique ways that will keep me inspired for a long time despite our short encounter.

I learned about several things that stood out as immediately applicable to my ideas and projects, one of them being Saturn. Saturn is a decentralized CDN. The problem it solves is the problem of ipfs retrievals not being able to match the speed required by modern apps via the ipfs gateways that are centralized. Developers could potentially use Saturn for their client-side games by experimenting with loading game content from Saturn, in a way that is quickly retrievable, which shifts all the heavy lifting to the peer-to-peer network and client side.

The other tool I liked was Portrait, a no-code tool for generating websites for people's web3 identity.

I intend to try out portrait with my jclqn.eth address and report back findings.

After this week-long gathering for the IPFS implementors community I was able to feel a new appreciation for ipfs that I had previously taken for granted. After working in the web3 space for almost two years I admit I forget about all the projects happening that are focused on advancing IPFS implementations.

I'd like to thank the event planning team at Protocol Labs for their Scholars program that helped sponsor my attendance at this magical event. I also want to give special thanks to Yuni & Nicole for all the help with logistics 🙏 .