Berlin Blockchain Week — A Recap
The blockchain space flocked to Berlin for a week of intensive conferences, workshops, meetups and hackathons. The AirGap & Papers team attended DappCon, presented at TQuorum Berlin and hacked at ETHBerlin.
With a few days of processing and recapitulation of the events at Berlin Blockchain Week we’ve arrived back in our daily routine. During the events of the last week we have met many old friends and made countless new ones and were able to take home some valuable inputs and great ideas.
DappCon 👀
The developer conference for Ethereum dapps & infrastructre at the Technical University Berlin.
The first day of our Berlin Blockchain Week started with DappCon where we got insights into the projects working on Ethereum on the dapp level as well as more in-depth with talks about state channels or cryptography.
TQuorum Berlin 🗣
A variety of technical workshops from the Tezos ecosystem at Estrel Berlin.
Core Protocol Engineering, STOs on Tezos, zKSnarks
TQ brought together the Tezos ecosystem in Berlin with TQuorum Berlin, we loved to connect with all the people and being able to put a face to projects.
The day was kicked off by Ryan Lackey talking about the security token ecosystem and with Adrian Brink with his talk about the importance of core protocol development. Followed by workshops full of mind bending knowledge like Christopher Goes talking about SNARKs, STARKs, and SHARKs. And Nomadic Labs, Cryptonomic, Baking Bad presenting their current and upcoming work.
Browser based wallet interaction
Alessandro De Carli presented AirGap’s vision of wallet based browser interaction on Tezos could look like in the future and how we think AirGap can bring value by developing a wallet communication standard with the focus on interoperability between wallets. Offering a simple solution for dapp developers to use said standard profiting from compatibility with wallets in the Tezos ecosystem. Avoiding the need to implement their own wallet and sacrificing precious development time.
We will gather the relevant parties for such a standard at TQuorum New York with the goal to have a unified approach in the end that allows browser interaction with multiple wallets. If you’re interested and would like to be involved in this process reach out to us.
The recording of these workshops will be available soon.
ETHBerlin 🏆
The Ethereum focused hackathon at the Factory Görlitzer Park
From Friday to Sunday evening it was time to hack at ETHBerlin in the magnificent Factory in Görlitzer Park. We fell in love with the building with its various spaces to hide and hack away into the night. We have attended our fair share of hackathons but ETHBerlin was one of our favorites ones not only the location, the food and drinks were top notch we also have to tip our hats to the organizers.
Building You. the decentralized password manager
A lot of time was spent on the plane during conferences and meals discussing what we should build at ETHBerlin. After one or the other argument we settled on building a decentralized password manager.
You. is a password manager leveraging decentralized storage and messaging that authenticates Web 2 and Web 3 logins with your mobile device.
Passwords are fine.. what is the problem anyways?
- Single Sign On is not supported by all websites
- Centralized password management means single point of failure
- Having to enter master passwords all the time is cumbersome
Soo.. what solution do you propose then?
A seamless login experience by leveraging human friendly security technologies for logins with minimal disruptive interaction by using biometric authentication like fingerprint to unlock the secure enclave of a mobile device accessing the stored passwords.
Using 3Box’s persistent storage and messaging for a resilient and distributed setup. No more backups needed, everything is distributed and persisted, recovery only requires an Ethereum account.
But.. how does it work?
With your browser on your notebook you visit a website where you store your password with You. The browser extensions recognises the login field of the website and sends a push notification to your mobile device. On your mobile device you open the push notification and confirm the login. Voilà the browser extension logs you in.
We will have a more detailed write-up shortly, meanwhile you can get more information on devpost.
We won…?
We were not only able to amaze ourselves by how seamless the approach and login experience was. But also the 3Box team by using their 3Box storage and messaging solution as well as the Consensys Grants team.
The cherry on top and unexpected for us (also displayed in our chaotic presentation on stage) was winning the ETHBerlin open track where the jury selected 10 out of 90 applications and rewarding the winners with 6'000 Euro each.
🏆 3Box Storage Bounty
🏆 Consensys Grants Security Bounty
🏆 ETHBerlin Open Track
Æternity Meetup 👂
The Æeternity Meetup with insights to Sophia smart contract development at Blockchain Embassy.
The processing of the events is still not entirely over but we’re already looking forward to ETHBerlin Drei and the next Berlin Blockchain Week.
