Anoma Seoul Round-up: August 2022
In the first week of August, members of the Anoma team headed out to Seoul for a range of events. It was the perfect opportunity to connect with the blossoming Web3 community in Korea, and to share the vision for Anoma with a new audience — as well as some familiar audiences, too. From BUIDL Asia to ETH Seoul, and with ZK Night sandwiched in-between, it was a busy week — which was largely fueled by Korean BBQ.
Our time in Seoul was also the ideal way to connect with members of this community, ranging from seasoned developers and protocol engineers, to those who are just getting into the space — helped in part by Korea’s fantastic community of welcoming, entrepreneurial, and interesting individuals.
Here’s what the team got up to:
BUIDL Asia 2022
Organized by Erica Kang, a key figure in Seoul’s Web3 community, and the team at KryptoSeoul, BUIDL Asia 2022 was three years in the making. The first time that many from across the community had had the opportunity to connect IRL, BUIDL was held on Thursday, August 4th, and Friday, August 5th at the Sofitel in Seoul.
As sponsors, the team manned a booth across the two days, dishing out Korean-themed merchandise and having interesting discussions with BUIDL’s 550+ attendees in return.
Here’s an overview of the talks and panels that we contributed to over the two days:
Anoma — an intent-centric architecture for fully decentralized dApps
To start off our contribution to BUIDL, co-founder Adrian Brink gave his talk, titled ‘Anoma — an intent-centric architecture for fully decentralized dApps.’
To a packed auditorium (with only standing room available at the very back!) Adrian gave an overview of the evolution of Anoma and explained our approach to design, before diving into the architecture itself, its possible deployment models, and the apps that can be built on top of it.
Adrian explained the role of intents in Anoma, “Intents are just code. An intent is just a predicate over some state change. It says that you are fine with a particular state change. And they are arbitrary — whatever you can write, you can express as an intent. They are fully programmatic.”
ZKPs for scaling and privacy
Next up, Adrian took to the stage once more for the panel, “ZKPs for scaling and privacy” along with Alex Pruden, COO of Aleo, Eli Ben-Sasson, President and Co-founder of StarkWare, and Jane Ma, Co-founder and Co-Project Lead zkLend. The discussion was moderated by Teck Chia, head of Gnosis.
The panel covered a lot of ground, starting out by considering the primary differences and trade-offs of ZK rollups and optimistic rollups, and journeying through why privacy isn’t more prevalent in modern applications, whether privacy even matters in the first place, and concluding with the areas of ZK research the panel is most excited by. Adrian commented that “In terms of areas of ZKP research that I’m excited about, it’s definitely better languages to write circuits in… Currently, you still hand-write constraints in Rust, and it sucks.” For those interested, we are working on Vamp-IR which solves the lack of interoperability between proof systems. It allows circuits to be written once in a canonical form and used in any proof system one desires and can be transformed into any other circuit language via a compiler.
Scaling blockchains with L2 solutions
On the second day of BUIDL Asia in Seoul, co-founder Awa Sun Yin moderated a panel, titled “Scaling blockchains with L2 solutions’’ which featured — norswap from Optimism Foundation, Alex Shevchenko from Aurora, Mustafa Al-Bassam from Celestia, and Tomasz Stańczak from Nevermind.
The panel began by considering what led us to develop L2s in the first place, with some very different views from the panel on the need for L2s. The broad discussion continued through the classification of L2s (“are they the same as sidechains?”) before considering MEV in L2s and the notion of finality.
Talks from both days will soon be available on the KryptoSeoul YouTube channel.
ZK Night
Organized by ZK-SEL, on Friday, August 5th, the team joined others from Aleo, Polygon, Radius, and ZKrypto to discuss the future of zero-knowledge.
Introduction to Anoma
Kicking off our contribution to the evening, Awa Sun Yin gave a short introduction to Anoma, highlighting the thinking that has inspired the approach to design, and giving context to the work that is being done by the Heliax team, including Namada.
Starting with an explanation of why Anoma is, truly, the third generation of blockchains — “What we’re proposing is the third generation of blockchains. We want to provide a full stack architecture that allows you to build fully decentralized apps.”
Awa then spent time explaining how Anoma’s architecture works, and how it can be deployed, and what can be built on top of it.
Why ZKPs will play a major role in the future
For the second part of the evening, Adrian joined a panel discussion with Alex Pruden from Aleo, Rahat Chowdhury from Polygon, and Hyunk Oh from Zkrypto — moderated by AJ from ZK-SEL.
The conversation focused on the future of zero-knowledge cryptography, including the problems it will solve, the challenges that lay ahead, and the ways that they can be overcome.
On the need for ZKPs, Adrian stated that, “The institutions around us are crumbling, democracy is eroding at a terrifying rate, and the tech we’re building in the ZK space is the off-boarding point without there being WW3.”
ETH Seoul 2022
To conclude the team’s Korean adventure, we were excited to join ETH Seoul , organized once again by Erica Kang. Broken into a hackathon as well as two days of IRL talks, followed by virtual events, 2022 marked the first ever ETH Seoul.
Anoma — an intent-centric architecture for fully decentralized dApps
Following a keynote from Vitalik Buterin on the importance of ZK to the future of blockchain, Adrian delivered his talk “Anoma — an intent-centric architecture for fully decentralized dApps” to the audience in Seoul’s bustling Gangnam district.
In this talk, Adrian gave a detailed explanation of the intent-centric approach to architecture design that Anoma follows, exploring the necessity for intent-centricity in general. He stated that, “To have decentralized counterparty discovery, you need to focus on intents… In an intent-centric design, you authorize the final state that you are happy with and not the intermediate steps to get there.”
Watch his full talk:
감사합니다, Seoul!
The last week has been a great testament to the strength of the growing blockchain community in Korea, and it was a pleasure to connect with so many interesting and passionate people at the various events, after parties, and everything in-between.
ZCon3 in Las Vegas
There is no rest for the wicked! Members of the team are already in Las Vegas for Zcash Foundation’s ZCon3 where they will be giving a number of talks and networking in the Nevada desert heat. If you’re there, be sure to say hello!
If you’re not able to be there, the livestream and recorded talks are available here:
If you’d like to stay in the loop, as always, be sure to follow Anoma and Namada on Twitter, and join us on Discord, for updates as they happen.
