Deep-Diving into Tech Crunch: Sessions Blockchain 2018
Hey, how’re you all doing folks?
I’m quite pleased to share these news with you: I was able to attend TechCrunch’s Sessions Blockchain and I gotta say it was quite an amazing spectacle of interesting ideas and strong opinions!
Ethereum foundation is betting strong in Zug, the town which received the event, as it’s becoming more and more the real Crypto-Valley. This is quite astonishing considering the fact cryptocurrency appeared only 10 years ago. The Swiss government is taking a strong stance on this market by opening their doors (and pockets) to massive crypto-currency projects.
Who attended? Figures like Vitalik, Karl, Justin (Ethereum Foundation), Galia(Bancor), Jun (OmiseGo), Jarrad (Status) and CZ (Binance) among others. The topics of discussion varied from the state of Ethereum, as it’s now heavily wrapped around the new plasma framework which combines both Casper’s proof of stake with Sharding, to the issue with gas fees or the problems of centralized and permissioned projects. Plasma, in a sensa, would work as a side-chain to Ethereum. Other projects are attempting more or less the same thing, but in a different way, like POA, whom I also met on the roadshow!
What did I learn?
Life is short and too wild. There is no right path for anything, except many different options — some of which will be full of booby traps. What is the right way to implement blockchain? Does blockchain technology even exists, or is it doomed to be linked to cryptocurrencies?
Is there a right path for governance? Is decentralization really that important for people? Can it actually be achieved?
I won’t answer most of those questions, as they’re still quite unanswerable, yet, discussions around these topics, by some of the greatest minds behind some of the biggest crypto-projects, should spark doubt in your mind and make you think what do you think to be the right way for this completely new ecosystem.
After all, if only some of us have a voice, what’s the point of decentralization?
In one hand projects like the Hyperledger are gaining loads of traction. Brian, who is an executive at Hyperledger project did mention the amazing things they’re building with different companies. The gist of it was something like: we can do many transactions per second and not have the issues public networks suffer.
Again, due to my pro-decentralization approach I feel like they’re missing the point. Without a cryptocurrency associated to your ledger, you have a distributed database. Yay, Congratz.
There was also a really cool panel of VC and investors who stated what projects are they interested in. If you’re building a protocol, you’re in luck! From all the people on stage, one of the speeches I enjoyed the most was both Bill’s and Colin’s as they seem to fully understand decentralization and human behavior. With people spread across the world and a tenacity for water sports, Bill Tai showed quite an aggressive stance in terms of what type of projects he believes in: if you’re building something “corporate” without economic incentives, forget it. He was quite pro-decentralization mentioning the most important asset out there are people and what they can get from this technology. I tip him my hat.
More interesting, of course, was the talk between key Ethereum foundation members. Vitalik led the way talking about the state of affairs, but way more surprising was Karl. That smiley dude sure knows how to motivate people. He’s currently working in plasma (previously on Casper) and he expects it to be released on the course of the following years. Justin and him are combining forces to allow for this new proof-of-stake technology to also incorporate Sharding, which stores information off-chain (on a sidechain), making the whole network incredibly faster.
An important note mentioned by Vitalik was that he truly wishes to move away from Ethereum someday and that people should be careful when betting on plasma-tech related projects. According to him, most of them do not truly have a working version of this technology.
The other awesome thing about the new Plasma framework, is that it is actually combining all the big brains within the Ethereum foundation. I’m really hopeful they are able to mash their knowledge and know-how to produce a truly epic protocol. One thing I would like to challenge is the following assumption: the higher the bar of the stake, the more centralized the system will become. For a network with enough network users, what it actual makes sense is to lower the bar as much as possible so that more participants can join in the validation of transactions. Assuming the hypothesis hashing could be done with minimal hardware (gpu, raspberry, etc), the goal is to have more users participating. The higher the reward for each block, the less likely people are of attacking the network. Plus, the more people value the network, the less likely an attack is to happen, for the simple fact an attack on the network would also destroy the attackers value.
I understand the attacks can be done with the sole purpose of destroying the network, which would in a way annihilate the above hypothesis, hence I understand Casper’s initial requirement of a minimum 1000 ETH to be staked to participate as a validator.
The nothing-at-stake problem is quite real and increasing the initial stake does solve it. But do we really want to make the rich, richer? Is that the path we want to follow?
I wish these guys the best of luck; their creation can change the entire Ethereum protocol forever.
Since we’re discussing Ethereum, I should also tell you if you’re looking for ERC compatible side-chains you have a really neat option already deployed and working.
POA’s side-chain is live and couldn’t be better. The demo done by Igor, POA’s Tech lead, showed how easy it is to actually convert your ether into a different token (POA20) which runs on the POA network. This conversion was done automatically on the network, there were no exchanges involved. If I had to bet on a side-chain project, I would definitely look into POA. Also, something quite interesting was a paper shown by Igor, the Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum Networks, which claims both networks are heavily centralized on a few accounts who hold a large quantity of funds.
Besides POA I would advise you to check Loom, as it’s the only other Ethereum side-chain I know to be working.
Before we move away from the Ethereum network related topics, we still need to discuss how awesome it was to hear the founders and leads from Bancor, OmiseGo and Status. I have to say I have invested some time ago in all three, so it’s really great to hear first-hand what they’re working on and their plans for the future. Bancor is an awesome ERC20 exchange, meaning all Ethereum tokens can be traded within Bancor with minimum hassle. In the future you can expect it to have extra functionality (maybe a crypto-to-fiat card? Who knows!). OmiseGo and status are also developing quite nicely, as both have deployed platforms that you can use today. I would advise you to give them a try, as Vitalik is involved with both.
Another amazing talk was from Roham, the founder of Cryptokitties. From all the people on stage, he was probably the most balanced one. His approach is heavily influenced by his business and previous projects experience. The way cryptokitties was created and deployed shows us there is a huge market for games, collectibles and art. Meaning, when you’re able to digitize a fungible item, you’re able to store similar assets in nature (smart-contracts containing code), that completely differ in value. Cryptokitties made it better by allowing for genetic procreation as combining kitties creates new unique kitties. If this logic becomes mainstream, I really see a world where game assets become valuable in real life.
To wrap up this whole thing, I would like to mention the really sweet talk by CZ. So one thing I want to say is that he’s quite a grounded person, this is, yes Binance has currently a daily volume of around USD 1 billion, but that doesn’t change the fact he’s still trying to give more power back to users. Either by creating the Binance token which distributes a percentage of all fees’ profits to token holders, or by opening up the SAFU fund — which protects investors from hacks — and the Binance Labs,which supports developing cryptocurrency projects, CZ has shown Binance’s path won’t be a corporate one.
A major goal mentioned by CZ was the fact he wants to bring Binance to Africa. He already met with around 20 country representatives to make this happen. I would argue his actions show he really cares about explaining his vision to people and it’s clearly not only about massive profits (although Binance is doing quite well on that area).
Conclusion
Events like TechCrunch: Sessions Blockchain are quite needed as they bring together investors and projects. It’s not only about raising money for ICOs or showing off your amazing new product, but the fact you’re able to discuss ideas with people who managed to build something in this crypto-world.
For me, due to my startup Bityond having a token, it was an epic chance to show-off some of my knowledge and to learn a lot from the best in the field.
You can check here my interview for BitcoinMagNL!
If you have comments or want to share your thoughts tweet me @febrocas
Looking forward to the next event!
