Devcon4: A Debrief
In this post, we briefly recap Devcon4 and discuss some of our favourite parts.
In 2014, a group of intrepid developers assembled in Berlin for Devcon0. It was at this proto-conference that the first conceptualisations of Ethereum were presented and refined. Fast forward to 2018, and Ethereum is a global phenomenon, whilst Devcon has become the world’s preeminent conference for blockchain developers and entrepreneurs.
Two weeks ago, the spectacular city of Prague played host to Devcon4. The Clearmatics team was there and we wanted to share our experiences and some of our standout moments.
Why go to Devcon?
Devcon is more than a conference. It’s an opportunity to share ideas and stories with more than 3,000 fellow technologists, friends and colleagues, driving our industry forward in the process. The event was brilliantly organised, with a superb venue, smoothly executed timetable and diverse variety of events covering all aspects of the blockchain ecosystem, including scalability, security, privacy, developer experience, UX and design as well as society and systems. There really was something for everyone.
The atmosphere at Devcon4 felt somewhat different to last year. In 2017, there was much exuberance around Blockchain finding a mass audience and of course, ICOs dominated proceedings. This year, the hype has calmed, enabling everyone to focus on what really matters: building practical real world applications for blockchain.
Our industry might be enjoying rapid growth, but it’s also maturing. The overarching narrative is evolving beyond crypto to meaningful use cases that promise to benefit every person on the planet. As Joe Lubin, founder of ConsenSys recently said:
“We’ve seen lots of booms and busts in our ecosystem over the last 10 years and it has never been stronger than it is now. I measure that in terms of the number of projects, people, entrepreneurs, and developers. It is orders of magnitudes bigger than it was and the foundational infrastructure is getting built out.”
Devcon is important, not just because it provides a platform for like-minded people to meet and exchange ideas. It’s also how we are seen by others. And the rave reviews doing the rounds bode well for the public image of our industry as we enter this new phase of growth and adoption.
Ethereum update
The conference is especially helpful on a practical level, providing a sense of where things are headed. We were hoping for an update from Vitalik Buterin on the second phase of Ethereum’s roadmap, and we got one.
First, some brief background. Ethereum currently runs off a Proof of Work (PoW) consensus protocol, allowing miners to allocate computational resources to validate and secure transactions on a decentralized network. PoW is widely regarded as slow and inefficient and Ethereum’s core development team are seeking to move away from the original consensus mechanism to something more scalable. Enter the “Serenity Protocol”, a hybrid between PoW and Proof of Stake (PoS). As Vitalik says, tongue firmly in cheek:
“Serenity is the world computer as it’s really meant to be. Not a smart phone from 1999 that can process 15 transactions per second and maybe, potentially play Snake.”
We learned from his keynote speech that the focus remains on scaling the Ethereum platform, with the team working on numerous solutions that include Casper, Plasma and sharding. This approach has been referred to as “Ethereum 2.0” and “shasper”. Well, at Devcon4 it was given a grown up name — Serenity.
The endgame with Serenity is to provide “pure PoS consensus, faster times to synchronous confirmation (8–16 seconds), economic finality (10–20 minutes),” and 1000x scalability. In short, it will address Ethereum’s shortcomings and fully deliver on its potential as a multipolar decentralized ecosystem. And it isn’t far away.
We learned that there will be 4 four versions to the rollout of Serenity:
- Initial version with proof-of-stake beacon chain. This new POS blockchain should co-exist alongside ethereum and will allow Casper validators to participate.
- Simplified version of Serenity with limited features. No smart contracts or money transfers from one shard to another.
- Amplified version of Serenity with cross-shard communication. Users can send funds and messages across shards.
- Various tweaks and optimized features.
This kind of visibility on the product roadmap is extremely helpful for entrepreneurs building with Ethereum as it helps us to make better strategic decisions.
Design takes centre stage
For blockchain to succeed and decentralised computing to flourish globally, we must do more than develop practical use cases. We must design applications that make it easy for users to access blockchain and benefit from its incredible power.
This logic applies equally to individual consumers and capital markets enterprises we work with here at Clearmatics. User-centric design requires more focus and investment from our industry, so it was gratifying to see the first shoots emerge at the conference with Coinbase’s UX Workshop on “Designing for Humans”.
Talks worth mentioning
Devcon4 was certainly a thought-provoking, inspiring, exhausting and rewarding few days, and we wanted to share some of the Clearmatics’ team’s favourite moments with you. Below we have included what caught our eye and captured our imagination at the conference.
Cryptoeconomics
One of the team’s favourite sessions was “Building a Cryptoeconomic Tool Set” by Vlad Zamfir, Aditya Asgaonkar, Ben Jones & Georgios Piliouras. Their slides can be found here.
Cryptoeconomics at Scale by Karl Floersch
Consensus
The Case For Proof Of Stake by Emin Gün Sirer
CBC Casper Design Philosophy by Vlad Zamfir
Privacy
Barry Whitehat’s talk on “Snarks for mixing, signaling and scaling” was of particular interest to the team given our work on Mobïus, a smart contract offering trustless autonomous tumbling using linkable ring signatures. Specifically, he discussed Miximus, a proof of concept trustless ethereum mixer and Semaphore, General Zero Knowledge Identity and Signaling, on and off chain.
Other privacy talks of interest were “STARKs” by E. Ben-Sasson and “Satoshi Has No Clothes: Failures in On-Chain Privacy” by Ian Miers as well as Zooko Wilcox from Zcash’s talk entitled “Privacy for Everyone” (see below).
Technical
Ethereum 2.0 randomness by Justin Drake from Prysmatic Labs
Yul
- Intermediate Language for Ethereum. (Formerly JULIA/IULIA, intermediate language that can compile to different backends (EVM 1.0 , 1.5; eWASM) giving portability across these platforms.
Honourable Mentions
Turbo-Geth by Alexey Akhunov was an awesome session, whose Devcon4 slides can be found here. Interested in diving deeper into the project? Here’s a Medium post from earlier this year and the project’s Github.
Cory Doctorow’s talk entitled “Decentralize, Democratize, or Die” was also worth an honourable mention with several of our team members particularly enjoying it.
A thank you
I’d like to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to the Ethereum Foundation and all the volunteers at the conference for putting on such an incredible event.
Devcon4 ended with everyone enjoying a good old sing-song (yes, you heard right) about the years of failed ideas and research that have gone into getting Ethereum to where it is today. This seemed like a fitting end to a conference that’s all about experimentation, iteration, and collaboration.
Christophe MacIntosh, cmacintosh, Community & Communications Lead, Clearmatics
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