A Smart City Built on Ethereum? International Blockchain Week Explores Viability and More

by Rebecca Migirov and Aiai Garcia

This September, the Ethereum Foundation and Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, a group part of the automotive industry giant Wanxiang, successfully hosted over one thousand blockchain developers, investors, and enthusiasts at International Blockchain Week in Shanghai. The City of the Future, as Shanghai is commonly called, was the ideal venue to introduce one of the world’s most promising technologies to Asian markets in what is the largest blockchain-focused conference in the world.

The week was spread out into three main events: DEVCON2, Demo Day, and the second Global Blockchain Summit.

PART I. DEVCON2
September 19–21, 2016

DEVCON2 was a packed three day event with back to back speakers, including Ethereum core developers, community representatives from top universities and NGOs, enterprises, and blockchain start-ups sharing new ventures and updates. An enthusiastic crowd packed the conference room as the community was eager to listen to thought leaders and technologists discuss the past, present, and future of Ethereum. ConsenSys, which started early in the game developing infrastructure tools for the ecosystem, presented a number of our Dapps. Since DEVCON1, we’ve been busy building Dapps and deep infrastructure and developer tools for the Ethereum ecosystem. At DEVCON2, ConsenSys Spoke teams and developers presented their work over the past year.

Kicking off with Ethereum Inventor Vitalik Buterin, Foundation Executive Director Ming Chan, and core developers Martin Becze, Christian Reitwiessner, Alex van de Sande, Peter Szilágyi, and Viktor Trón, Day 1 focused on regulatory frameworks, the future of Ethereum infrastructure, and scalability solutions. Vlad Zamfir presented on Casper, representing Ethereum’s anticipated move to Proof-of-Stake from Proof-of-Work, and Heiko Hees discussed plans for the Raiden Network, which aiming to allow for instant, off chain transactions for Ethereum. In “Zcash Loves Ethereum,” Zooko Wilcox explained how the launch of Zcash on October 28th can have positive impacts for Ethereum.

On Day 2, speakers and audience members alike focused on security and formal verification, as well as developer tools. The day began with a panels and talks on smart contract security and discussions on formal verification for Solidity and Ethereum. ConsenSys’ own MetaMask, Truffle, and Infura teams presented their tools. MetaMask, which seeks to allow end-users to easily access Ethereum Dapps through a Chrome plugin currently available in the Chrome Store, announced their in-development proof of concept Meta-Mascara. Meta-Mascara aims to eliminate the need for a browser extension. Tim Coulter of Truffle revealed a new TestRPC fork feature, as well as in-beta features such as Solidity unit testing and npm package management. “INFURA for the people!” announced Chief Architect Herman Junge when he announced that their secure, stable, fault tolerant, and scalable Ethereum and IPFS nodes are now available to all developers.

Kicking off with Marley Gray presenting Microsoft’s updates on cryptlets, followed by a demo and presentation for the vision of Mist by Alex van de Sande, Day 3 included discussions on multiple oracle systems and higher level tools. There were several presentations on IPFS, including creator and Protocol Labs founder Juan Benet discussing IPFS and Ethereum. Martin Koeppelmann of Gnosis discussed his team’s vision of prediction market governance and applications and explained that prediction markets add economic building blocks to the Ethereum ecosystem by providing an interface to the real world through economic incentives. Rouven Heck and Christian Lundkvist presented on uPort, the decentralized identity and key management solution on Ethereum. PoPA, or Proof of Physical Address, was introduced to the community by Igor Lilic as an eventual platform for KYC attestations. One of the final panels of the day was a discussion Ethereum for enterprise. Wednesday also featured a Women in Blockchain luncheon organized by members of the Ethereum Foundation and ConsenSys.

PART II. DEMO DAY
September 22, 2016
Dapp presentations during International Blockchain Week co-hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs and ChainB, one of China’s leading blockchain news agencies.

Over 100 applicant projects applied to present on Demo Day with 31 ultimately presenting. ConsenSys featured 10 of our Dapps with uPort coming out as the big winner, being recognized as the Best Blockchain Application, with WeiFund receiving recognition as Most Innovative. Other ConsenSys projects presenting included Ujo Music, Virtue Poker, EtherLoan, Token Factory, Cora Legacy, Benefactory, and Stabl.

PART III. GLOBAL BLOCKCHAIN SUMMIT
September 23–24, 2016

Whereas DEVCON2 focused on the technical side and Demo Day on Dapps, the Global Blockchain Summit, hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, included higher level discussions on the impact of Ethereum on various sectors and institutions.

In his welcome address, Vitalik Buterin covered the growing interest Chinese leaders have shown in blockchain technology and Ethereum. Wanxiang’s Feng Xiao announced the company’s ¥200bn investment in building smart cities. This is a major initiative that seeks to use blockchain and IoT innovation in collaboration with Microsoft, IBM, the Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys, WeBank, and AliCloud. ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin discussed financial technology, as well as the longer-term and range implications and use cases of Ethereum and other blockchain, such as decentralized authentication self-sovereign identity. Tyler Smith of BHP Billiton, one of the largest mining companies in the world, revealed Project Rai Stones for tracking geological core samples using Ethereum and IPFS. Co-Tricity, a prosumer business, where individuals taking place in the market are both producers and consumers of a good or service, leads John Lilic and Martin Lundfall revealed details about their decentralized energy market.

The last day focused on a wide range of topics from venture capital to IoT to zero-knowledge proofs. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) announced support for String Labs’ business blockchain project Dfinity. Zcash’s Zooko Wilcox discussed zero-knowledge encryption layer and encryption for blockchains. The day rounded out with presentations from provenance tracking and payments platforms, such as Chronicled, which focuses on the sneaker market, and EverLedger, which tracks diamond provenance.

After a full six days of blockchain immersion, we at ConsenSys are ready for the year ahead and looking forward to seeing you all at DEVCON3!