DeFi, DAOs, and Furries: Here’s What Happened at Berlin Blockchain Week
Berlin Blockchain Week solidifies its place as the most interactive, out-of-the-box, and downright fun developer-focused gathering in Europe.
Berlin Blockchain Week is decentralized community-organized initiative focusing on industry education, facilitating mass adoption through collaboration, and well, bier. Steering clear of a typical conference set-up, Web3 coders, researchers, designers, and enthusiasts convened in boats, ball pits, universities, escape rooms, night clubs, basements, warehouses, and in swimming trunks at 200+ events to discuss the future of decentralization.
Rather than spend precious space on this article posting pictures of ourselves in speedos, we decided to shine the light on some of the incredible talks, projects, and quotes that we overheard during Berlin Blockchain Week.
Notes and quotes from the week:
- DeFi and DAO share the center stage in 2019
- A new consensus algorithm was introduced: Snowball Byzantine Fault Tolerance
“Cross collaboration would benefit from centralized communication.”
“I don’t watch series. Crypto Twitter is enough”
“Wake him up, we won!”
“Creating a thing is different than running a thing which is different from using a thing.”
“If you go to the gas station to buy water, your transaction should be validated by an exchange of value, not by your identity.” — Edward Snowden
“Ethereum 1.0 was a toy.” — Joe Lubin
“Mmmmmrrrroowwww” — Justin Myles Holmes
Web3 Summit
By now, you might have heard of the guest of honor — Edward Snowden called in and spoke to a crowd of 1,000 about his favorite topic, the right to privacy. Another key takeaway from Web3 was the proposal of a new consensus algorithm called Snowball by Emin Gün Sirer. Shortly, Snowball is a family of leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocol built around a metastable mechanism via network subsampling. Check out the Snow BFT Demo. Access the white paper.
DappCon
During DappCon, we were overwhelmed with insights into the projects working on Ethereum at the dapp level, in-depth talks on state channels, and 24+ technical workshops sharing knowledge before the ETH Berlin hackathon.
Vitalik Buterin surprised DappCon attendees twice, once appearing on stage as a fox, beckoning the audience to ponder the complexities of #MemeDrivenDevelopment: can a meme be a business model? Later, Buterin joined Joe Lubin, Stephen D. Palley, and Ryan Selkis on stage to discuss the blockchain community, Ethereum, and its impact on society.
ETH Berlin Zwei:
ETH Berlin Zwei came and went, and we’re just barely recovering from the fantastic presentations, projects, and Mongolian throat singing. Over the years, the hacks have gotten more impressive; the tools are easier to use, enabling the hackers to create unstoppable projects.
ETH Berlin Zwei Stats:
- 730 attendees
- 88 hack submissions
- 86 ETHBerlin staff
- 61 speakers
- 36 judges
- 1 weird flute guy
Justin Myles Holmes from NuCyper serenaded us with Mongolian throat singing and guitar-accompanied inspirational code-quotes — and then the hackers went to work. 48 hours later, we announced the winners:
ConsenSys Grants Winners:
Social Impact — 1,000 Euro
Transit is a mutual, cooperatively owned Pension Plan on the blockchain.
Security — 1,000 Euro
You is a password manager leveraging decentralized storage and messaging that authenticates Web 2 and Web 3 logins with your mobile device.
Demo | GitHub Repository
Infrastructure — 1,000 Euro
Bearrowing created a tokenization layer for positions in lending/borrowing platforms with interoperability of debts.
Website | GitHub Repository
Usability and Dev Tooling — 1,000 Euro for both winners
DeLamp stands for Decentralised Legal Agreement Marketplace Protocol. DeLAMP is a general protocol for generating compliant smart contracts and tracking how the clauses are used. It creates a marketplace for legal clauses bound to smart contract code and provides the governance tools to manage exceptions and update contracts as needs arise.
Check out the D-lamp demo | Presentation
D-ost wallet is UNI / Layer Swap + 6 digit pin recovery.
They built a 6d-digit recovery mechanism for a web wallet with gnosis SAFE contract. Users can recover access to their web wallet with 6 digit PIN and username and two trusted friends. When sending money to a friend, D-ost automatically respects their risk-profile preferences. D-ost on-the-fly uni-swaps the tokens to their preferred token. If the user has a Layer-2 contract account, D-ost sends it to her (from L1 to L2) there to reduce future transaction costs.
Watch the presentation | GitHub Repo
Bounties Network:
Gearing up for Berlin Blockchain Week, Bounties Network created 34 bounties, some submitted by users.
- 34 Bounties
- 133 submissions
- Over 1000 USD rewards in DAI
- 680 users with 147 active users on Aug 21st alone.
Check out the bounties here.
Kauri
Kauri teamed up with ConsenSys Grants to offer bounties to improve documentation quality for various projects, namely Solhint and relaunching the Ethereum Wiki. Check out their results here. Keep an eye out for bountied documentation issues for ETH Boston.
3Box
3Box offered bounties for Best Overall 3Box Integration, Most Social Application, and Best Use of Storage Spaces. The winners were: Collector hub, You, CiaoDao, Split Network, and Bob the browser.
Open Track Winners:
.dotgallery
.dotgallery presented a digital gallery that hosts time-bound art exhibitions — recreating the feeling of being in a real art gallery. Dot.gallery exhibitions last for one week, the display forces your browser into full screen, demanding “100% of your pixels and 100% of your attention. When a user travels through the gallery, they produce unique NFTs that can be exported to their wallet, creating digital memorabilia.
Cherry Swap
The team behind Cherry Swap created an autonomous, open-source platform for interest rate swaps on Compound Finance markets. The project with easily the nicest UI, we imagine it bringing interest rate swaps to teenagers.
Check out the pitch deck. | GitHub Repository
Sol.tty
Sol.tty is an easy way to script multiple transaction calls together and send them in a single transaction. Ideal for saving gas by batching transactions together, writing one-off scripts and codifying specific transaction behavior in a reusable format.
Check out the sol.tty demo | GitHub Repository
LS Dai
LSDai creates a Euro-dollar like construct, that is a future on the Compound Dai lending rate over the duration of the contract. By leveraging Market Protocol, LSDai takes on the approach of de-coupling the risk of the two sides. It enables three different types of users to gain the kind of exposure to the interest rate fluctuation that fits their profile, while aligns incentives: Hedgers, speculators, and market makers.
Website | GitHub Repository
SUDZ
The team behind SUDZ created a browser-based burner game to incentivize participation in the Tornado Cash ETH privacy pool.
Website
RateLock
RateLock facilitates fixed interest rate term loans via Compound Finance and powered by an on-chain interest rate swap order book system. This smart contract repo consists of 3 contracts which allow for users to be both makers and takers in fixed-fee loans on compound.finance
Website | GitHub Repository
You
You is a password manager leveraging decentralized storage and messaging that authenticates Web 2 and Web 3 logins with your mobile device.
Demo | GitHub Repository
Mapcovery
Mapcovery solves the issue of remembering private keys. Select 5 locations of your choice, geo-data is hashed to derive the private key to recovery account. FOAM is used as a decentralized geo-data provider. Smart contract module is attached to your Gnosis Safe. Easily recover by entering the 5 Locations to get the private key.
Demo | GitHub Repository
Up next? Follow Narly to Osaka!
To everyone that attended stopped by the ConsenSys booth, we hope you enjoyed your time and snagged a Narly t-shirt. If you didn’t get a chance, find Narly swag at Devcon! Thanks to the hackers, ETHBerlinZwei organizers, the Department of Decentralization, ConsenSys Meshians, and the countless other contributors.
