Dispatch from Devcon VI

To any Ethereum developers, builders, and fans that haven’t been to the Ethereum Foundation’s annual developer conference, Devcon, consider this your sign from above to not miss its next iteration.

Stimulating speaker presentations on the state of the Ethereum ecosystem, a lively local culture, and warm engagement from many attendees of various identities and backgrounds characterized Devcon 6 in Bogotá, Colombia earlier this month. Activities on the itinerary ranged from talks with a technical or philosophical lens, to recollections of experiences from renowned builders and hands-on workshops.

For those unfamiliar, Devcon is a technically-immersive conference with a rotating location, highlighting burgeoning hotspots of the global ETH community. With many prominent figures of the space leading and participating in a variety of festivities, there was much more to the conference than diving into the tech behind new hot topics in ETH.

From @SongADayMann’s Merge Song (starting at approx. 37:05) at the opening ceremony, to an overview of Ethereum from Vitalik himself (newly refreshed for Proof of Stake), it was evident from the start that the community was convening in celebration. With this gracious and celebratory vibe present, it was hard to find a conversation mentioning price, or the speculation thereof.

While the events touched on many recent trends and technical developments of the Ethereum ecosystem, some notable topics attracted significant attention and discourse:

• Account Abstraction: Redefining the approach to wallet addresses in order to include more functionality, user customization, and improvements in security and recovery.
• Zero Knowledge: Proving the validity of the statement without disclosing the statement itself is accomplished with Zero Knowledge (ZK), a proof methodology with many implementations in Ethereum today (ZK-Rollups, ZK-SNARKs, & ZK-STARKs).
• Rollups: An answer to the scaling issues caused by high network traffic, rollups allow for transactions to be processed in batches, while still benefiting from the security of the Ethereum mainnet.
• Public Goods and DAOs: The significant attention on public goods and DAOs was inspired by altruism and improving the collective global community with other methods that have been seen in crypto up to this point.

Each of these topics is discussed in a bit more detail below. Let’s dive in.

Account Abstraction

The current wallet framework where access is granted with the correct public and private key pair provides good functionality for the earlier, introductory use cases seen with wallets so far.

Within this framework are two types of Ethereum accounts, Externally Owned Accounts (EOA) and Contract Accounts (Contract Accounts). CAs are smart contracts deployed to the network that are run by code. The following focuses only on EOAs, where the external ownership belongs to the user.

EOAs contain three components, a state containing the ETH balance and a nonce, coded logic inside of the EVM to validate and execute transactions, and an address.

With current account abstraction standards, the account (object holding tokens) and the signer (object authorized to move tokens) are pretty much the same. This coupling means that the loss of your private key results in the loss of the account, and your account can be controlled by a party containing your private key.

Looking ahead to the future of account abstraction, separating the account and the signer will provide greater security and functionality for users. With this shift comes some new exciting features. Users can use a different transaction signing scheme than the ETH-standardized ECDSA. Multiple keys can be required to approve transactions, not just one. The signer of an account can be changed.

Improving account abstraction standards will speed global adoption by providing security and functionality to new and existing users alike.

Learn more about account abstraction with EIP-4337, and EIP-2938 before it. A few notable talks from Devcon on this subject are Account Abstraction Panel, Why AA is A Game-Changer for Dapps, and Account Abstraction on StarkNet.

Zero Knowledge

As both a way of preserving privacy and reducing transaction cost and time, Zero Knowledge was a pervasive topic across various technical niches of Ethereum builders and projects.

In a Zero-Knowledge proof, a claim is proven by one party and verified by another, without revealing information regarding the claim itself. As the Ethereum ecosystem still has some institutional centralization points (ex.: Coinbase) containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII), the desire for privacy will only continue.

One day before Devcon, Polygon hosted a single-day conference of their own, Polygon Connect. At the event, Polygon announced the successful public testnet launch of the first zkRollup with open-sourced zkProver on Polygon zkEVM.

A few arising use cases from ZK-proofs are anonymous payments, identity protection, authentication, and verifiable computation.

Learn more about Zero-Knowledge proofs here, or catch up on these presentations from Devcon: Using a Hybrid UTXO and Account-based State Model in a ZK Rollup, ZK Badges.

Rollups

Even though everyone loves interacting with the Ethereum blockchain, no one loves the slow speed and high costs associated with paying gas fees.

Tackling the sizable task of providing more scalability to Ethereum, rollups process transactions on layer 2 (another chain sitting atop Ethereum) protocols and post them to ETH mainnet. Sidechains and state channels are alternative scaling solutions.

To accomplish the task of posting layer 2 transactions to the ETH mainnet, rollups can either occur in two ways: optimistic or zero-knowledge.

Optimistic rollups operate on the assumption that all of the transactions are valid, with a set amount of time to report a transaction as fraudulent. In this case, a user would not be able to transact with funds that are still awaiting confirmation. On optimistic rollup networks like Arbitrum or Optimism, confirming transactions (and requiring the freezing of funds) could take roughly a week.

Alternatively, Zero-Knowledge rollups (or ZK-rollups) use the cryptographic Zero-Knowledge proof to use minimal transaction information to determine validity. In addition to providing quick and cheap transactions, ZK-rollups also provide the most privacy when compared to alternatives. Funds from transactions confirmed with ZK-rollups are also available quicker than those from optimistic rollups.

As rollups are a newer feature of the Ethereum ecosystem, there is still reliance on centralized transaction coordinators, or sequencers, for processing transactions. Even though sequencers cannot spoof or change transactions, they could censor or re-arrange them to benefit.

For more on this subject, check out this link or these talks from Devcon: Demystifying L2 Transactions, Fast and Furious Withdrawls from Optimistic Rollups.

Public Goods & DAOs

While Ethereum innovation has chiefly prioritized technical and financial growth, a focus on innovation benefiting the public, underserved communities, and the environment is growing in importance. Paired with this refocusing on using crypto to provide benefits to more people is the consideration of DAOs for this purpose, as it is this type of organizational structure that will empower groups with large member volumes.

With this new perspective, ReFi (regenerative finance) prioritizes using financial resources for greater accessibility and inclusivity.

Movements championing public goods, like ReFi, have been received as an honest, mission-driven purpose; one that seems to be a welcomed answer to the all too common question for those skeptical of crypto’s potential to provide benefit, “What problems is it really solving?”

There are no shortages of causes that need support, but despite that, obtaining funding for public goods is often difficult. Additionally without initial or consistent support (funding, advisory, awareness), it can be hard for organizations to continue supporting their cause after starting.

Speaking on this dilemma, Vitalik said, “it’s easier to agree on what has worked versus what will.”

From this realization and an Optimism medium post, retroactive public goods funding emerged. In this funding structure, organizations can receive financial support for the altruistic initiatives they’ve already supported.

With this new focus on providing more than technical and financial benefits, it will be exciting to see the world’s old problems meet new solutions.

Though these novel and noble challenges are facing no shortage of people willing to rise to the occasion, coordinating the masses and organizing those efforts can also be challenging.

Thankfully, DAOs have already emerged within the ecosystem as a reliable way for large groups to act on these initiatives. Effective in uniting and empowering people to collectively achieve feats of a major scale (ex.: ConstitutionDAO), DAOs and their structuring will need constant refinement as getting consensus from massive groups can be difficult and slow.

Check out these Devcon presentations to learn more: How DAOs Can Leverage It for the Future of Work, Open Sourcing and Coordinating DAO Research for the Public Good.

The work of growing the Ethereum ecosystem takes place off-chain just as much as it does on. Builders of all backgrounds are able to seamlessly interact and collaborate thanks to contributions from Web2 and Web3, but that doesn’t undermine the potency of old-fashioned IRL. As the location for Devcon changes every year to highlight a new physical destination where the ecosystem grows, this potency is recognized and supported by the Ethereum Foundation.

If you’ve yet to experience Devcon, go touch grass, and do so, and we’ll see you out on the road.

Ethereum grows together.

Follow @ETHSanDiego or check out ethsd.org for info on events, educational content, and more!