EthCC Voices: dcbuilder from WorldCoin
Welcome to EthCC Voices, the Medium Series for the EthCC community, the conference organised by Ethereum France is regarded as Europe’s leading Ethereum conference for the community by the community!
DC, Research Engineer at Worldcoin, building the world’s largest identity and financial network as a public utility, giving ownership to everyone.
In conversation, DC divulges how conferences such as EthCC are so vital in creating a space for the blockchain community to meet and have meaningful conversations that can go deeper than exchanges on social media platforms, like Twitter.
What do you think are the highlight moments in crypto over the past year?
In the past year, there have been several significant events in the crypto space that have caught my attention. One of the biggest events for me was the demerger, which I believe happened around September in East Berlin. As someone who spends a lot of time in serum core research circles, I consider hard forks and quick changes to be major events. The merge, which took place during the demerger, was definitely a significant development. Another important event was Chun guy, which occurred earlier this year. It involved the introduction of two clients, one for consensus and one for execution, enabling withdrawals.
These events are important to me because they align with the mission of crypto, which is to provide permissionless access to various applications, whether they are financial or social in nature. The launch of projects like Polygons and KVM on May 9 also played a significant role in furthering this mission.
These projects contribute to the development of graphical protocols that allow people to use modifications and enable applications to operate at scale. Furthermore, there are three main areas of focus in the crypto space: scalability, user experience, and privacy. People are working on improving scalability, enhancing user experience, and addressing privacy concerns. The goal is to create a user-friendly crypto stack that is as accessible as web and mobile applications used by billions of people worldwide. To achieve this, advancements such as smart contract wallets that support features like transaction signing through face ID or touch ID, new cryptography primitives for signatures, and gas-less transactions are crucial. These developments aim to improve the user experience and make crypto more widely adopted. Overall, I prioritize events that make meaningful contributions to the crypto space, rather than those that are simply hyped.
What are some new trends you think will emerge over the next 12 months, which ones are you excited about?
One emerging trend that I find exciting is the access to historical state within smart contracts. Recently, a new primitive called storage groups has become feasible. Essentially, it involves storing historical state on a node in Ethereum. Currently, accessing historical state from within a smart contract is not straightforward and usually requires an Oracle, which is a permissioned network of trusted computers. However, there is a cryptographic primitive called storage proofs that enables the creation of proofs over historical states using zk-SNARKs and other techniques. This allows for proofs about any historical state from Genesis to the present. This capability is valuable in various applications, such as creating certified credit scores in DeFi or building important primitives that rely on historical data. Projects like Axiom Herodotus, Grunge, and Succinct are working on storage plus or similar solutions that enable access to historical state from different environments. This advancement also promotes composability, for instance, in DeFi governance protocols, where token ownership on a specific chain is required for voting on proposals. With storage proofs, one can prove token ownership on the mainnet and vote from any chain by providing and verifying the storage proof. This eliminates the need for bridging tokens and simplifies the process. There are numerous fundamental primitives like this that I’m excited about, including privacy-related developments. Technologies like Astec enable private-by-default transactions and stealth addresses, which enhance privacy in transactions. Another interesting area of research is the ability to fund a wallet without revealing the source of funds, allowing for native tracing prevention using cryptographic primitives like ring signatures instead of zk-SNARKs. These exciting primitives are progressing from the ideation phase to early specification, implementation, and even early production. Storage groups, for example, are already being deployed into production, and projects like Herodotus plan to launch them by the end of the summer. As these products become available, people will notice their existence and start building innovative applications based on these prototypes.
How has being a part of the EthCC impacted you/ your team thus far? Has anything come out of it?
Being a part of EthCChas had a positive impact on both me and my team. It provided an opportunity to connect and engage with like-minded individuals in the crypto community. Conferences like EthCC offer a valuable platform for more meaningful conversations compared to the limited interactions we often have on social media platforms like Twitter or Telegram. While EthCC can feel overwhelming due to the large number of attendees, it’s still possible to have valuable conversations by pulling individuals aside from the main event. Overall, it’s always great to be able to see and greet friends and acquaintances at such conferences. The experience of networking and socializing with peers has been beneficial to our team.
What impact do you think Ethereum updates this year will have on the overall ecosystem, crypto projects, and mainstream adoption?
The Ethereum updates planned for this year are expected to have a significant impact on the overall ecosystem, crypto projects, and mainstream adoption. One of the most anticipated changes is the upcoming hard fork, known as Boon Deneb. This hard fork implements several improvements, with the most important one being the CIP-1559 protocol, which introduces a new mechanism for fee burning.
This change involves allocating a separate storage space within an Ethereum node to store data from rollups temporarily. This development will create a new database for rollups, making their operation significantly cheaper. It will also lay the groundwork for future scalability roadmaps within Ethereum and Ethereum Core.
This improvement is particularly exciting for projects like ours that have a substantial user base, as it will reduce costs associated with subsidizing wallets and the World ID protocol. Early estimates suggest that this change could make rollups up to 20 times cheaper, greatly benefiting both project teams and end users. Cheaper transactions and improved user experience are expected outcomes of these updates. Overall, the CIP-1559 implementation and other planned improvements will make our lives and the lives of hundreds of other projects easier and more efficient, ultimately leading to better user experiences and more affordable investments.
Anything else to add?
There are two areas that I find particularly interesting at the moment. The first one is ZKML, which stands for zero-knowledge proofs of machine learning models. Typically, running machine learning models on blockchain environments is challenging due to the limited computational capabilities of blockchain networks. However, ZKML offers a solution by allowing the computation to be performed off-chain and then providing a zero-knowledge proof to a function verifier. This enables the integration of machine learning into blockchain environments, opening up possibilities for manipulating on-chain data through analysis, inference, categorization, and other actions based on the models. As machine learning becomes more prevalent and solves increasingly complex tasks, there will likely be more use cases where manipulating on-chain data using ML makes sense.
The second area of interest is composable identity, which involves making attestations about different primitives. For example, tools like Rochlin allow proving personal uniqueness, which can be used to build civil-resistant applications. Once uniqueness is established, users can make attestations about their financial history or other relevant information without revealing sensitive details. These attestations can be made in a private manner and enable users to leverage different applications while making meaningful statements about their identity or actions. Developers can leverage these attestations to build useful services or products that cater to user needs.
Both ZKML and composable identity open up new possibilities and vectors for innovation in the blockchain space. These developments enable the integration of machine learning and enhance the flexibility and utility of identity within the ecosystem. As these technologies advance, we can expect to see exciting applications and services emerge that leverage the power of machine learning and provide users with enhanced privacy and control over their data.
