Learnings from Devconnect Istanbul
Devconnect’s second edition in Istanbul, a city known for its vibrant and rich cultural history, saw over 3,500 participants come together from November 13–19. There were over 70 independently organized events by the Ethereum community which took place across various locations across the city. Check out the Devconnect team’s recap for more details.
In this article, we’ll provide a recap of key topics throughout the entire event: programmable cryptography, enhancing user experience, and scaling Ethereum to facilitate higher transaction throughput while keeping fees low for end users.
Enhancing User Experience
The main challenge we face is streamlining the end-user onboarding process into the Ethereum ecosystem. The current process involves many tedious steps:
Firstly, you need ETH in your wallet, and figuring out how to add it can be tricky for a new user. But then, you’re also hit with expensive gas fees exceeding $10 per transaction, many will just abandon the process here.
You might wonder if there’s a more cost-effective chain. If so, how do you switch networks? And when you do figure out how to switch networks and loaded your wallet with enough ETH, you’ll then get hit with another roadblock, that is the vendor you’re interacting with doesn’t use the same network as you, and now you’ll need to know how to bridge funds. How fascinating.
All these intricacies must be effectively abstracted, ensuring that end users don’t spend excessive time navigating these complexities.
The zkBazaar event was a refreshing experience where you receive a loaded testnet wallet and can use it to purchase Turkish souvenirs. The scene at zkBazaar was lively, with people happily selecting their favorite scarves, ceramic bowls, blue evil eye amulets, soaps, spices, and baklava — all conveniently paid for with a crypto wallet.
To my surprise, each transaction didn’t deduct gas fees from my wallet. This means I don’t have to worry about being left with decimals, allowing me to buy exactly what I want, especially since most items are priced in whole numbers.
The payment process was swift, and I didn’t encounter many difficulties. Overall, it was a pleasant experience. You can re-live the experience here:
ETHGlobal Istanbul finalist, BridgeBuddy, developed a chain-abstracted wallet to automate the bridging of assets as needed. This project enhances the user experience by simplifying the complexity associated with various EVM-compatible chains.
Instead of users having to monitor and manage funds on each individual chain, navigating the process of bridging, the wallet streamlines everything by consolidating and displaying all assets together. When a transaction necessitates additional funds on a specific chain, the wallet seamlessly bridges the required amount before executing the transaction, leveraging account abstraction for a smooth and effortless process.
Watch the project demo here:
https://stream.mux.com/4i5UvQ1Bc00zdkMfnZveXN7502pcsMFmgwJuo2pYsmV4s/high.mp4
Scaling Ethereum
To enhance the user experience, there is a need to scale Ethereum, increasing blockspace supply to support higher transaction throughput and reduce fees for end users.
Despite events at Devconnect being held independently, there was a collective effort to scale Ethereum. The HOT TAKE Series: Battle of the L2s brought together leading teams developing scaling solutions on top of Ethereum to share insights into the evolving L2 ecosystem.
Rollup-as-a-service (RaaS) providers are here to make it easier than ever for new projects to launch a blockchain, whether it’s app-specific or a general-purpose one. These rollups can come with varying gas tokens, custom precompiles, and opcodes. Additionally, these providers are also experimenting with Account Abstraction wallets, enabling app-specific chains to offer gasless transactions to their users.
Data availability remains a crucial topic in the context of scaling Ethereum. As transactional throughput increases, the volume of data to be posted back to Ethereum will inevitably surge. It will then become excessively costly to frequently post large chunks of data back to Ethereum.
There is no one-size-fits-all tech stack for all the L2s. Each team has its unique vision for building the chain that best suits their chosen use cases. This choice often involves deciding between optimistic and validity rollups, as well as opting for different data availability layers, such as Celestia and Eigen DA, for example.
With so many L2s coming live on Ethereum, there is a need to develop proper frontend standards to ensure users are sufficiently aware of the tradeoffs when using different L2s.
Programmable Cryptography
The Programmable Cryptography Conference (Progcrypto) was a 2-day event co-organized by the Privacy, Scaling, & Explorations (PSE) team at Ethereum Foundation and 0xPARC. It covered a range of topics, including programmable cryptography, multi-party computation, fully-homomorphic encryption, indistinguishable obfuscation, and a focus on technology for decentralized interfaces rather than centralized servers.
But what exactly is programmable cryptography? It is a new generation cryptography that enables developers to program any function on top of a cryptographic primitive, such as a ZK proof. This allows us to move from verifying specific claims to the verification of any claim that can be expressed mathematically. Listen to gubsheep’s talk on Introduction to Programmable Cryptography:
https://lp-playback.com/hls/705e460p6prwvkrh/1080p0.mp4
Programmable cryptography makes high levels of security cheap in 2 ways:
- Cheap in terms of verification cost (with ZK-SNARKs)
- Cheap in terms of developer time (where developers only have to write a program for a new app instead of creating an entirely new cryptographic protocol)
Listen to Vitalik’s talk on Cryptography as Defensive Technology (d/acc):
https://lp-playback.com/hls/a27e35hafflnbym7/1080p0.mp4
Devconnect attendees were able to use ZuPass, an open-source tool built by developers from the Devconnect and Zuzalu communities, to verify their attendance at the co-working space and the Progcrypto conference without revealing their personal information.
With programmable cryptography, it allows us to conduct fully onchain operations without having to reveal sensitive personal information. Here’s some valuable resources to learn more in-depth about programmable cryptography:
Final Thoughts
Devconnect Istanbul was a major success. Despite events being organized by independent teams, the topics covered converged toward helping Ethereum transition into a mature tech stack that is capable of actually bringing an open, global and permissionless experience to average users.
Looking forward to the next one, and more events like this in a city full of cats please!
