EDCON 2020 took place virtually for the first time last week. It was a packed three days of development updates, announcements, insights, and demos. More than 2,000 Ethereumers and blockchain enthusiasts attended EDCON online and we pride ourselves on bringing together leaders and builders from around the Ethereum world who are shaping the way we live, work, and innovate.
All the keynotes and panels can be replayed on LinkTime and ETHPlanet YouTube channel.
Vitalik Buterin: From Eth1 to Eth2, Opportunities, and Challenges
“Yay, 5 candles for 5 years,” Ethereum founder Vitalik wished Ethereum blockchain Happy Birthday at the beginning of his keynote:
Then he gave us a general overview of Ethereum 2.0, from the goal to the history, from proof-of-stake philosophy to the eth2 Medalla testnet to the long-term roadmap. “To reduce risks, eth2 deployment process is split into phases,” said Vitalik. Testing is one of the “remaining challenges” — “Testing is hard and we know that from the experience we had in eth1.” As for the “unknowns”, he said, “I am confident that proof-of-stake is going to be better, but at the same time, we have to admit that proof-of-stake and sharding these two both contain these unknown unknowns.”
Ethereum 2.0: The Journey, the Excitement, the Gas Price, the Staking, and the Testnet
Eth2 is one of those topics that gets people curious and excited at the same time. Whether you’re new to eth2, or you’re just getting started and setting up and running a validator on the Prysm testnet, Day 1 of EDCON packed out everything you need to know about eth2.
Danny Ryan, the core researcher at Ethereum Foundation, talked about the state of the eth1 and eth2 merger. “One really exciting part of this is what we’ve been building eth2 over the past two years is it’s essentially a piece of software that is a highly sophisticated consensus mechanism — it can handle hundreds of thousands of validators and it can handle dozens of shards,” Danny said. “So in the phase 1.5 version of the software, these two pieces of software (eth1 and eth2) live and work together.” “Eth1 is like the user layer and eth2 is the system layer,” Danny further explained. In the end, he showed us a demo of eth mainnet running on eth2’s beacon chain.
Another core researcher Hsiao-Wei Wang gave us an introduction about eth2 phase 1. Hsiao-Wei said they’re planning to introduce an EIP-1559 style approach for the fee market to adjust the gas price. She also talked about crosslinking, custody games, shard networking, the challenges, and more.
Aditya Asgaonkar, the researcher at Ethereum Foundation, started his keynote with the concept of what’s the weak subjectivity in eth2, what it means to eth2, and a demo. “Providing the latest weak subjectivity state to syncing nodes is essential to the security of the network,” Aditya told us and “call to the community” to get involved.
Paul Hauner, the co-founder of Sigma Prime, took to the “stage” and shared his work at Lighthouse, the eth2 implementer, and “Final Sprint for Eth2 Phase0 Launch”. “Staking is coming” and “Lighthouse will be there at the front line and waiting to serve your staking needs,” Paul said.
Afri Schoedon, the blockchain operations at Byzantine Fault joined us and talked about the final road to Ethereum 2.0 and gave us a little bit of background about how seven client teams gathered together last September and decided to make clients “talk” and work on single-client and multi-client testnets. Afri thinks the final milestones will be around October and November this year, “if everything works out.”
The eth2 Medalla testnet went live right before the EDCON 2020. We had Terence Tsao from Prysmatic Labs shared with us the 8 lessons that he and his team have learned from building the Onyx testnet, including accounts UX improvements, initial syncing improvements, and more. And as you probably already know that in the past weekend, a bug almost crashed the network and Terence’s team released an update to fix the bug within a short period of time. You can read the full update and new lessons learned here:
Gas prices surged to an all-time high last week, so there’s no better time to take a deep look into the gas price and explore the possible solution. Tomasz Kajetan Stańczak, the founder of Nethermind, shared his new improvement proposal — EIP-1559 for the Ethereum gas price. “The most important thing for me is that the basefee will be observable on-chain, so something that you really don’t have access to at the moment from the perspective of the virtual machine will be available for the smart contracts… so the gas price that can no longer be manipulated by the miners,” Tomasz said. “We should see less volatility of gas price much and more predictability.”
We also had Philipp Langhans, the software engineer at Ethereum Foundation, joined us and shared the state of decentralization, how to get started with Ethereum infrastructure, and how to become an eth2 validator.
Rolling up on Layer 2
Karl Floersch, CTO of Ethereum Optimism, opened his talk very positively by saying “Today we’re gonna talk about a lot of optimistic stuff.” “The current latency is 15 seconds in the best case and that is too high, we want it to be 5 seconds… and we need to increase the throughput.” He talked about how we can use Optimistic Rollup and the OVM (Optimistic VM) to safely increase Ethereum throughput and L2 scalability. Then he shared how to reduce time to transaction confirmation with transaction sequencers and use MEVA (miner extractable value auction) to redirect miner fees to support the network.
The co-founder of Fuel Labs John Adler shared his thoughts on scaling Ethereum with Optimistic Rollups, too. “Number of consensus nodes has nothing to do with throughput. Because consensus is not the bottleneck,” said John. “Decentralization is measured by the cost to run a full node, it is not the number of the full nodes or the number of nodes in general and this is a social contract.” The design paradigm of Rollup is you do execution off-chain and you only use Ethereum for data availability. With Rollups, “the consensus nodes (miners) and so on and also non-consensus nodes (users) only need to make data available and order it and they don’t have to execute the transactions” — that’s why can Rollups scale. And John did a comparison for Optimistic Rollup and zkRollup and told us what’re the unique benefits of Optimistic Rollup.
“Scalability = Increasing throughput without increasing node load,” said Alex Gluchowski, the CEO of Matter Labs, the team behind the zkSnyc. Alex compared the multiple scaling solutions and also did a side-by-side comparison for zkRollup and Optimistic Rollup. Then Alex gave us an update on zkSnyc — the zkRollup protocol implementation, and their Reddit scaling challenge submission with a demo showcase of how zkSnyc works in the end.
Jordi Baylina, the tech lead at iden3 shared his project Hermez with us. Jordi introduced the key components of Hermez — proof-of-donation and the decentralized permissionless auction to be Hermez block producers (coordinators) — it will be the source of funding for public goods. “The zkRollup network Hermez can roll up at 2,000 transactions per second,” said Jordi. “Layer 1 keeps going and keeps improving and well maintained, and layer 2 systems have this responsibility of taking care of the layer one.”
Loopring CEO Daniel Wang announced the upcoming major upgrade Loopring v3.6 at the conference. The release of v3.6 will be including no registration required for receiving payments (meaning you will be able to transfer ETH to any Ethereum addresses on L2), one Ethereum address will have multiple L2 accounts, and all different types of transactions can be packed into one single block and so on.
We also had a panel on “Layering vs. Sharding”. Builders and researchers had a friendly debate about the Ethereum scaling solutions. Are you pro-layering or pro-sharding? Let us know in the comment below.
Dapps: What Is Dappening?
Brian Gu, the creator of dark forest, explained why zk (zero-knowledge) is useful in games. Unlike other space conquest games, dark forest leverages zk hidden information technique to make this game unique — “a cryptographically endorsed fog of war,” Brian said.
Did you know art has a data problem? Why is NFT a simple standard-based solution? What is the future of digital art? And where is the art industry heading? SuperRare (SuperRare Team) CEO John Crain covered all the questions in his talk NFTs: The Unlikely Catalyst for a Revolution in Art.
Streamr co-founder Henri Pihkala explained the concept of data union and introduced Swash, a browser extension that pays people to surf the web and a “dedicated data union app” as Henri described it. Henri also provided a step-by-step guide on how to create a data union.
Brantly Millegan from one of the Ethereum OG projects Ethereum Name Service shared the overview of ENS and how ENS complements DNS. “Our goal is to make ENS — and therefore Ethereum — a basic piece of Internet infrastructure and used widely by people whether they are a part of the ‘blockchain community’ or not,” Brantly said.
Will you secure your future with blockchain-based insurance? The CEO of Etherisc Christoph Mussenbrock thinks you should. Christoph talked about how Etherisc started, what is the new legal model (which is approved by the German Insurance authority BaFin), and why it’s promising.
Golem has come a long way. According to Kuba Kucharski, the CPO of golem (Golem Project), they’re getting closer to become a public goods platform with an MVP releasing in Q4. “Think what kind of applications would really benefit from values like censorship resistance, distributed trust, permissionless,” said Kuba. “And here are something you could be building with golem.” So builders, go check it out.
What else is dappening? Carolin Wend (Carolin_Berlin) from Mintbase talked about evolving the NFT economies and the Metaverse and showed us around their virtual HQ in Decentraland. Anton Bukov, the co-Founder and CTO of 1inch gave us a general overview of sharded smart contracts and how to achieve unlimited transaction capacity. And the founder and CEO of Cartesi Erick de Moura shared how Cartesi is “Giving an OS to Dapps”.
Cross-Chain Composability and a Multichain World
“Regardless of whatever vision you subscribe to for the future of this space, whether that’s eth2 with a bunch of different shards or layer 1 or layer 2 with a bunch of different layer 2 options, we’re going to end up in a multi-chain world,” said Arjun Bhuptani, the co-founder of Connext. The current experience completely takes away the interoperability and composability, so we need three things: Users can transfer funds across chains, users can call contracts on other chains, and contracts can call contracts on other chains. That’s why Arjun and the team are building Connext — “a point-to-point network that allows you to make unbreakable commitments off-chain”. They also built a simple swap UI Spacefold so you can instantly transfer assets across different L2s and it looks pretty cool.
As for the DeFi 2.0 and the cross-chain composability around the DeFi dapps and protocols, we had a panel discussion about how to leverage proof-of-stake and what’s cross-chain DeFi, and we absolutely enjoyed our panelists’ conversation. Also, Alexander Kolotov from xDai TokenBridge introduced the tooling for mass migration.
There was a fireside chat on the second day of EDCON and it was very special. We invited great panelists from Blockstack, ChainLink, Loopring, and our very own Vitalik, to talk about scalability and pathway to a fairer world from their (own network’s) perspective, moderated by Peter Van Valkenburgh, the director of research at Coin Center. You can watch the panel here.
DeFi: The Current State of the DeFi and the Path to Mass Adoption
Last week, DeFi “DeFinitely” had a very eventful week: $6 billion TVL, short-lived YAM… and of course, the first day of EDCON — a star-studded lineup of industry trailblazers.
What’s the current state of the DeFi? And what’s the security challenge and possible solution? Hayden Adams from Uniswap, lawyer Badri Natarajan, Jaye Harrill from Quantstamp, and TM (tmlee) from CoinGecko, took a deep dive into “DeFi rabbit hole”.
Stani Kulechov, the founder and CEO of Aave (Aavesome) kicked off Day 0, the first day of EDCON. “Aave started in January, we basically started from ‘zero’ and as same for Compound and Maker. And today in terms of size, it has grown a lot. This is good in a sense of adoption,” Stani said. “DeFi is risky business… and smart contract audits do not guarantee safety.” That’s why Aave has been building Aave protocol with incentive design to empower and improve safety. “There is a lot of things happening now in the liquidity and the mining space and you should not compromise your security on that (reward programs that you’re participating), you should think twice and think about what are the risks involved and how the risks handled, and this is really important.”
“Our goal in DeFi is not to create a system that is just generating risk, I think the goal is to basically create a system that interoperable anyone can deploy things and new products, but at the same time, the risk is mitigated that everyone can participate into the protocols,” said Stani.
Avalanche co-founder, Emin Gün Sirer told us a “story” of trapped exotic instruments on blockchain — DeFi King, and of course, the computer science professor at Cornell had to dress up as Joe Exotic for a little while. He told us that the current state of the DeFi has two problems, one is “the infrastructure is abysmal” and the other one is “it is inward-facing”. He started exploring the solutions to enhance the performance and scalability by showing us three case studies: DEX, prediction markets, and corporate debt.
In his summary, “DeFi can fix this, but only if its infrastructure problems are fixed…the performance problem, the scale problem, and the difference between these two, and I alluded to some of the control problems that DeFi faces today,” said Emin. “We believe that a chain design for low latency, high throughput, and control over the network will open up the stage for fast competitive, externally-facing DeFi instruments.”
Jordan Lyall, the DeFi product lead at ConsenSys, shared about his work on DeFi Score, a community-driven effort to bring transparency and accountability to DeFi. Jordan also gave us some great advice on how to approach risk as a DeFi user: You need to realize that security is on a sliding scale, don’t expect someone else to educate you and do your own research, and when it doubt sit it out. And how to approach risk as a DeFi developer? Jordan suggested that you can create a culture of vigilance, focus on the user, and build in safety by default. By the way, in case you missed it, someone turned Jordan’s “joke” into a meme coin — again, DeFi world had a very interesting week.
We had two builders from UMA joined us on Day 0. Adrian Li, Tech Evangelist at UMA, talked about building with DeFi money legos on Ethereum. “The composability of DeFi protocols make DeFi powerful, but the uniqueness of each protocol makes DeFi problematic,” Andrian said. So he built an NPM package to help people build money legos with ease. UMA’s software engineer Kendrick Tan shared the lessons he learned from building on top of mainnet protocols with a few recommendations and productivity hacks.
Compound founder Robert Leshner, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, Curve founder Michael Egorov, and fintech strategist Hao Wei had a panel discussion about how to take DeFi mainstream. The moderator, Dragonfly Capital founding partner Alexander Pack asked tons of great questions during the one-hour-long panel and one of them was “one single thing could move DeFi forward the most if happen today?” Robert and Hao said it’s “time”, and Michael and Kain’s agreed on “scalability”.
What Other Talks You Can’t Miss
- Vlad Zamfir, the researcher at the Ethereum Foundation: Validation, Equivocation, and Byzantine Fault Tolerance
- Terry Culver, CEO of ETC Labs: Ethereum Classic Resilience
- William Mougayar, author and investor: Delayering Decentralization One Center at a Time
- Scott Moore, developer relations at Gitcoin: WTF is QF: Funding Public Goods in the 21st Century
- Adelyn Zhou, CMO and Head of Chainlink Marketing: How Oracles Unlock The Value of DeFi
- Gilles Fedak, CEO and Co-founder of iExec: DeFi challenges, Off-Chain Computing, and Privacy
- Evgeny Yurtaev, CEO and co-founder of Zerion: DeFi Is the New Fintech
- Conor Svensson, founder and CEO of Web3 Labs: From Zero to Live with Web3j + Epirus
- Alessandro Mario Lagana Toschi & Marco Vasapollo, co-inventors of DFOhub, From Voting Tokens to Programmable Equities
The last but not least, Emily Guidry and Ken Ng from Ethereum Foundation shared about “How Can ESP Help Your Project Succeed” — if you’re building something on top of Ethereum or thinking about building an Ethereum-related project, you should definitely check it out.
“Heroes drive stories.” — Camila Russo, Founder of The Defiant
That’s it from this year’s EDCON and THANK YOU everyone for tuning in. We really hope to *see* each of you at EDCON 2021 and we can’t wait to hear more stories from you!
Also, we’d like to thank our sponsors (Ethereum Foundation, 1inch, Cartesi, Loopring, Amberdata.io, OMG Network, MYKEY, and Alpha Wallet), our community partners (EthWorld, Gitcoin, Ethereum Italia, Ethereum Taipei, and Cryptocurrency Jobs), and our media partners (CryptoNewsZ, Cointelegraph, The Cryptonomist, defiprime, NewsBTC, and TechNode). Thank you for all the great support.
Want to learn more about it? Follow us on Twitter here to find out where the next conference or event is taking place as well as speaker lineup and other information.
About EDCON
EDCON is a non-profit global Ethereum conference that is held annually in different countries, and it is mainly committed to serving the Ethereum ecosystem, boosting the communication of Ethereum communities worldwide. For more information, visit https://edcon.io/.
EDCON 2020 is brought to you by LinkTime, ETHPlanet, and Unitimes.
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