Groundhog at DevCon4
My co-founder Andrew and I had the opportunity to represent Groundhog this year at Devcon4 in Prague.
Groundhog is our suite of tools powering the crypto subscription economy. Read more at groundhog.network.
Devcon is the largest annual gathering of the Ethereum community. If you’re building on Ethereum, you pretty much have to be at Devcon.
We were honoured to attend with BUIDLer tickets, a category of tickets reserved for those who are building the next generation of infrastructure, tools, and Dapps powering the public Ethereum blockchain.
The DAI Happy Hour Boat Party
There were a number of events to hit up before the conference even officially started on Tuesday morning. First up was the Dai Happy Hour on Sunday night. Held on a bar/boat permanently docked on the Vitavo River that runs through Prague, this was an opportunity to connect and reconnect with all our friends and colleagues and purchase an entire menu of drinks with Dai! One drink == 1 Dai!
The place was packed, electric with the excitement of the week to come and the thrill of an entire boatful of people using crypto stablecoins to make real world purchases.
All the Dai that was raised was donated to BEN, Blockchain Education Network, to help engage and educate the public about blockchain.
The DeFi Prague Summit
We had the opportunity on Monday to attend one of the largest “off-DevCon” events, the DeFi Summit.
Composed of a group of leading-edge companies working together to move the Decentralized Finance movement forward, The #DeFi Summit was an unparalleled opportunity to network with other DeFi’ers, and attend presentations and Q&As with leaders in the space.
Some highlights:
- Maker co-founder Rune Christensen got the crowd buzzing with an announcement about their upcoming development plans for Synthetic Assets — cryptographic assets that are like stablecoins in reverse — they use the stable asset (Dai) to collateralize another asset, which could be anything — a stock, an index, or a commodity. We’re very excited to see how these progress — They could be extremely disruptive to traditional finance.
- Alex Van de Sande gave an excellent presentation on what he’s been working on with Universal Login. Universal Login is a pattern of interactions and architecture that radically improves the onboarding experience and account recovery for Dapp users, completely abstracting away seed phrases and public keys, abstracting away gas through meta transactions and relayers, and “tricking” the user into deploying a proxy ID contract on chain. We’re already using many of these concepts in Groundhog, but we definitely gleaned some great ideas we hadn’t considered, that may soon make their way into the product.
We look forward to doing our part to continue the DeFi revolution. Thanks to Max Bronstein and Brendan Forster from Dharma for letting us in. 😂
MetaCartel
RaveCon0
It was 3am on Halloween Eve in an abandoned factory in Prague. I was waiting in line to use the bathroom stalls, only one of which had a door. Hardstyle techno music was thumping, strobe lights were flashing, smoke machines had turned the air into an ethereal haze, and the person next to me and I were discussing the finer points of meta transactions.
Blockchains, LLC
You could hardly go anywhere in Prague this week without seeing huge, mysterious billboards for something billing itself as Blockchains, LLC. They were on buses, trains, projected on to historic buildings, featuring a defiant young girl and emblazoned with vague slogans like “We’re tired of waiting.”
It became apparent that there was going to be a secret reveal party on Friday night. Andrew and I RSVPd to the Eventbrite, and on Friday, we hopped...
I was skeptical. There was so much hype. I expected at most maybe an announcement for some kind of permissioned Hyperledger or interledger/interchain project.
When the crowd arrived, we were greeted with champagne by an army of waitstaff and led down through a glowing blue tunnel to a spectacular event hall filled with cocktail tables, an open bar, dinner buffet, and a giant multi-depth screen on stage with a 1 hour countdown. The space and event was gorgeous, extremely well produced, and I was fairly sure there was no way the announcement could possibly live up to the hype.
I was wrong. Jeffrey Berns, CEO of Blockchains, LLC, took the stage — along with a hologram — to describe what they’ve been building in stealth for 2 years.
Berns participated in the Ethereum ICO and likely made 9–10 figures in the process. Since then he’s spent $250 million of that to do the following:
- Buy 5 nuclear-proof bunkers worldwide to hold multi-sig private keys for crypto custody, including 3 in the United States
- Buy a bank, aiming to be the most crypto-friendly bank in the world, to solve the challenges of blockchain companies acquiring banking services
- Acquire a plot of land in the Nevada desert, the size of Reno, where they will be building an entire blockchain CITY, running on the public Ethereum chain
This is one of the most ambitious projects crypto has seen to date. They addressed a number of concerns up front and admitted that this will either be the one of the biggest things blockchain has ever seen, or it will crash and burn spectacularly. Either way, we left the event inspired with what this might make possible. We look forward to seeing how this evolves.
Neptune Room (the chill out room)
Tower Party
It seemed fitting that the final event of Devcon, put on by ConsenSys Diligence, Maker, Balanc3, and Women in Blockchain, was a party at the tallest tower in Prague. Invitees took elevators up to the top and enjoyed an open bar and DJ, networking and chatting 93 meters above Prague with a 360 degree view of the city. It was a perfect venue to reflect on the events of the previous week.
Huge thanks to the Ethereum Foundation for putting on a world class event that people will be talking about until Devcon5.
