Field Report: iExec Summit & Party 2018, Prague
The goal of the iExec Summit & Party was simple: to inspire developers to build decentralized applications by bringing together the best speakers and developers for an afternoon of talks, workshops and expert sessions, followed by an evening of discussions over food, drinks and music.
The iExec Summit & Party conference was for anyone currently building applications and components on the Ethereum network or anyone who just wants to learn about blockchain development and how the tech can be powered.
15 speakers and over a hundred attendees gathered for 3 different sessions to learn, build, and think big around the topic of decentralized applications and tools, scaling and security solutions on Ethereum.
SESSION 1: SCALABILITY & INFRASTRUCTURE
Ethereum has an incredible potential to impact our world. The use of smart contracts and ICOs offered blockchain technology an immediate success. There are still, however, a number of challenges that need to be adressed in order to bring Ethereum to the state where it can run millions of applications and transactions at a reasonable cost.
Our 1st session presented scalability and infrastructure solutions in development to potentially reach this state. Fabian Gompf from Polkadot presented Parity Substrate, a new development framework to build blockchains from scratch. This solution makes it possible for enterprises to create custom blockchains with variables degrees of privacy depending on the use case, along with ‘forkless’ upgrade paths to keep networks together.
Another project tackling Ethereum’s limits for scalability is Celer Network. The startup’s CEO, Mo Dong, explained how this is performed by relying on off-chain consensus techniques. It seems off-chain is becoming the inflection point for blockchain mass adoption and will be the engine behind all large-scale decentralized applications. Off-chain scaling techniques allow mutually distrustful parties to execute a contract locally among themselves instead of the global blockchain.
Ledger is making a move from strictly hardware wallets to a virtual secure device by utilizing hardware enclave technology. Nicolas Bacca presented the company’s plans towards a Ledger Intel SGX wallet, that will be compatible with popular ETH wallets, followed by an SGX Wallet SDK with a dedicated UI that leverages Ledger’s Protected Transaction Display API.
Finally, Lukas Pfeiffer from Genesis Mining, the cloud mining service operating since 2013, went over their current move from a cryptocurrency mining giant to a public GPU cloud. Their transformation story was full of insights and learnings as to how the biggest blockchains are kept running, and how the hardware used to keep them running can be recycled to serve other activities.
SESSION 2: DECENTRALIZED APPLICATIONS
Just as the web was able to decentralize information around a shared protocol, blockchain is now able to decentralize and secure any type of transaction, activity, or data. In this context, decentralized applications allow for various novel application scenarios, which are built upon distributed consensus and thus hard to block or censor.
iExec’s Dapp Store is growing bigger every day since more developers have chosen iExec for launching and running their applications. Oleg Lodygensky and Eric Rodriguez therefore, opened this second session by providing an overview of the various components of iExec:
- The SDK to build secure and scalable applications
- The Marketplace to buy decentralized computing power
- The Dapp Store to release applications
Developers from the iExec ecosystem then took over to present their own works and how they integrate and are powered by iExec. Mircea Moca, CEO of SynergyCrowds, presented BirdieBlue, a decentralized application running ‘sentiment analysis’ on tweets to find the general sentiment or atttitudes towards cryptocurrencies. iExec has been chosen to accelerate the development of the application which relies on heavy neural networks that need to be trained in order to perform well and provide results with the highest accuracy.
Daan Helsloot then took to the stage to present Troubadour, a project that was one of the winners of the ‘Dapp Challenge’, which was organized by iExec in 2017 to encourage the development of innovative and impactful applications built on top of iExec. In collaboration with the VU University of Amsterdam, Daan explained how Troubadour’s web application integrates with the iExec marketplace to provide an easy-to-use and scalable Natural Language Processing application for everyone. He shared that the most valuable aspect of iExec is that it removes the the need and hassle for a developer to run, maintain or scale servers.
Sajida Zouarhi, Blockchain architect at Consensys, outlined the different cryptographic methods used to perform computations over private data, with a special focus on the HellHound platform (blind computations) — HellHound hosted an immersive ‘escape-room’ style game involving Cryptography based tasks at Devcon. This ended up being one of the most popular attractions of the entire conference. HellHound is definitely a project to keep an eye on. Sajida’s work on Blind computations is particularly critical for highly-private applications such as healthcare dapps. Sajida then presented another winner of the iExec Dapp Challenge, Kidner. The Kidner Project is a platform which aims to help Kidney Paired-Exchange (KPE) programs to find life-saving opportunities and improve access to kidney transplants in an efficient and more rapid way. Kidner can rely on iExec nodes to perform blind computations in this case.
SESSION 3: SECURITY IN TRUSTLESS ENVIRONMENTS
The theme of ISP’s 3rd session is security in trustless environments. We are observing a new trend in the world of blockchain and decentralized systems: enclaves. Enclaves are paradigm-shifting tools in the world of cloud computing. Thanks to the security they offer, anyone is able to run applications on any computer without the fear of disclosing sensitive data to a third party.
The most well-known enclave solution is Intel SGX. Sanjay Bakshi, Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation discussed the company’s vision to have a common Trusted Compute interface for both public and enterprise deployments. Intel is committed to supporting the Ethereum ecosystem in delivering implementations for broad deployments. Intel recently published a blogpost article on their work with blockchain projects such as iExec towards their recently released application specification, ‘the Trusted Compute API (TC API)’
Lei Zhang from iExec also announced the release of the iExec End-to-End Trusted Execution Solution: the first Intel SGX scalable solution for businesses to bring security to blockchain-based computing. Working in partnership with Scontain UG, the iExec solution is the first-ever complete toolkit, including SDK developer tools and technical documentation for businesses to easily employ Intel SGX enclaves and ensure E2E protection for any blockchain product. A user guide to iExec’s Trusted Execution solution has been released as well during Devcon4.
Afterward, our audience was introduced to SCONE by Christof Fetzer, a Systems Engineer Professor at TU Dresden. SCONE runs programs inside secure enclaves preventing even attackers with root access from stealing secrets from these programs. Christof showed how to build trusted dapps with the help of SCONE and introduced its transparent attestation mechanism and integrated secrets management service.
Petar Tsankov from ChainSecurity also gave a stunning talk on the fundamentals of blockchain security and shared current research findings from ETH Zurich ICE center, along with a sneak peek of the tools for production-use in blockchain projects to ensure a high level of security.
HAPPY HOUR WITH THE COMMUNITY 🎊
Having a great deal of information to digest after all the technical presentations, in the evening everyone was given a well-deserved chance to discuss what they had learned over some food and drink.
Some long-term members of the iExec community were also in attendance. It was a fantastic opportunity for the team to finally meet these community members face-to-face, some of whom have been long-term supporters of the project and had been offering precious
feedback for some time online.
The party continued until the late evening, where long-time partners and new contacts made over the week at Devcon were able to relax together over some French wine, discussing their insights, ideas and future plans. The iExec team is certainly left feeling inspired and excited for the year ahead!
Latest News from iExec:
CoinTelegraph: ‘Intel Meets Blockchain: Cloud Computing Platform Releases New Solution For Data Protection’
