Field Report: iExec’s Highlights at Devcon4
From October 30 to November 2, iExec took part in the fifth edition of the annual Ethereum Development Conference (Devcon4) in the crypto-friendly city of Prague, Czech Republic. The team had the pleasure to sponsor this very special gathering. Let’s reflect on a week of invaluable learnings with the developer community.
Over 3,000 Ethereum enthusiasts gathered in Prague last week for the Ethereum Foundation’s annual conference, Devcon4. Three floors of the Prague Congress Center became the epicenter of an ebullient tribe of Ethereum engineers for four days, as they discussed the most cutting-edge scalability and security solutions for Ethereum.
The theme of Day 1 was updates from both the Ethereum Foundation and other major players in the ecosystem.
As an official sponsor of Devcon4, iExec welcomed visitors at its booth on the third floor. The whole iExec team was present at the event to present and demo our products, answer developers’ questions and engage conversations with other game-changing projets.
Developers who already knew about us were very eager to meet the whole team in person, and developers not familiar with us yet were extremely curious about the possibilities offered by iExec.
We later invited everyone to our satellite event on November 2: the very first edition of the iExec Summit & Party, which gathered 15 speakers and hundreds of attendees. We went over this special event on a previous post.
The theme of Day 2 was an emphasis on BUIDLing — bringing devs, consumers, and enterprises the solutions that have long been promised.
Devcon4 consisted of a series of valuable and insightful talks about scalability, privacy, security, UX design and developer experience. Despite current market conditions, blockchain’s fundamentals are booming beyond belief.
iExec has been making consistent progress on its roadmap, and we were proud to make a major announcement during Devcon4. Lei Zhang from iExec participated in the Security Breakout session with Intel, Microsoft, Oasis Labs, Enigma and Golem.
A common implementation of trusted computation is a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) which is a secure area of a main processor. In this context, iExec was thrilled to release and demo the first-ever end-to-end trusted execution solution using SGX to bring the highest level of security to decentralized computing.
The theme of Day 3 was how to overcome the technical barriers to entry and make blockchain technology work better for its users.
The industry’s best and brightest were all at Devcon4. The team took advantage of this unique gathering to meet and mingle with the ecosystem’s developers, and showcase the advantages of utilizing the iExec products:
- Have access to decentralized offchain computing
- Compute your works faster when you don’t have access to a large facility of CPU/GPU or a supercomputer
- Monetize your decentralized application and release it on the DApp Store
- Concentrate on your core offering without managing, maintaining or scaling servers
- Take advantage of iExec’s pay-per-task (PPT) scheme
Many developers building on top of iExec were present at Devcon, making it an invaluable opportunity to gather live feedback from them. The team also met with many of the supporters and active members of our community.
Conversations were engaged with various blockchain teams, and we might see new POCs coming out as a result of those encounters in the following months.
The theme of Day 4 was the challenges and opportunities that face our community over the next year.
The iExec v2.3 labelled “Gold Lancer” (金槍手) sees the addition of an SDK that provides full end-to-end privacy-preserving computing, guarantees execution integrity, and provides an on-chain enclave execution attestation.
The challenges iExec is undertaking in the future months towards the release of v3 are better tackled by uniting with other teams and developers. We therefore also used our time in Prague to meet with specific teams to discuss our research initiatives:
- The evolution of Proof-of-Contribution to include Bag-of-Tasks (this will allow for a scalable and more efficient execution of large computations)
- Scaling iExec with sidechain technology
- The rewriting of iExec Core for better performance and coordination with blockchain
- Open Decentralized Brokering to address the scalability of the marketplace
- Decoupling brokering with a 0x-like protocol: sealed deals stored on-chain, while market management is done off-chain
- Towards more complex orderbook management with bid and ask, OTC, discounts and subscription mechanisms
BUIDL, SHIP, CELEBRATE
Firstly, a massive thank you to the city of Prague! Blockchain projects like us felt very at home in what this stunning crypto-friendly city. For example, did anyone know that in Prague, you can find a Bitcoin Coffee shop (Paralelní Polis)?
iExec attended a meetup held at the ‘Cryptoanarchy Institute’ which was quite the experience! Let’s also not forget all the afterparties organized by blockchain companies that rythmed our evenings (and sometimes nights) in Prague.
Special thanks to all the speakers who helped make the iExec Summit 2018 a fantastic and very informative afternoon. We’ll be back next year for the sixth edition of Devcon!
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