Presenting iExec’s latest adoption news at EthCC
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Throughout last week, iExec was in Paris attending the EthCC — the ethereum community conference. Being renowned as one of the best forums for technical developments within the Ethereum and Web3 movement, EthCC was a chance for iExec to catch up on the latest trends, problems recently solved and new challenges within the industry. The conference was also a great opportunity for iExec to present our latest developer tools while sharing our recent use-cases and adoption news.
The iExec offer for developers
Discussing with various devs who passed by our sponsor booth, we were able to take the chance to ask questions to identify the needs of both individual developers and representatives from enterprises. We then introduce the main value that iExec can provide for blockchain developers, specific to what they were building.
The iExec decentralized network offers ethereum applications access to off-chain computation and data.
‘Off-chain computing’ means offloading computation to a network of decentralized computing nodes. ‘Off-chain data’ refers to connecting smart contract to secure and verifiable data from the ‘real’ world. Meaning, smart contracts connected to traditional Web2 APIs.
What use-cases were developers most interested in?
- Access to a price-feed API (using an encrypted API key), and returning the value back on-chain (our demo of the DeFi Trusted Price Feed presented with Kaiko is detailed further on in this post)
- Random generator where you can generate a random number in secured hardware before return the value on-chain.
- Cross-chain transfers
- Decentralized car Insurance (iExec confidential compute + Chainlink data source)
- Secure data renting — made possible with iExec services and protocols, using confidential computing facilities proposed by Intel, AMD and more and the blockchain for decentralized access control and audit
- Healthcare: patient and hospital data can be used in compliance with the law (ownership; privacy)
- Anti laundering: with confidential computing, banks and insurances can safely share computing process without revealing data to one another
- Heavy compute: Genesis Cloud x iExec x EDF (EDF run their demanding simulations)
Trends to watch out for in 2020
One area that iExec has had its eye on for some time and was confirmed as a trend was Decentralized Finance, or DeFi — one of the most interesting use cases for Ethereum developers at the moment. This is extremely encouraging for iExec services of the marketplace offering ethereum applications access to off-chain data, that will have blockchain-level consensus carried out for validation back on-chain. Other trends included DAOs and Zero-knowledge and TEEs, which all lend themselves to decentralized finance use cases. iExec is one of the more further developed solutions for confidential and trusted computing with blockchain, so it was natural that this was our main focus and message for the conference.
Crazy Dapps you can build with iExec and Confidential Computing: Gilles Fedak talk at EthCC
As one of the closing speakers of the conference, Gilles Fedak, iExec CEO & co-founder took to stage and presented iExec’s latest innovation on confidential computing. After a global introduction on iExec Confidential Computing and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). Although for now, a lot of our work has been with Intel on their Intel SGX hardware enclave technology, other TEE solutions are possible such as but Gilles presented the Trusted Execution using Intel SGX Enclaves, providing full end-to-end privacy-preserving off-chain computing. Several use-cases were explained to demonstrate the diverse potential of applications.
→ First, Trusted Execution using an Oracle that fetches off-chain information. This is the technology used for our Price Feed, an example of what Decentralized Finance means.
→ Second, Provisioning Secrets Off-Chain. Secrets are stored by the SMS (Secret Management Service), and the governance is resolved on-chain.
→ Computing on Encrypted Data: Gilles presented the Nilearn use-case, Machine learning for Neuro-Imaging in Python. It leverages the scikit-learn Python toolbox for multivariate statistics with applications such as predictive modeling, classification, decoding, or connectivity analysis.
→ Last but not least, New Models for Data Modelization and Ownership: Data can be generated within an enclave, iExec allows data monetization, which enables the possibility of renting.
What iExec developers had to say
Remi, iExec blockchain dev: “It was great to meet others at the forefront of ethereum development, discussing in person with those who I had only ever spoken to online — getting a better mutual understanding”
Zied, Dev, first time at EthCC: The Trusted Execution Environment is becoming an interesting topic for the community. Many of the persons I talked to, knew it already, some of them have just discovered it.
Jérémy, Core Dev: I was asked a few times by devs who were surprised that it was really possible to train AI models on iExec without an AWS setup — it was something they were interested in moving towards. A lot of blockchain devs were also interested in cross-chain swap services, we should look into that!”
Hadrien, PoCo God: When going into the details of ZK based layer 2, the data availability problem is still a major barrier. It was also nice to see good progress on projects that have been in development for a while rather than completely new proposals.
