Presenting Klaytn at Ethereum’s Devcon — Part 1
It all started with an e-mail from Devcon5 that our Junghyun, the leader of Platform & SDK Team, received:
Junghyun had believed that the rigorous demands of taking care of blockchain user account addresses, which typically associate with randomly generated character strings, stand as one of the biggest barriers that hinders blockchain mass adoption. In order to overcome such usability limitations, specifically within the Ethereum sphere, Junghyun, together with the Klaytn team, focused on extending account and transaction models while preserving compatibility, which were successfully incorporated into the Klaytn mainnet, launched this past June.
He believed that Klaytn’s new account and transaction models are applicable to other Ethereum-compatible blockchain platforms to increase usability and performance. He thus proposed to introduce this system at this year’s Devcon, and he was officially invited to speak at this year’s Devcon, with a comment from the Devcon Team: “the Ethereum community should see this.”
And we were off to Osaka, Japan.
Devcon is the annual Ethereum developers conference held by the Ethereum Foundation. With a mission to educate and empower the community to bring decentralized protocols, tools, and culture, Devcon invites builders of all kinds: developers, designers, researchers, community organizers, social economists, and artists.
The first day of the conference started with the opening ceremony of the Ethereum Magicians, which is a self-organized fellowship, initiated by James Pitts and Greg Colvin in order to maximize technical opportunities, share ideas, and work together effectively across boundaries. With a mission to keep Ethereum “the best it can technically be,” the fellowship seeks to nurture community consensus on the technical direction and specification of Ethereum. In doing so, the fellowship invites any interested person to participate in improving the Ethereum improvement process, which can be submitted to the Ethereum Improvement Proposals, aka the EIPs. The EIPs describe standards for the Ethereum platform, including core protocol specifications, client APIs, and contract standards, which can be proposed by any Ethereum community member.
The opening ceremony also introduced the Ethereum Cat Herders, a global grassroots community dedicated to improving the Ethereum protocol and community by improving underlying practices. The Cat Herders are in a sense ‘project managers,’ dedicated to facilitating and coordinating tasks required to achieve specific project outcomes within the Ethereum ecosystem and so assist with moving Ethereum forward.
It was no surprise that Devcon 5 kick-off emphasized the power of community, which is often overlooked when we discuss blockchain. Community is the group of people, companies, and other organizations that together support and maintain the blockchain. It can include the core developers who work on building the network itself, the miners who own and operate the nodes that constitute the network, the larger ecosystem of developers and entrepreneurs who are developing applications on the network, the users who enjoy a variety of applications built on the network, and other researchers, participants, advisors, etc.¹ To run, maintain, and support a project, especially if it is decentralized, the communication, coordination, and facilitation among the productive community of dedicated members stand as key components.
We Klaytn also believe that building a strong community is one of the key elements in running our project. Committed to facilitating the creation of readily-usable blockchain applications (BApps), we are a 100% open source project to which we invite all the community to participate as a partner, a contributor, and a supporter of the project. You can visit our GitHub page at https://github.com/klaytn/klaytn to find more about the official Go implementation of the Klaytn protocol. For more details on Klaytn design, node operation guides, and application development resources, please visit the official Klaytn Docs, which recently released its Korean version as well. Further, you can also visit our Community at Klaytn Medium page to find more information about our efforts towards community building.
After the Opening Ceremony, our team enjoyed a variety of inspiring sessions including Ethereum Roadmap 2020: EEA Meets with the Ethereum Community, which called for the protocol standardization, How Two Microsoft Engineers Build Blockchain Apps on Ethereum Networks featuring Microsoft’s Azure, Ethereum Roadmap 2020: Ethereum 1.0 and Eth1.x with Vitalik, State of Ethereum 2019, which explored the network’s growth based on Google Analytics data, Preventing Disaster: Advances in Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection, featuring MythX, and many more.
[1] Josh Stark, “Building the Foundations for a Scalable Ethereum Community” CoinDesk: https://www.coindesk.com/building-foundations-scalable-blockchain-ethereum-community
