EDCON 2019 & the first decentralized execution with MESG
EDCON has just finished, so this is an update on the event, and the cool things that are happening in the blockchain space.
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The event was composed of a hackathon at the beginning of the week and a conference at the end.
TL;DR: Layer-2 solutions like Plasma are awesome and are ready to use. The ecosystem is growing in the right direction (in my opinion). We had our first Decentralized Execution of a MESG Service :)
EDCON Hackathon
We didn’t present anything, but we did hack for the 3 days of the hackathon on the Plasma Chain to understand more about this Layer-2 solution.
Our goal was to create a plasma operator with MESG, unfortunately there is not much documentation about this specific part. There is one really good thing though, there are some really good projects that let you run your own Plasma Chain or access one easily.
- OmiseGO Ari: You can check the dev portal and some good documentation of their implementation.
- Plasma Group to create your own Plasma Chain in just few command lines.
- Loom SDK to create apps based on DAppChain that are linked to a Plasma Cash chain. Complex setup, but quite nice and really easy to use.
There is still some work to be done on the Plasma Chain (especially for the Generalized Plasma) but I was happy to see that it’s already pretty much production ready.
The hackathon in general was nice, we saw really good projects, some really cool tech that unfortunately didn’t win, but a team of 11 years old kids won the 3rd prize by creating a game, that was awesome.
EDCON Conference
The conference was intense. A lot of discussions about scalability, layer 2 with plasma, zk-snark, state channels…, layer 1 with Eth2.0 and the existing implementations from prismatic labs, lighthouse…
Scalability with Ethereum is definitely not a dream anymore.
Here is a list of some projects/tools that I found interesting.
Developer tools:
- https://github.com/trufflesuite/drizzle-utils: rxjs+web3
- https://ethers.io web3 equivalent library in typescript
- https://embark.status.im/ framework for dApp
- https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk Blockchain framework
- https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-kad-dht DHT with libp2p
- https://github.com/makerdao/multicall.js#readme group multiple web3 calls
- https://rakyll.org/grpc-trace/ trace GRPC calls
- https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/bazel-overview.html Better build system
- https://docs.pantheon.pegasys.tech/en/stable/Consensus-Protocols/IBFT/
Projects:
- https://universallogin.io/ made login easy
- https://openbazaar.org/ buy anything in a decentralized marketplace
- https://amberdata.io/dashboards/applications Nice project to have data from Ethereum
- https://ethhub.io/ General information about Ethereum
- https://www.contractland.io/ Scalable and interoperable chain
- https://uniswap.exchange/swap Swap token
Scalability:
- https://github.com/ethereum/trinity Eth2.0 client
- https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs Eth2.0 specs
- https://www.cryptoeconomicslab.com/ Plasma chain use in real life
- https://github.com/FourthState/plasma-mvp-sidechain Plasma MVP with Cosmos SDK
- http://alephium.org/ scalable blockchain with some kind of subnetworks
MESG First Decentralized Execution
With this hackathon and conference Nicolas and I were really excited to hack on what is the long term vision of MESG and to have this Marketplace of Decentralized Executions.
After a long evening/night of discussions, hacks and beers we finished an implementation of a decentralized execution using a MESG Application 🤯.
This is still a big work in progress but a cool starting point and it was done in a way that we could use layer 2 solutions to scale. This is pretty exciting because it can quite easily be integrated into the Core and this means that your application running with MESG could actually benefit from decentralized execution within your application.
You can find this proof of concept on Github, and of course you can start to play with MESG right now even with no decentralized executions, however those too will come sooner than expected 😀.
