Devcon IV — What We Learned and Why It Matters
Learnings from the MetaX Team
Devcon 4 has officially ended, but our experiences, connections, and takeaways are coming home with us.
After four amazing days at the Prague Congress Centre in the Czech Republic, immersed in workshops, lectures, meetings, and more, our team is here to share what they loved the most about Devcon 4!
Edwin Cheung — Senior Software Engineer
It would be hard to pick just one thing from Devcon to talk about, so I’m going to talk about a few.
First, the Build Your Own Multi-Sig Wallet in Two Hours was really fun and featured a Solidity walk through similar to Cryptozombies.
Next up, I enjoyed Building Gasless Onboarding UX Powered by Meta Transactions with Clevis & Dapparatus. It provided a comprehensive walkthrough of tools to set up a throwaway account (without the need for Metamask) and send meta transactions, so the user pays no gas fees. These tools are valuable as they create a better onboarding experience for the end user.
Lastly, the Embark Into The Ether: Aiming For Pluto workshop provided an example of how to build a dApp using Embark, a framework for serverless decentralized applications using Ethereum, IPFS, and other platforms. It was insightful to see an alternative to truffle and how easily dApps can be set up in a serverless environment.
Nick Porter — Full Stack Software Engineer
My focus for Devcon was to learn how to deploy smart contracts in a more efficient manner, which is why I was most excited about Zeppelin and their recent release of the ZeppelinOS.
ZeppelinOS is a framework and CLI for creating and deploying upgradeable smart contracts. The great thing is that it does not affect how developers write smart contracts. After you are finished writing a contract, you simply use a few commands from the Zeppelin CLI to make it upgradeable. Their approach to upgradability uses a growingly popular design called “Proxy Pattern.”
Although upgradability is a fantastic innovation, there now becomes a new trust layer between the contract and the user. Zeppelin is looking for ways to notify a user if a contract that they previously interacted with has been modified, which should provide transparency within the system. Additionally, this approach to upgradability complements the Ethereum Package Manager and should allow for upgradable packages. Now, EPM packages can have versioning, similar to how npm currently works. Lastly, Zeppelin is developing a vouching system “so developers can rate packages and build reputation for packages.”
Sam Kim - Full Stack Software Engineer
Traveling to Prague and seeing all of my favorite crypto celebrities was an incredible experience! I also had the privilege of taking over the companies social media accounts for a few days to provide company updates, which is not something many software engineers ever get to do #winning.
The Universal Ethereum Logins presentation by Alex Van de Sande was by far my favorite. Usability in dApps is currently very difficult for non-technical people, but having universal logins would give users a better experience. They would not download anything extra and would be instantly logged in to multiple devices without entering a password. Users would also have control of their data and be able to use this data in multiple applications. For the Ethereum community, this is an amazing idea that would increase usage and remove the hassle of using multiple dApps with different accounts.
Eduardo Muñoz — Project Manager
One of the main goals in Ethereum and something you hear constantly is the need for killer dApps, which are dApps that can go mainstream. Without a large user base, Ethereum is still just novel technology for tinkerers and tech enthusiasts.
That is why the Getting to a Million DApp Users by Sid Coehlo-Prabhu, Product Lead at Coinbase was the highlight for me.
Sid walked the audience through the steps Coinbase is taking to increase user adoption for dApps. Through their acquisition of Cipher Browser, Coinbase restructured their Toshi mobile app to create Coinbase Wallet.
Coinbase Wallet is a mobile app (featuring the adChain Publisher Registry!) that doubles as an Ethereum wallet and allows users to interact with dApps directly from their phone. This advancement is huge because in many parts of the world, especially in developing nations, people have limited access to computers, but smartphones are prevalent. Coinbase Wallet also increases dApp usability with its on-and-off fiat-to-crypto ramps.
Hunter Gebron — Director of Strategy
Devcon 4 exceeded my expectations. Being in the presence of so many brilliant people working tirelessly to build out Ethereum 2.0 (or as Vitalik dubbed it ‘Serenity’) was inspirational. It was a great reminder of why we are all here and what this is all about- building a better, more self-sovereign future.
However, connecting the traditional societal government and legal systems to Ethereum remains a challenge. There is much talk of tokenizing real-world assets and putting them on-chain, but without a framework to support these assets that are grounded in traditional legal doctrine, tokenized assets will remain on the fringe. Luckily for us, one of the smartest, most well-spoken assets in the Ethereum community, Vinay Gupta, is on the job.
Vinay’s presentation, How do we control the material world with smart contracts told the story of his several-year-long research quest to bring “the practical legal technicalities of controlling fiat property from Ethereum smart contracts.”
It was a fascinating account of how he learned to bridge the gap between computer programmers and lawyers. Essentially, said Vinay, “lawyers are computer programmers, except the legal system is so blurry and convoluted they spend 90% of their time doing the equivalent of testing for error code.”
Mattereum is the name of Vinay’s company, and they have partnered with Ocean Protocol. Expect to see a lot more from them in the future!
Jon Roethke — Software Engineer / Business Development
My biggest takeaway from Devcon 4 is that the conversation around blockchain technology and cryptocurrency continues to mature. Early on in the space, many of the use cases people had dreamed up for this new technology were highly theoretical and especially abstract for non-technical audiences to follow and participate in. Now that much of that initial hype has subsided, the Ethereum community seems to be turning a big corner by including user experience (UX) and design as a vital focus going forward. This inclusion does not mark a shift in developer focus; rather it creates an additional consideration for those building decentralized applications to take seriously if they seek to create a highly usable and successful dApp.
These observations were substantiated by the recent inclusions of UX/Design tracks within the Devcon category of talks i.e. “gasless onboarding UX powered by meta transactions” and UX considerations from Coinbase surrounding its new wallet application.
Overall, our team had an unforgettable time at Devcon, and is inspired to get back to the office and apply their learnings to enhancing our dApp, the adChain Publisher Registry!
