Thank you Devcon VI!
Nethermind’s highlights from Ethereum’s foundational conference
Devcon is the biggest developer conference in the Ethereum ecosystem. What had been an annual event since 2014 was sadly interrupted, along with the rest of the world, when Covid swept across the globe in 2020. The Ethereum Foundation resisted moving Devcon online and decided to be patient — for two long years. Having recently attended Devcon VI with 21 members of the Nethermind team, we can confirm it was well worth the wait!
We arrived at the jaw-dropping Agora venue in Bogota, Colombia. All six floors were packed with everything from swag stations, photo stands, food and watering holes, presentation rooms (9 stages!), and co-working areas, to impact booths, interview and meeting rooms, a relaxing jungle, and one kick-ass hacker basement! Snacks, lunch, and refreshments (did you try the fresh guanabana and granadillas? 🤤) were on offer throughout the day. There was little need to leave the venue, and still, every day offered something new to discover. Devcon VI hosted 6000 attendees, including 444 speakers from 113 different countries. Despite the number of people, somehow the conference didn’t feel crowded, most likely due to the great vibes and everyone's excitement. 34% of the attendees were Spanish speakers, a testament to the huge growth of the LatAm community in recent years. It was a glorious melting pot of cultures, skills, experiences, and perspectives, all coming together on this special occasion.
Devcon is an event for the builders of Ethereum, and with 200 hours of programming recorded during the hackathon and workshops, this year was no exception. Everywhere you looked, you could see heads colliding over lines of code on a computer screen. If you stopped to briefly listen to conversations going on around you, you’d pick up on discussions on how to build better infrastructure, how to improve user experience, or how to scale.
The topics dominating the agenda were Zero Knowledge, rollups, EVM, Layer 2, MEV, and Account Abstraction.
The Ethereum roadmap was discussed, humble learnings from the Merge were noted, and new projects and collaborations were announced: Flashbots Suave and Arbitrum acquired Prysm, to name just a couple. DAOs, public goods, and the future of identities were debated, and all of the above was underpinned by cryptographic research and security considerations in the form of audits, formal verification, decentralization, and governance.
The beauty of a tech conference in the Ethereum community is that the conversations often extend to societal and human coordination topics as well.
The community building and well-being talks also attracted crowds. In ‘The Power of Stories’, Piper Merriam gave a powerful description of navigating one’s personal life in all its glory, while owning one’s position, passion, and purpose in this rapidly growing ecosystem that is testing our assumptions about leadership and hierarchies.
From the Nethermind team, we were 21 colleagues with various expertise ranging from Ethereum core development, security audits, formal verification, governance, L2 research and cryptographic research, community, and growth.
Two of our cryptographers gave a lightning talk on their latest research topics: Shamir Secret Sharing with no ID numbers by Jorge Arce-Garro and Vampire, a novel zkSNARK by Michal Zajac. Conveying these cryptographic concepts in 6 minutes is no small feat and we are very proud of our team!
Our very own CEO, Tomasz Stanczak, and Ethereum protocol engineer and researcher, Kristof Gazso, were on the panel of Ethereum Magicians Protocol Roadmap Session co-hosted by our Internship Program Manager Anett Rolikova and Ethereum Foundation’s Tim Beiko.
At the impact booths on the third floor, our team got to hang out with node operators Ethereum on Arms and Dappnode, consensus clients Lodestar and Nimbus, as well as L2s such as StarkNet, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon, and many other influential projects in the Ethereum ecosystem.
We would like to extend a huge thank you to the Devcon organizers Skylar, Natalia, and Heather, as well as all of the Devcon volunteers, who helped to create an unforgettable experience. Our team had a blast connecting with this wonderful community of builders and enthusiasts. Wen Devcon VII? 👀 Keep an eye on our social media to stay up to date on where you can meet our team in the meanwhile!
Nethermind is a team of world-class builders and researchers. We empower enterprises and developers worldwide to access and build upon the decentralized web. Our work touches every part of the Web3 ecosystem, from our Nethermind node to fundamental cryptography research and application-layer protocol development. We’re always looking for passionate people to join us in solving Ethereum’s most difficult challenges. Are you interested? Check out our job board https://nethermind.io/company/.
