What you missed at Devcon IV
A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to attend the 4th annual Devcon conference in Prague. This was a 4 day conference hosted by the Ethereum Foundation that brought together developers, designers, researchers, community organizers, and even artists from all over the world. I met talented people working on really interesting projects in the space. I attended talks and workshops that focused on scalability, security, privacy, and UX & design. I roamed the streets of Prague with new friends. And most importantly, I left the conference feeling inspired and even more excited about this new paradigm shift of the internet.
Here are a few things you missed:
Ethereum 2.0 (aka Serenity)
Vitalik Buterin gave a talk about the past, present and future of Ethereum development. He spoke about Ethereum 2.0, dubbed “Serenity”, which is a combination of different features that the Ethereum team has been working on and researching for the past few years including Proof of Stake (Casper), Scalability (sharding), and improvements to the VM, cross-contract logic, and protocol economics. He spoke about the history of the research & development that went into proof of stake and sharding, and addressed some of the things that we wrong.
The most exciting part of the talk was about the future of Ethereum. Serenity, which will start as a new blockchain with a link to the existing PoW chain, is the “the world computer” as it’s really meant to be according to Vitalik. It will process transactions at a faster rate then the current blockchain and hopefully allow for 1000x higher scalability.
Serenity will be introduced in 4 phases:
Phase 0: the first phase will introduce the beacon chain, the new proof of stake blockchain that will co-exist alongside Ethereum (dummy chain). This blockchain will be halfway between a testnet and mainnet.
Phase 1: The second phase will introduce a simplified version of “shards as data chains”. These shards can store data but won’t be able to transfer smart contracts or money from one shard to another.
Phase 2: This phase will enable cross-shard communication, meaning users can send messages and funds to each other across different shards.
Phase 3: The last phase will include tweaks and optimizations.
You can check out the recording of Vitalik’s talk here!
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Zero-Knowledge Proofs were a hot topic at the conference and they definitely caught my attention. Zero-Knowledge proofs are a method in which one party (a prover) can prove to another party (the verifier), that they know the value of an output without revealing the inputs. Zero-Knowledge proofs are not a new concept: they were first introduced in 1985 by MIT Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff in their paper “The knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems”. Recently, this concept has been introduced into the blockchain for the purposes of online privacy and scalability. Elena Nadolinski gave a talk titled Demystifying Zero knowledge proofs where she went over the math behind this concept and then Jacob Eberhardt gave a workshop on ZoKrates, a toolbox to use zkSNARKS in your dapps.
Read more about Zero-Knowledge Proofs in this Medium article from The Argon Group.
UX & Design
One of the challenges of the entire blockchain ecosystem is on-boarding users, so this year’s Devcon focused on UX & design more than ever before. There were a handful of workshops addressing the topic. The first day kicked off with a UX workshop called “How to Design for Humans & Get Users Onboard”, hosted by Connie Yang, the Director of Design at Coinbase and Tara Tan, a design director at IDEO CoLab. Their presentation included tips and tools for a human-centered approach to designing for DApps.
Metamask announced their mobile app, a bridge to the decentralized web which includes intuitive on-boarding. Alex Van de Sande gave a talk about development for Universal Login for DApps, which can replace the usual login and does not require passwords, backing up private keys, or seed phrases. Taylor Monahan gave a talk about lessons learned while building out the user interface for MyEtherWallet and MyCrypto. It was exciting to see that a major topic of conversation around the extremely important topic of User Experience and Design.
There were countless presentations and workshops throughout Devcon and I wish I could have attended them all. Luckily, many of the presentations were recorded so you are able to watch them from the comfort of your couch!
Aside from the workshops and presentations, it was awesome to meet so many developers from the community and explore the beautiful city of Prague. We are already looking forward to Devcon V!
If you attended Devcon IV and live in the LA area, let’s grab coffee! Tweet me.
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