We’ll always have Paris — a reflection of EthCC [5] and StarkNet CC
With thousands of crypto enthusiasts descending into Paris for EthCC and turning up the temperature, it is no wonder Paris experienced the hottest temperatures in July yet. In its fifth and presumably most “lit” edition yet, the sold out EthCC event had an impressive line up such as Vitalik Buterin, Co-Founder of Ethereum, Eli Ben-Sasson, Co-Founder of StarkWare, Georgios Konstantopoulos, CTO of Paradigm and many more.
Amidst the chaos, hype, and of course memes circulated amongst the crowd, one thing was clear, the optimism towards Ethereum and the technology built around it is unchanged. Many commented on the bear market being a temporary setback rather than a permanent “crash” , with a period of consolidation upon us.
My Co-Founder Brian and I had the opportunity to attend both EthCC as well as some of the events organised around it, including the StarkNet Hackathon organised by Encode where our tech teams won some of the competitions and the full-day StarkNetCC run by Only Dust and Journal du Coin. Here I’d like to bring your attention to some noteworthy events and my takeaways from them.
Highlighted events:
1. Vitalik Buterin | Co-Founder of Ethereum @ EthCC — Thoughts about the longer term of the Ethereum protocol
In typical superstar fashion, Buterin drew in a full house before his speaking topic was even revealed. On stage, Burterin explains where we are at right now with Ethereum (~55% of the way there once the merge is complete), and what the future should look like for the chain.
He recognises that we’re going through an accelerated pace of change (with the Merge, EIP 1559, EIP 4844 on Proto-danksharding) to make Ethereum a far more scalable network, “but that doesn’t mean we should keep going this way forever”.
At some point, the rate of change of Ethereum will slow down and the chain will settle down, where L1 will be used for security and dependability, and L2 is used for “rapid iteration and action”. He also mentions his belief in the “Functionality escape velocity” thesis — once L1 is strong enough, the rest can be done by L2, where he remains optimistic on zk-EVMs and/or other better cryptographic approaches that massively improves efficiency and simplicity. The beauty of this is at this point it would be far easier for people to understand the whole protocol from start to finish, and the ecosystem would be able to focus on decentralisation such as supporting easy-to-use light clients or being able to run a full node on lighter hardware to help secure the network.
While there is undoubtedly lots to unpack, what I appreciate most is while Buertin touched on some details on EIPs and SNARK technology, his speech was in fact tailored to a wide range of audiences, from venture capitalists, to developers, to Web3 enthusiasts, with a very high level takeaway on the protocol’s direction that everyone should be able to understand.
2. Eli Ben-Sasson | Co-Founder & President of StarkWare @ EthCC — StarkNet — Next steps
In the first talk given by the StarkWare leadership team since their recent token announcement, Eli recounts the StarkWare’s journey over the past 4 years (from building StarkEx by hand to developing Cairo, and now onto StarkNet, a public standalone L2) before diving into the design structure of the foundation and token mechanism.
He stresses that ultimately, STARKs as a technology should be a public good, and StarkNet is a medium that enables this technology to be made available to everyone. But in order for this public good to be built and maintained, StarkNet must reward developers (existing and newcomers alike) for their continued contributions for making the whole operation possible.
StarkNet as a public good will also mean the StarkWare team needs to take a step back, and so a governance token assisted by a foundation is the best way to accomplish both, and transition the decision making process away from one body to another — over to the developers/ecosystem participants advancing the system.
Unlike other chains focusing on rewards for early adopters through airdrops (OP), or protocol token grants (NEAR, AVAX), StarkWare has decidedly taken on a “developers first” approach for StarkNet, carving out the largest chunk for core contributors in order to properly incentivise for the longevity of the protocol, to continuously boost development of creative tools and infrastructure for the ecosystem to grow, and to ensure governance tokens are in the hands of the right people.
As someone who has been part of the ecosystem for some time now, I can confidently say that the StarkNet community is a special, tight-knit group of developers who truly believe in building something different with Cairo. I can only imagine the types of talent this new token announcement will bring to the protocol!
3. Yael Doweck | Product Manager and Researcher of StarkWare @ StarkNetCC — STARK Recursion
Having watched Avihu’s video on STARK recursion a few weeks back (would recommend it as a primer), I was amazed by how much Yael’s talk further unlocked for me on recursion.
Validity roll ups are a great way to improve speed and scalability by rolling up thousands of transactions into a single proof to be verified on chain, but StarkWare understood that proofs are still fundamentally constrained by capacity. No matter the machine size, there would always be a limit on the number of transactions a proof could contain.
Enter recursion, which is the idea of increasing proof capacity by including multiple verifier programs in one proof. Instead of taking the original program with thousands of transactions, producing a proof, and taking that generated proof to an on-chain verifier, one can soon take multiple verifiers and generate a single proof from them in far less idle time while waiting for the batch to be filled with transactions. This means we are now able to fit far more transactions into a single proof before going to a final on-chain verifier. The more recursive hops that happen means more transactions can be included and transactions can be simultaneously proved in parallel , which ultimately means lower average transaction costs and lower latency.
Recursion sets the stage for L3 as well, given that on-chain verifiers can be in both Cairo (for L2 settlement) and in Solidity (for L1). It’s a technical talk, but one that is critical to understand if you want to understand the next step of StarkNet/StarkEx development and performance optimization. Wen recursion? In less than a month!
4. Panel @ StarkNetCC — Why account abstraction is a breakthrough for dApp UX & Security
Sylve Chevet (Moderator) — briq, Motty Lavie — Braavos, Ismael Darwich — Argent, Thomas Brillard — Ledger, Loaf — BibliothecaDAO & Loot Realms
Link to Video (5:45:30)
The panel discusses the key benefits of account abstraction (another hot topic besides recursion for StarkNet) and what it enables users to do.
The concept of account abstraction (primer here) is to move away from a world where we must abide by a one-size-fits all solution (i.e. you lose your keys, you lose your funds) into one where an account’s parameters can be tailored to a users’ needs. Examples of what this allows users to do may include guardians, multisig and social recovery if we’re thinking along the lines of wallet recovery. On the gaming side, it opens up a world of features such as session keys or “ecommerce cards” mentioned by LOAF, which allows for the batching of game actions into one single transaction instead of having to sign every single step along the way .
The current state of self-custodial solutions and wallets is that we’re still a long way from creating a UX that people want and are used to getting from centralised solutions. Motty from Braavos argues that
“smart contract based wallets opens up for us a completely new domain space that will enable us to achieve a much better UX”.
While this sounds great in theory, the group also acknowledges the challenges in making account abstraction work, specifically because most protocols only tailor to EOA (externally owned account) such as Metamask right now making it an uphill battle. My takeaway? It’s still VERY early days, but account abstraction is here to stay and to help further crypto adoption through further ease of access while customising security!
Other noteworthy events:
5. StarkNet Hackathon by Encode
Another event that took place separately from EthCC and StarkNetCC was the StarkNet Hackathon organised by Encode club. Over 150 participants and 30 submissions were made within a 24 hour period!
Our very own CTO, Jonathan, gave a workshop to budding Cairo developers on StarkNet Data Storage Optimization, and we had two teams represent and go on to win the Ledger and Braavos hackathon challenges. Big thanks to the Encode team for organising this successful event and for making sure everyone stayed hydrated!
6. StarkCon Mixer and Shooting Starks Party (StarkNet CC afterparty)
It goes without saying that zkLend loves to throw a good party for the StarkNet community, and what better way to end the day than to spend more time with the StarkNet ecosystem trading dad jokes and drinking vodka sodas. The week kicked off with StarkCon, and closed with the Shooting Starks.
Special thanks to ZKX, Journal du Coin, Only Dust, Astraly, and briq for co-hosting the parties with us. ‘Till next time, Paris. Merci beaucoup!
About zkLend
zkLend is an L2 money-market protocol built on StarkNet, combining zk-rollup scalability, superior transaction speed, and cost-savings with Ethereum’s security. The protocol offers a dual solution: a permissioned and compliance-focused solution for institutional clients, and a permissionless service for DeFi users — all without sacrificing decentralisation.
