Archive

Reducing the Trust Surface

Reducing the Trust Surface

End-to-End Privacy

End-to-End Privacy

Private State, Public Network: The Tradeoffs Behind Privacy

Public blockchains require public data and execution. Multiple technologies, cryptographic or otherwise, seek to fulfil these requirements while obfuscating fundamental information required to reconstruct a transaction's intent and the data it operates on. At application boundaries, private execution faces distinct challenges. Fees, node queries, timing and public calls can make hidden payloads linkable. For private user-controlled state, transaction architectures that allow dapps to read contract state creates consent challenges This talk compares the challenges and trade-offs of current technologies that aim to enable private transactions on public networks, and looks into the future to what blockchains that enshrine 'privacy' as a core value will truly look like.

Digital Rights in DPIs — Limitations and Lessons for Equitable Futures

Over the last two decades, Digital Public Infrastructures have become central to most policy debates, especially in Global South countries that have come to use them for a variety of purposes. But like any data-driven platform that mediates between two sides of a transaction, DPIs are just as vulnerable to digital rights violations, more so, in fact, given their scale, state backing, and multi-channel deployment. This talk is precisely about identifying, understanding, and navigating these violations in the political and economic context of our time. I attempt to historicize the functioning of these techno-legal ecosystems and convey how their most essential features — data sharing, digital service delivery, and private sector integration — risk excluding, marginalizing, and exploiting the same communities they aim to support. The goal is not to abandon the utility of these innovations, but to reflect on their purpose, design, and use, and move towards futures rooted in principles of openness, equity, and fairness.

Ethereum's Roadmap, Simplified: What Changes Next and Why

Ethereum’s core protocol development roadmap can feel hard to understand - so this talk breaks it down in plain, beginner-friendly language. Attendees will learn what to be excited about in the short, medium, and long term, and how the roadmap actually comes together. We’ll also address common concerns - like the idea that the roadmap “keeps changing” - and explain how core protocol work is funded. As a core contributor to Protocol Guild (a funding mechanism for Ethereum’s core protocol), I’ll have the unique ability to share practical context and up-to-date perspectives from direct collaboration with core developers to make the roadmap clear and accurate.

PQ Ethereum Q&A

Quantum has become a significant topic of interest for the general public (as well as institutions). My goal for this talk is to answer the most common questions and have the recording become a reference point that folks link back to. I'll try to share as much alpha as possible while keeping it accessible.

One Ethereum: Same Block, Every Chain (Part I)

1. What actually limits scaling. State, compute, bandwidth. Max out L1 entirely, with bandwidth as the binding constraint, and see where that lands us. 2. What would we use it for? Compare the ceiling of a fully scaled Ethereum against the world's financial transactions per second, then against the far larger set of interactions that carry value. Even best-case L1 falls orders of magnitude short. 3. Even if it could scale, not everyone belongs there. Ethereum's choices on privacy and censorship resistance mean no recourse when things go wrong. Should vanilla users transact on L1 at all? Institutions have their own reasons not to make a public chain their primary home. 4. The EEZ as the answer. It lets networks that are nothing alike (EVM or non-EVM, privacy-first, permissioned, validiums) compose synchronously while settling on Ethereum: one settlement layer, many economies. Not a workaround for Ethereum's limits, but the architecture you arrive at once you take them seriously.

Reimagining Money Movement: Open Financial Rails for India

**A fireside chat with Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal exploring:** - Next frontier for payments in India - making cross-border money movement just as fast and accessible. - Stablecoins as invisible settlement infrastructure; moving value globally, 24/7, at significantly lower cost. - Benefits to Indian households, exporters and MSMEs through cheaper remittances, faster settlement and improved access to global markets. - Opportunity to connect stablecoin infrastructure with India’s existing banking and payment rails, while users continue to send and receive familiar fiat currencies. - Licensed platforms, verified identities and transparent blockchain records give regulators greater visibility and control than today’s offshore and informal channels. - With a supervised, innovation-friendly framework, India can define the model for regulated digital money across emerging markets - Sandeep’s journey building Polygon and supporting social-impact initiatives with Blockchain for Impact

Ethereum Is Decentralized. Your Access Isn’t.

Ethereum’s protocol can be decentralized, secure, and credibly neutral while most users never interact with it directly. Their path runs through wallets, RPCs, frontends, relays, indexers, identity systems, and increasingly AI agents, any of which can reintroduce trust, censorship, surveillance, or lock-in. This talk starts with Moxie Marlinspike’s 2022 critique of Web3 and asks how much has actually changed. It then maps the user boundary where Ethereum’s guarantees still break and introduces the work being done within the Ethereum Foundation’s new Access Layer: private and verifiable reads, censorship-resistant transaction submission, safer account interfaces, privacy-preserving identity, bounded delegation, and credible fallback and exit paths. Attendees will leave with a framework for understanding Ethereum’s remaining access-layer dependencies, the technologies being developed to remove them, and what a genuinely self-sovereign Ethereum experience could look like.

The Future of Privacy and How to Stop it

Privacy is essential to a free society, as the building block on which our fundamental rights stand, and strong privacy enhancing technologies are necessary to enable people to protect their rights in the face of an increasingly surveilled world. These technologies are increasingly getting targeted, with policymakers pushing for backdoors and other required weaknesses or mandated surveillance capabilities, and more recently threats to the people who write the code and provide the services that make privacy possible, not just the people who use it. This talk will discuss why we need strong privacy and the tools that enable it, the threat landscape that we face as individuals and as builders, and how we can push back, both with building for resilient privacy enhancing technologies and by working together to create the legal and policy space necessary for a free society.

Digital Objects: What, Why, and How

Digital Objects are a new Ethereum-based software construct enabled by recent advancements in recursive ZKPs and Ethereum DA that 0xPARC has been productionalizing as of this year. Digital Objects unlock a large class of valuable applications on Ethereum that we are actively working with partners to develop pilots for. We believe that the deployment of Digital Objects will significantly broaden Ethereum's audience and use cases, and are seeking to reach Ethereum developers to help us build such applications. Technologically, DOs represent a novel use of Ethereum as a highly scalable "public broadcast channel", with computation offloaded to individual end-users rather than the Ethereum network itself. Understanding this architecture pattern may benefit developers who are also seeking ways to build scalable applications using Ethereum as a public billboard.

Tor AMA with Roger Dingledine

Come ask-me-anything about Tor. Your cool privacy-preserving app will only go so far if you don't also protect IP addresses at the network layer. And what's your plan when your servers and protocol get blocked in Russia? Beyond communications metadata and network-layer censorship resistance, we can also talk about the bigger pictures: Tor as critical infrastructure for other projects including cryptocurrencies, policy angles like how governments keep trying to get backdoors in encryption, and community topics like our experiences having a non-profit for 20+ years in this weird world we live in. And when the session ends... keep asking! Roger will stick around after the session for more Q&A, in case you didn't manage to get your question in or you didn't want to ask it in front of everybody.

From First Mover to Blueprint: Lessons from Bhutan’s Decentralized ID

As one of the first countries to implement self-sovereign identity at national scale – and the first to anchor its national digital identity system on Ethereum – Bhutan had few direct precedents to follow. Building on existing models and decentralized technologies, it had to rethink their application to national public infrastructure. The discussion unpacks the technical, institutional and societal choices behind implementation – from Ethereum’s role and the transition from Polygon to the governance, legal and operational conditions required for success. It explores the challenges of building trust, driving adoption and ensuring inclusion, as well as the opportunities and tradeoffs for countries with different levels of digital infrastructure, institutional capacity and population scale.

Keynote: Nomic Foundation’s vision for Ethereum’s tooling ecosystem

Nomic Foundation is the nonprofit behind Hardhat. Nomic’s co-founder and CTO will walk you through Nomic’s long-term vision for a community-driven developer tooling ecosystem for Ethereum.

Keynote: Unifying Ethereum Through Intents and ERC-7683

Ethereum has scaled with a diverse ecosystem of L2s—but this created a new challenge: how can this fragmented landscape of potentially millions of rollups feel like a **unified Ethereum**? In this talk, I’ll discuss how intent-based architectures—and new standards like ERC-7683—can help unify Ethereum while maintaining the benefits of Ethereum’s rollup centric architecture.

Keynote: Ethereum in 30 minutes

Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum, opens Devcon with a comprehensive overview of Ethereum’s evolution as a decentralized “world computer,” explaining its layer 1 trust machine and layer 2 scaling solutions for security and scalability, emphasizing improvements in decentralization and client diversity, and encouraging developers to build innovative applications that leverage Ethereum’s robust and evolving ecosystem.

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Keynote: Glass Houses and Tornados

The Tornado Cash sanctions and criminal prosecutions have challenged longstanding assumptions within crypto about the limits of money transmission licensing, money laundering statutes, and sanctions laws. They've also revealed a longstanding assumption from some in policy and law enforcement circles: that blockchains have always been and must remain transparent. Neither assumption has served us well and the time has come for legal certainty. This talk is about how we get there.

Keynote: Lessons learned from Tor

I will share lessons learned during Tor's twenty years as free software fighting for privacy and human rights. We'll talk about distributed trust and privacy by design, how to help people understand the good uses of your tech, getting allies in both cypherpunks and government, why transparency and community-building are so essential to trust, and successes from other spaces. It may seem like the crypto wars never really end, but we all have a part to play in saving the world.

Keynote: The REAL state of L2s

The evolution of Layer 2 solutions has been pivotal in scaling blockchain technologies. This talk, led by L2BEAT founder Bartek Kiepuszewski, delves into the current landscape, recent advancements, and future potential of L2 ecosystems. It will try to address some myths and current challenges of the space. Some important changes to L2BEAT risk framework will also be announced.

Keynote: Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again: Why we need privacy

The Web3 revolution seeks to address the sins of Web2. However, in doing so, it’s created an even worse outcome for users - users’ data is publicly available and makes them vulnerable to state-level censorship and adverse actions. This talk will address the philosophical as well as practical considerations of privacy in Web3. Privacy is an industry-wide issue and sits at the heart of all that is Web3. Understanding why privacy matters involves recognizing that it is not an isolated concept bu

Keynote: World Politics, World Building

World politics has changed. Geopolitics is no longer simply a contest to control territory: in this age of advanced technology, it has become a contest to create the territory. Great powers seek to build a world for other states to inhabit, while keeping the ability to change the rules or the state of the world when necessary. At a moment when the old concepts no longer work, this book aims to introduce a radically new theory of world politics and technology. The end goal: god mode

Keynote: The next 10 years of Web3 in Africa

When Africa reaches 2 billion people, what are the profound ways Web3 shapes its economy? Historically, millions of Africans repurposed and stitched together crypto tools for real-world utility. Now, a new generation of builders is developing tailored solutions. In the next 10 years, what can we expect to be built that redefines trust and finance in Africa? And what needs to be true for more than half of African economies to be powered by decentralized technologies?

Keynote: How to Properly Open Source Software: Lessons Learned from the Linux Foundation

It can be challenging to properly open source software: there are licenses, IP, security reporting, and many other issues that need to be addressed. In this talk, we will discuss the best practices for open source software development learned from almost 25 years of experience at the Linux Foundation. Attendees will learn about how to set up their projects for a variety of potential goals, including things like maximizing security and community building.

Keynote: Making Sense of Stablecoins

Everyone is talking about stablecoins now! In this talk I'll share what I learned about Tether on Tron in addition to stablecoins more broadly. Why are so many USDT transactions on Tron? Why did Bridge get acquired for $1.1B? What do L2s have to do with stablecoins? Are stablecoins a threat to Ethereum or an accelerant?

Keynote: ⿻ Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

This talk explores the evolving relationship between freedom, wisdom, and technology, centered on ⿻ Plurality—a philosophy that promotes collaborative diversity. Drawing on experiences from Taiwan and beyond, we’ll examine how decentralized governance can scale to bridge divides, empower autonomy, and co-create innovative solutions for the challenges of the 21st century.

Why and How to Run a Node! (No ETH Required)

The foundation of Ethereum is a resilient and decentralized network of nodes. You’ll learn how nodes defend the network, the easiest ways to run a node, about the upcoming upgrades to Ethereum which make it easier to run a node, and more.

Account Abstraction Panel

Account Abstraction: Experts agree, if we don't have Account Abstraction, then Ethereum is at stake! Your private key wallet will soon be a thing of the past. Account Abstraction promises to put programmability into every Ethereum wallet, and unlock new frontiers for both developers and users. How will Ethereum be different, when every wallet upgrades to a smart wallet? What will it take to get there? What commercial use-cases emerge? What other parts of Ethereum does AA touch?

Ethereum in 25 Minutes

Ethereum Foundation Chief Scientist, Vitalik Buterin, describes Ethereum.

MEV for the Next Billion: It's Time to Get Serious...

We will take a birds-eye view of research, industry, and L1 developments on MEV. We start with the reasons behind the origins of MEV, a years-old warnings to developers. We revisit these against an explosion of research and industry interest in MEV. We cover the big picture of why these topics, including PBS, MEV auctions, MEV ethics, "fair ordering", cryptography, etc. are key to the decentralization and UX of L1. We will attempt to provide a roadmap to avoid the centralizing effects of MEV.

Dai Stablecoin

The process of developing the Dai Stablecoin System has matured significantly over the course of the last year. We innovated in the Ethereum community by being the first project to release a well-defined reference implementation, written in Haskell, for our proposed system. This effort has helped with the simplification of the system’s design, increased project efficiency, and has attracted the attention of formal verificiation specialists who now want to focus on Maker. It is becoming more and more likely that Maker will be the first non-trivial decentralized application to be formally verified before launch. In this proposed presentation, I would like to talk about the usefulness of rigorous specification and external reference implementations for the benefit of other Ethereum projects.

Cryptoeconomics In 30 Minutes

Vitalik gives a quick overview behind Cryptoeconomics.