Archive

A Better Mental Model for Rollups, Plasma, and Validating Bridges

Sidechains, Plasma, Rollups, Valdiums, AnyTrust, PoS chains, Crypto Exchanges, all have one thing in common: the bridge. This talk provides an overview on the trust assumptions, threat model, security goals and solutions associated with the humble bridge smart contract. As we will see, rollups emerged because of the scalability bottlenecks faced by Ethereum, but the product-market fit is solving the operational security issues for bridging funds from Ethereum to an off-chain system.

1 Human 1 Vote Money Legos 🔜 More Democratic DAOs 🧱🤝✨

Right now, the DAO ecosystem is built around one-token-one-vote or one-cpu-one-vote schemes. With strong sybil resistence, the ecosystem could move to DAOs built on one-human-one-vote. This unlocks more democratic use cases like: - quadratic funding - quadratic voting - Gini coefficient measurements - UBI - one-person-one-vote DAOs - data collectives - sybil resistant airdrops + more Learn about the current landscape of sybil resistance techniques in web3.

A Mechanism for Pricing Non-fungible Resources: Toward Multi-dimensional Fee Markets

We propose a new mechanism for multi-dimensional resource pricing in blockchains. Currently, many blockchain systems operate with either fixed transaction fees or fixed relative prices of different resources (e.g., compute, memory, storage). Our proposed mechanism prices resources independently and automatically in a way that maximizes some utility set by the protocol designer.

A More Regenerative, Interactive Commons

"The concept of the commons is not that of a resource; a commons comes from a different way of being in the world where it is not production which counts, but bodily use... established by custom." At KERNEL, we've spent 2 years establishing customs which embody regenerative ways of living, both internally and in web3 projects. We'd welcome sharing KERNEL customs in an interactive workshop, where we get to know each other & our commons through 4 words: trust, value, freedom, and giving.

A SNARKs Tale: A Story of Building SNARK Solutions on Mainnet

We tell the story of deploying a real-world solution using SNARKs as a core primitive; highlighting many cutting edge SNARKs and their limitations in the hope to identify opportunities for the community to make Ethereum more SNARK friendly, creating a diverse ecosystem where SNARKs built upon a variety of unique primitives can thrive.

A Playbook for Product Development in DeFi

I’ll cover frameworks and useful tools to help emerging DeFi product development teams: 1. understand how to set product strategy and establish protocol + user-level goals 2. build an MVP 3. conduct 'what if' analyses – using simulation-based modeling to optimize incentives 4. use a data-driven approach to understand product market fit – tracking the right on/off-chain metrics to identify growth levers 5. understand common web3 nuances that can impact UX

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?

Account Abstraction on StarkNet

An overview of how native account abstraction looks on StarkNet.

A ZoKrates Update

zkSNARKs are becoming a cornerstone of decentralised technologies. Yet they are often considered impenetrable to newcomers. We will present an update on the ZoKrates toolbox, a set of tools aimed at making developing zkSNARK applications easier using a high-level language instead of handcrafted circuits.

Adoption Day

Open-source design unconference and working groups helping to drive improved User Experience and usability standards forward for the decentralized eco-system. Enable cross pollination of fresh perspectives and emerging UX methodologies. Bringing together developers and designers in the ecosystem working at the various layers of the Web3 Tech Stack to share their unique solutions and encourage interoperability amongst various systems.

Advanced Seaport Techniques

Seaport is a marketplace protocol for buying and selling NFTs. While it powers OpenSea in a horizontal capacity, Seaport is open source and allows marketplaces to share a pool of liquidity – enabling project-specific, bespoke vertical marketplaces. Since launch, it’s helped spur innovation across emerging NFT verticals, including ENS names, in-game purchases, etc. This workshop will explore advanced techniques and use cases for the Seaport protocol.

A Visual Overview of Blockchain Development

“The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. Depending on the license terms, others may then download, modify, and publish their version (fork) back to the community.”Yet the ‘open source way’ doesn’t always abide by the rules and many developers just don’t care enough to choose the right license. Arguably, the more than 80 license types scare developers away. This talk will show us the current state of licenses out in the wild west of open source Ethereum communities- for that, we’ll look at charts, diagrams and maybe even maps- and help you choose an appropriate one when starting a new project.

Accountable Watching Services (PISA)

At Devcon IV, we presented PISA, a solution to help alleviate the online requirements for state channels. Thanks to an Ethereum Foundation grant, the team has taken the idea of an 'accountable watching service' further to help alleviate the online requirement for other off-chain protocols such as Plasma and in general most smart contracts. What do we mean that PISA is usable by most smart contracts? Ideally, if we consider a smart contract where the user has to be online and watching for an on-chain event, then PISA can be hired to protect them (and perform the final step). Our goal is to help improve the UX for most smart contracts as users can simply go off-line and PISA can finish the task in a financially accountable manner. In this talk, we'll discuss the substantial changes to PISA such that it can be generically used for most smart contracts. We'll discuss the implementation of PISA, the open-source project, and how other projects can use our simple API to sign up to the accountable watching service.

AKASHA Reloaded: Unifying the Ecosystem with ethereum.world

AKASHA Reloaded introduces the idea of a social media framework. It might help to imagine it as a sort of "Wordpress for social networks." What if we would use this framework to build a social network designed to enhance the collective intelligence and collaboration potential of the Ethereum community as a whole? What if we would use this opportunity to integrate the Ethereum ecosystem of dapps and services into a unified user experience accessible to anyone - from meetup organizers to smart contract developers to researchers and beyond? Moreover, how would this play in the bigger picture where any other social network built with the AKASHA framework will have at their fingertips the equivalent of "Wordpress plugins" but in this case in the form of Ethereum services and dapps? We're almost done with the foundational work at the "framework level" and we plan to start in the next couple of months working on ethereum.world to showcase the potential of a modular, interoperable, open-source, social network powered by Ethereum and complementary technologies like IPFS, Verifiable Claims and DIDs. In the past I tried to encourage more collaboration within Ethereum but I think it was too early: https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/20/ethereum-builders-experiment/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/04/06/ethereum-builders-supercharging-github/What about now?

An Examination of Quadratic Voting

Quadratic Voting advocate Masahiro Yasu (CEO of ALIS Co., Ltd.), who, upon request by RadicalexChange co-writer, Glen Weyl, founded the Japanese division of Radical Markets,  and Sota Ishii (CTO of ALIS Co., Ltd.) implemented and tested multiple Democratic Voting Mechanisms such as Majority Judgement and Quadratic Voting using his own Web3 community. The Economics Design involved in these experiments was supervised by Mechanism Design scholar and Professor of Economics at Keiou University, Professor Sakai. In this talk we will go over the findings done in these experiments that were based on economic theories, on an advancing Web3.

An Anthropological Perspective on Ethereum

This talk offers insights on the Ethereum community from an anthropological perspective. Technology and society mutually constitute one another. Despite popular claims that depict blockchain as a “neutral technology”, it is important to critically examine how blockchain expresses itself in different social, economic and political contexts. The famous media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, once stated that technologies are extensions of the human; this means that blockchain as a technology, reflects our values, beliefs, and biases. It is thus important to critically reflect on the kinds of narratives and values we prescribe to blockchain and how in turn, actors within the blockchain community and beyond are influenced by them. Topics in this talk range from exploring the relationship between Ethereum protocol design and ideologies, the dangers of techno-utopianism, techno-colonial solutionism, and general recommendations for how Ethereum builders can adopt more socially-minded frameworks in their work to create a more ethical and accessible Ethereum ecosystem.

An Examination of the Evolution of Staking and Validators

Ethereum 2.0 Phase Zero is rapidly approaching. Extensive research has been conducted on Proof-of-Stake, along with multiple tests and debates to discuss the economics of how this transition will play out. However, there are a few real world data points worth observing in order to understand how Ethereum 2.0 staking and validator markets will play out. stake.fish has been in operations for a year supporting projects like Cosmos, Tezos, and Loom Network. We would love to share how these staking projects evolved along with the stakeholders around them. We can't wait for Devcon 5 and for Ethereum 2.0 :)

An EVM-based formal Rules Language

Smart contracts are immutable programs on the blockchain. They are automatically executed based on pre-defined rules. However, complex and inferencing rules could be extremely difficult to program, test, and validate, using standard programming languages like Solidity. The long sequences of highly nested and intersecting IF / THEN statements are fragile and error-prone. The problem is compounded by the need to frequently change rules based on business requirements. Enterprise software developers have long relied on Business Rules Engines (BREs) to solve this problem. BREs allow business analysts to write transactional (state changing) programs in a specialized programming language called formal rules language, which can be generated by graphical user interfaces. BREs automatically evaluate, re-evaluate, and execute those rules. They have been proven successful in traditional financial services. The Open Source Lity project developed extensions to Solidity so that the EVM could support BRE for smart contracts. In this presentation, I will discuss the benefits and use cases of rules language and engine for smart contracts especially in the context of financial services and e-commerce applications. I will further describe how the rules language extension for Solidity, modeled after Drools,  is designed and implemented, including compiler and runtime support.

An introduction to privacy and anonymous communication: A hands-on workshop

This workshop will go over the basics of privacy, starting with anonymity and unlinkability. We'll show that privacy is a 'holistic' systems-level concept, and not just an application of zkSNARKs on-chain. Various types of privacy notions (unlinkability, undetectability), and threat models, will be explored, as well as the various levels where privacy leaks happen (layer 0 on the network level, layer 1 on the chain, and layer 2 application issues). The workshop will then invite coders to describe their own privacy problems, and we'll offer advise and hands-on work through with systems like mix-networks (Loopix), anonymous credentials (Nym), and other systems.

Analyzing decentralized exchange liquidity with DexIndex

DexIndex is a free, open source library for developers working with Ethereum decentralized exchange data.  It launched in February of 2019 and has seen spectacular growth since then, with almost half of all new commits coming from outside contributors!  In this lightning talk, we'll go over what DexIndex is and how you can use it your applications and APIs with just a few lines of code. https://medium.com/fluidity/introducing-dexindex-93dc0bac77d0

Analyzing The Security Of Casper

From the beginning of this year, we have been working on the security analysis of Casper FFG/CBC, resulting in findings of attacks and formal proofs of properties. In this talk, I'll share a few tips towards the secure development of cryptoeconomic protocols, as well as our research on Casper.

Architecting a Decentralized GitHub Backup

When it comes to building dApps, there is a key part of the process that remains very centralized. The tools we use for version control, like GitHub, are centralized, leaving dApp builders and communities at the mercy of providers and prone to censorship. By building a decentralized backup of GitHub in case of censorship, downtime, or other sudden loss of source code access, dApps can better decentralize access to their codebase. This presentation will outline the architecture behind a decentralized GitHub alternative and demo the proof of concept.

Understanding the Ethereum Blockchain Protocol

Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin presents on the intricacies of the Ethereum Blockchain Protocol.

Ethereum in 25 Minutes

Ethereum Foundation Chief Scientist, Vitalik Buterin, describes Ethereum.

Solidity for Dummies

We will explore the basics of the Solidity contract language using examples.

Zcash + Ethereum = ❤

This presentation focuses on how Zcash uses zero-knowledge proofs to add private transactions to a public blockchain, and how Zcash and Ethereum will grow together. Zcash is a new cryptocurrency that provides private transactions — the sender’s and receiver’s addresses are not publicly visible in the blockchain, nor is the amount transferred. Zcash posts that private information to the blockchain in encrypted form, and uses zero-knowledge proofs to cryptographically guarantee the validity of transactions without exposing the private information. This results in “Selective Transparency”. It’s not all-dark-all-the-time — it’s that each encrypted transaction in the blockchain can be revealed by its creator to selected third parties. Zcash is developed by a VC-funded, highly skilled development team and a widespread and active open source community. There are three paths forward for integrating Ethereum’s programmability with Zcash’s privacy. The Zcash team is actively contributing to all three paths. 1. Programmable Zcash — add Ethereum-style programmability to the Zcash blockchain 2. Private Ethereum — add Zcash-style privacy to the Ethereum blockchain 3. Project Alchemy — interoperation between the Ethereum and Zcash

A Modest Proposal for Ethereum 2.0

Vitalik Buterin gives his talk titled, "A Modest Proposal for Ethereum 2.0"

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.

The Energy Blockchain in 20 Minutes

An overview of the energy blockchain landscape detailing the tech that is being built to accommodate energy data oracles + real world device interactions. What have we learned from using this technology on mission critical infrastructure where lives can be lost if decimals are out of place? Transmission lines can be blown and millions of $ in expenses for what would be an accounting error in financial applications? And most importantly, we will go over the grand vision of every energy consumption + production node on a network being a smart agent enabling next-day prediction of by-minute energy consumption so we can generate exactly 100% of our needs, no more.

Cryptoeconomics In 30 Minutes

Vitalik gives a quick overview behind Cryptoeconomics.