Archive

A trustless Ethereum mixer using zero-knowledge signalling

Since Ethereum transactions are fully visible on-chain, it is possible to trace value transfers and surveil users' financial activity. This state of affairs deprives users of privacy beyond mere pseudonymity. Some workarounds, like using a centralised exchange wallet or a custodial mixing service, however, introduce a high degree of counterparty risk. The Ethereum ecosystem needs a noncustodial mixer which works through strong cryptography, rather than blind trust. To solve this, we present a trustless mixer for Ether and ERC20 tokens. It builds upon Semaphore, a zero-knowledge signalling system by Barry WhiteHat and Kobi Gurkan. Additionally, it employs a burn relay registry which incentivises third parties to pay gas fees on behalf of mixer users. In this presentation, I will show a high-level architectural overview of the mixer, dive into its underlying zero-knowledge circuits, and discuss other applications of zero-knowledge signalling.

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 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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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

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.

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.

Autonomous Ethereum mixers

I demonstrate how to build a profitable, self-sustaining Ethereum mixer. I use zkSNARKs as the core mixer mechanism [1], and invest the shielded money pool into a risk-free DeFi application to earn interest [2].  The mixer complies with Vitalik's interface proposal [3]. The general privacy setup is similar to ZCash: a "shielded" pool, which contains all the ETH deposited by people who desire anonymity, and "notes" that can be withdrawn without revealing any connection to the deposit transaction. Importantly, this provides K-anonymity for K → ∞, unlike ring signatures or MimbleWimble, providing K-anonymity for K < 15 (ring signature size in Monero, block size in MimbleWimble) and thus prone to several attacks [4, 5]. The pool of ETH deposited into the mixer and awaiting withdrawal is supplied into the Uniswap WETH converter (~4%/year ROI). Unfortunately, that revenue cannot be supplied to the users, since the exact amount would give away precisely when the deposit was made. On the other hand, it can be used to subsidize infrastructure and "keepers" that made the withdrawal transactions for clients – a known problem for all previous mixer designs. [1] https://github.com/barryWhiteHat/miximus [2] https://zumzoom.github.io/analytics/uniswap/roi.html ETH-WETH pair [3] https://hackmd.io/@HWeNw8hNRimMm2m2GH56Cw/rJj9hEJTN?type=view [4] https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmWYTeggKeL8xBitA8uQWAaNDWfFrUHXAxBXkvmnisdDw7 [5] https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/455.pdf

Eth 2.0; tldr

High level overview of the work that has gone into Ethereum 2.0 since last devcon, the major milestones achieved, the landscape of research, and where we're going in the next 12 months. This serves as an overview talk for the track to get devcon attendees acquainted with the space in general and ground them for the range of more technical talks throughout the conference.

Growing The Way We Support

What we're up to, what's different from last year.

Ethereum in 25 Minutes, Version MMXVII

So what are all of the different moving parts of the Ethereum blockchain? What are uncles, how do contracts call other contracts, who runs them? What is the role of proof of work and proof of stake, and what exactly is gas? What will EIP86 do for you? Vitalik Buterin provides a 25-minute technical overview of the ethereum blockchain, start to finish, and explain many of these concepts in detail.

Ethereum for Python Developers

Everything you need to know to get started with Ethereum with Python.

Flexibility in Solidity

This talk presents latest updates and upcoming features of the Solidity language. Improvements in the code generator will greatly improve maintainability in the future. Furthermore, the next iteration of formal verification tools which will soon be a built-in component that helps you write safer smart contracts.

Welcome & Team Introduction

Ethereum Foundation ED, Ming Chan introduces Ethereum team leads, who give a brief summary of the projects and efforts they work on.

Contributing to Ethereum and Open-Source

The Ethereum community is an open source community. We rely on implementations of an open protocol, open tools built to interface with these implementations, and ultimately open source dApps and contracts that live on top. Without a healthy ecosystem of open source developers, Ethereum is nothing. That said, contributing to open source can sometimes feel intimidating, and it's not always clear how to get started. Fortunately, it is actually easy in the Ethereum community! Everything is growing and changing so much. There is so much to do and to build, and there are a ton of great ways to get started. This talk will help demystify contributing to Ethereum and open-source in general.

Ethereum 2.0 randomness

Justin Drake talks about the randomness behind Ethereum 2.0 using a Verifiable Delay Function.