Devcon 2

A Correct by Construction Asynchronous Casper Protocol

This technical talk covers the ongoing formal verification and implementation efforts behind a correct-by-construction asynchronous byzantine-fault tolerant binary version of the Casper consensus protocol that is currently under development. Work extending the correct-by-construction approach to virtual machine replication, validator rotation and public economic consensus will also be discussed.

A Deep Dive into the Colony Foundation Protocol

The Colony Foundation is a non-profit foundation responsible for developing the open source Colony smart contract network on Ethereum. We see the Colony Network as infrastructure for internet organisations and part of the remit of the foundation will be supporting the development of applications on top of the protocol. This talk will give an in-depth look in to how it works.

A Provably Honest Oracle Model: Auditable Offchain Data Gathering and Computations

Providing offchain data to Ethereum contracts is hard. The model we present enables an offchain party to act as a provably honest oracle which can give strong authenticity guarantees for both data and computations. This novel approach prevents it to tamper any data, while being able to deliver them to the blockchain. This is possible thanks to an extensive use of smart HW and SW techniques based on TLSNotary, Intel SGX and Qualcomm TrustZone among the others.

Beyond the Bubble

A presentation focusing on how we can address education and adoption challenges to expand the blockchain industry.

Building Highly Scalable, Optimized, Standardized dApp’s from UI to Contracts

Nick Dodson gives his talk on Building highly scalable, optimized, standardized dApps from UI to contracts.

Building The Light Client Ecosystem

A short explanation of the LES flow control mechanism followed by: incentives and performance with and without micropayment avoiding Sybil attacks using micropayment channels for improved performance economic model for massively scaled networks

CarbonVote A Gauge for Human Consensus

This presentation will cover an introduction to the site of carbonvote.com, including its voting mechanisms, views of community consensus, and future roadmap.

A Lap Around Developing Cryptlets

Developer tour of Cryptlet implementation, brief overview of Cryptlets, creating a Cryptlet, write Solidity to use Cryptlets and wiring it all up at runtime

Complex Dapps and Updating Them

This presentation by Joey Krug of Augur, will show how Augur has setup its contracts such that the business and storage logic are separate. Joey will go over different ways to upgrade contracts (as well as the way they’re settled on), and discuss why Augur thinks this separation of data and logic should be the pattern going forward for larger sets of contracts as it enables easier upgrade and bug fixing paths.

Dapple Dev Workflow

Learn how to explore, develop, test, integrate and maintain your dapps with the Dapple dev toolchain.

Decentralized Commercial Banking

Dominic Williams gives his talk on Decentralized commercial banking.

Designs for the L4 Contract Programming Language Based on Deontic Modal Logic

We propose the creation of a domain-specific-language (DSL) for (smart) contracts are consistent, correct, and complete. Our DSL, L4, doesn’t simply fill templates, it fulfills the Curry–Howard correspondence between computer programs and mathematical proofs, i.e., what functional languages do for the 𝜆-calculus, the DSL will do for the deontic modal μ-calculus. This means the DSL natively expresses obligations, permissions, prohibitions, and other contractual concepts in a way that computers can easily reason about. The compiler will be responsible for static analysis of the contracts and automated detection of several classes of errors, including: inconsistency, inompleteness, goal satisfaction, and policy compliance. Functional languages are well-suited for this kind of formal verification, and we developing L4 in Haskell. L4 derives from the academic literature on contract formalization, everything is opensource and we invite feature requests and contributors to define and create what will become "SQL for contracts".

Developing Scalable Decentralized Applications for Swarm & Ethereum

Blockchain-coordinated decentralized applications represent a radical departure from the client-server model on which most of the currently popular web applications are based. On one hand, such đapps’ approach to scalability is more natural as the computing power and bandwidth available for applications grows in proportion to their user base, while on the other hand the lack of a centralized trusted infrastructure under the control of a single — typically corporate — entity raises unique challenges in trust, reliability and coordination. In my presentation, I will introduce some of the principles and practices of architecting and developing such applications, highlighting both the challenges and the unique opportunities for transcending the limitations of the client-server model. In addition to developing the underlying infrastructure, the Swarm team also develops some example applications that, while useful themselves for end users, are also meant as a template and a starting point for independent developers. Using these examples as illustrations, the presentation will introduce prospective developers to techniques and approaches of both replicating Web 2.0 patterns in a decentralized fashion and going beyond their limitations, taking full advantage of content-addressed storage and blockchain-arbitrated interactions. In particular, the basic building blocks of decentralized, community-moderated knowledge bases (such as maps or encyclopediae), social networks and other forms of information aggregation are going to be presented.

DigixGlobal’s security robustness and the Stablecoin, DGX

Talk on Contract Patterns and Security.

Directions in Smart Contract Research: A Selection

Tackling the problem of writing smart contracts is difficult, and understanding them fully remains even harder. We analyze what work the academic community is doing and should be doing to advance the basic foundational science of smart contracts. We make the case for better smart contracts through a three pronged approach: tooling (including formal verification and analysis models), bug bounties, and recovery through escape hatches. We survey current related work and discuss research and engineering directions to increase the cost of future attacks, in the context of lessons learned from contracts in the field.

ENS Ethereum Domain Name System

ENS: Ethereum (Domain) Name System The talk covers three aspects of a proposed Ethereum domain name system: the technical implementation of the recursive and modular lookup protocol (https://github.com/Arachnid/EIPs/blob...), the auction aspects for domain registration and reselling (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issu...) and the possible attack vectors along with the suggestion solution and future expansion.

Ethereum Blockchain Initiatives at Thomson Reuters

Tim Nugent will discuss some of Thomson Reuters’ proof-of-concept projects including oracle services providing real-time market and reference to smart contracts.

Ethereum Enterprise

A 30 minute panel exploring Ethereum’s usage in enterprise environments.

Ethereum for Resource Limited Devices

State of the union and roadmap for mobile, wearables, SBCs and IoT running Ethereum

Ethereum in 25 Minutes

Ethereum Foundation Chief Scientist, Vitalik Buterin, describes Ethereum.

Ethereum Meets the Outdoors

This talk will introduce Sikorka. It’s a system that allows smarts contracts to be deployed out in the open air. Users can interact with smart contracts deployed around them or deploy their own. We will see how Sikorka works, some of its use cases, the work done so far and what remains to be done.

Ethereum On Ruby

A presentation exploring the Ethereum Ruby Client/Cryptape and the Ethfans community in China.

Ethereum Security Overview

Martin Swende gives an overview of Ethereum Security.

Evolving the EVM

Greg Colvin, Martin Becze, Paweł Bylica, Christian Reitwiessner, Alex Beregszaszi discuss their personal work and evolving the EVM.

Formal Verification for Solidity

Christian Reitwiessner & Yoichi Hirai speak on Formal Verification for Solidity.

Formal Verification of Smart Contracts

Yoichi Hirai gives their talk on Formal Verification of Smart Contracts.

Full Stack on Ethereum

A presentation covering the ongoing efforts at Ether.Camp, including the block explorer, online IDE and EthereumJ client.

Fully Distributed Cloud Thanks to the Ethereum Blockchain

iExec provides the SMI / SME and individuals a scalable, secure and easy access to the application, the data-sets and the computing resources they need. iExec leverages a set of research technologies that have been developed at INRIA and CNRS in the field of Desktop Grid computing (aka Volunteer Computing). The principle is to collect the computer resources underutilized on the Internet to execute very large parallel applications at the fraction of the cost of a traditional supercomputer. Since the early 2000’s we have pushed this idea to its extreme limit by proposing many software and algorithms in the area of large scale data processing, data management, parallel computing, security and dependability, QoS,… iExec relies on XtremWeb-HEP, a mature, solid, and open-source Desktop Grid software which implements all the needed features : fault-tolerance, multi-applications, multi-users, hybrid public/private infrastructure, deployment of virtual images, data management, security and accountability, interoperability with eScience infrastructure, and many more. In this talk, we’ll show how Ethereum can be used to organize decentralised infrastructures and market places, where everyone will be able to rent its computing resources (CPU, storage, GPU, …), where the innovative SMEs which design Big Data and HPC applications will be able to sell them online immediately with the needed resources to run them, and where highly valued data-sets will be rentable with a fine-grain business model. We’ll present some early results that illustrate the interaction between the Ethereum blockchain and regular distributed systems (e.g task scheduler, data management, etc..) Moreover, because the blockchain provides distributed consensus and resiliency while being fully distributed, we think that it’s going to change drastically the way we design distributed systems and applications. We’ll draw some perspectives on blockchain-based infrastructure management, and present the related research directions.

Going From Analogue to Digital wth Otonomous

The Future of Digital Assets and Exchanges on the Blockchain

How to Develop Advanced DApps Using Embark

Introducing Embark 2.0; What’s new, and how to develop & test advanced DApps

Imandra Contracts Formal Verification for Ethereum

A presentation covering Imandra Contracts, Aesthetic Integration’s cloud-based formal verification system for Ethereum.

Import Geth Ethereum from Go and beyond

Teaser presentation about using go-ethereum as a library in other projects: running embedded nodes; interfacing native DApps; Android and iOS support.

INFURA インフラ – IPFS and Blockchain Infrastructure

INFURA aims to provide ConsenSys spokes and the World, with a stable, robust, balanced, fault tolerant and easily scalable infrastructure of Ethereum and IPFS nodes.

libp2p ❤ devp2p: IPFS and Ethereum Networking

libp2p is the modular secure networking suite that powers IPFS. It defines a set of interfaces for common networking and peer-to-peer protocols. libp2p is fast, robust, and powerful. It uses multiformats for self-description, avoiding algorithm lock-in, and cryptographic agility. libp2p handles Authentication, Transports, Stream Multiplexing, Peer Discovery, Peer Routing, Content Routing, NAT Traversal, and Relay. The coolest thing? It also runs entirely on the browser! devp2p is the secure networking suite that powers Ethereum. It also defines a set of networking and peer-to-peer protocols. devp2p is also fast and robust. It uses RLPx for authentication, stream multiplexing, network forming, and protocol multiplexing. This talk compares libp2p and devp2p, traces their concurrent history, discusses protocol differences and similarities, and suggests important areas of future collaboration and synthesis of efforts. The aim of this talk is to launch an important collaboration between the Ethereum and IPFS communities.

Maker Ecosystem Overview

Andy from Maker speaks about Maker & Simplecoin.

Making Smart Contracts Smarter - Oyente

The contract analyzer OYENTE was built to detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts and will soon be released as open source. This presentation will give an overview of Oyente and how it can me used to make smart contracts smarter.

Making the EVM Scream

How I got the EVM interpreter from where it was to where it will be in the future.

Mango - Git Completely Decentralized

This presentation will cover an introduction to the problem, explanation of Mango itself, and how it could be further developed to provide all the convenience of GitHub in a decentralised manner.

Marmot y Goodness and Ethereum

RJ Catalano and Zach Ramsey of Eris Industries will showcase how Eris tooling can help you in your ethereum development via chain management solutions, IPFS integration, and the Eris package manager.

MetaMask Bridging Browsers to Blockchains

A presentation showing the progress of MetaMask’s efforts and a genral overview of interacting with blockchain technology through browsers.

Mist Vision and Demo UPDATED

Alex Van de Sande reviews Mist's vision and previews a demo.

Orbit: Distributed, Real Time Web3 Apps with IPFS and Ethereum

Samuli Poyhtari gives their talk on Orbit: Distributed, Real Time Web3 Apps with IPFS and Ethereum.

Parity's Innovations

Ethcore is proud to bring you Parity, a high-performance implementation of the Ethereum client written in Rust. Ethcore will talking about what makes Parity unique for DApp and blockchain developers. Get a brief overview of Parity’s performance and security aspects. You will learn about some of the advanced features, such as state-tree pruning, blockchain snapshotting and transaction tracing. We will also touch on private chain’s use of Parity and present a roadmap for the features to come.

Parity’s Launch

Ethcore will be unveiling its powerful new Parity client. With a shiny UI natively baked-in, it is packed full of unique features that will drastically improve every aspect of the Ethereum user-experience. Glimpse the never-before-seen product. You will hear about Ethcore’s vision and how it plans to contribute back to the growing Ethereum ecosystem. We will make it easier for developers and users to utilise the network and foster a new spurt of innovation in the ecosystem.

Prove It – Blockchain based KYC

Igor Lillic reviews blockchain-based KYC processes.

Regulatory Considerations for Dapp Development

Dapp development and token distribution particularly, pose unique questions for regulators and law enforcement. Ethereum Foundation Executive Director, Ming Chan, will introduce the topic of regulatory issues when creating Dapps, followed by Peter Van Valkenburgh introducing Coin Center. Peter will give a brief summary of Coin Center's advocacy work and the current legal landscape surrounding these technologies.

Smart Contract Security

After a quick overview of smart contract failures in the past, a list of important takeaways will be covered. Some coding techniques to prevent unexpected behaviour in smart contracts will be covered as well as some remarks about governance in decentralized systems.

Remix and Other Ethereum Development Tools

This presentation will explore why we’ve chosen to replace Mix by Remix. It will focus on the integration of Remix in Browser Solidity and other tool/web apps, such as Ether Scan, Mist, Metamask and potentially Dapple, Embark, Truffle, etc.

Smart Contract Security in Ethereum

Martin Swende, Vitalik Buterin, Christian Reitwiessner, Raine Revere, Philip Daian discuss Smart Contract Security.

Smart Contract Security Tips

Through the use of examples, Joseph Chow walks us through some common things to avoid when developing and deploying smart contracts.

Smart Contracts as Parametrization: Why the DLT Talk Can Make Sense

Mistaking blockchain for a distributed ledger usually leads to wrong ideas and broken designs. Other technologies should usually be used to implement an immutable ledger. Especially if there is no use for smart contracts or on-chain code, using Ethereum would usually create too much overhead. However, a different use for smart contracts seems to be emerging that may not be along the lines they are currently understood: instead of facilitating self executing agreements and payments, they can be useful for user parametrization of complex workloads. Parameters of a system can ever only be as powerful as the code they are controlling. In platform systems, users will define parameters to control part of a pre-programmed environment in ways that they need it. Parameters often power creep from static values, over macros to full blown scripts. It’s along those lines that Lua developed from a parameter definition language into a powerful script language. Smart contracts seem to leak into a role where they extend the power of digitally signed parameters to trustable scripts, which can allow e.g. for more flexible controlling of the anonymous execution of analysis code against a provided data stream with full transparency for the data provider and execution guarantee for the code provider.

Smart Contracts in Java

David Roon gives his talk on Smart Contracts in Java.

Solutions for Storing and Exchanging Data for Consortiums With Real Use Cases

Victor Lysenko gives his talk on Solutions for Storing and Exchanging Data for Consortiums With Real Use Cases.

Solidity for Dummies

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

State Channels Systemic Security Considerations and Solutions

The principal author of the Lightning Network describes how to improve state channels on Ethereum to maximize the chance of transactions being processed despite protocol constraints.

Swap, Swear and Swindle Swarm Incentivisation

Swap, Swear and Swindle. Swarm Incentivisation A robust peer-to-peer content storage and retrieval system requires a careful balance between the needs of the service providers and those of the consumers. The Swarm network is uniquely able to address these needs due to the new opportunities ethereum offers in the form of micro payments and smart-contract governed incentive schemes. In this talk we want to introduce the swarm incentive system. It is built around three pillars which we call Swap, Swear and Swindle. The Swap system accounts for bandwidth usage and compensates nodes for serving up content. The dynamics of this system suggest that popular content will automatically become more widely distributed and faster to access. Micropayments are handled by a custom chequebook smart contract and we are actively looking to integrate full payment channels as well. The Swear contracts deal with long term storage, allowing nodes to sell access to their storage capacity while allowing others to reliably store their content on swarm for extended periods of time. Finally, the Swindle contracts constitute a litigation engine to resolve disputes. The properties of Swindle make it a natural candidate to be a state-channel judge contract and we will present our research into off-chain state-channels for proofs-of-custody, recurring payments as well as litigation and conflict resolution. Swarm thus touches upon multiple strands of research currently happening in and around the ethereum ecosystem and unifies them in a coherent narrative that we hope to convey in this talk.

Testing Ethereum Consensus

Ethereum tests overview and integration instructions for client developers.

The Browser-Solidity IDE

Christian Reitwiessner gives his talk on the Browser-Solidity IDE.

The Future of Digital Infrastructure

Matthew Spoke gives his talk on the Future of Digital Infrastructure

The Golem Project: Ethereum-based market for computing power

This presentation will cover the most important features of Golem, including the use of Ethereum as a trading platform. It will also describe how Golem’s technology will create an open market for computing power and how that will distort the way the Internet is organised. Finally, it will describe the way ahead of Golem, including our plans for further development.

The Mauve Revolution

Proof of stake and sharding present two of the biggest upcoming milestones in the ongoing development of the Ethereum protocol. Proof of stake offers the promise to greatly reduce the cost of consensus and increase security guarantees, while sharding presents an approach to allow on-chain scaling to tens of thousands of transactions per second while still retaining a network that can, if needed, run on nothing but a sufficiently large set of consumer laptops. The Casper approach to proof of stake also introduces a number of novel concepts, including consensus-by-bet and fork choice by value-at-loss.

The new Web3.js

Fabian Vogelsteller gives their talk on the new Web3.js

The Decentralized Colllaborative Web

Since the early days of Ethereum and the blockchain 2.0 movement there has been extensive research regarding the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) concept. Nevertheless, and despite TheDAO experiment, a complete understanding of what exactly a DAO is and how its ticks is still lacking. In this talk I’d like to briefly sketch a comprehensive DAO protocol, enabling decentralised reputation-based collaboration, decision making and value distribution. A scalable implementation of the protocol on the Ethereum blockchain is made possible by introducing a novel software architecture composed of a simple smart contract on the chain, and an off-chain component responsible for the majority of the interactions with the protocol.

The Raiden Network

Lefteris Karapetsas gives his talk on the Raiden Network.

Truebit - Trying to Fool a Blockchain

How to use interactive verification for offloading computations, providing help in scaling and giving a proper incentivisation scheme for doing computationally-intensive work.

Truffle Development Ecosystem and Future of Ethereum Development Tools

Truffle Development Ecosystem and Future of Ethereum Development Tools A presentation on the Truffle development ecosystem which encompasses a number of different tools including the Truffle development framework. There will be a demo of new features as well as talk about future plan, keeping an eye toward writing code that benefits the whole Ethereum community and not just Truffle users, focusing on development processes, blockchain simulations, testing, using live chain data for testing and development, and on-chain package management.

uPort – Usable key management & identity

uPort is an Ethereum-based identity system that aims among other things to provide a smooth end-user experience for interacting with Ethereum dapps. Part of the challenge when interacting with blockchain systems is that the end user is in charge of key management, which is a major hurdle for the unsophisticated user.

Welcome & Introduction Panel

Ethereum Foundation Executive Director, Ming Chan, makes opening remarks and introduces the R&D leads.

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

New and future Features of Solidity

Update on how Solidity evolved in the recent months also showcasing features of Solidity in general and giving a roadmap for the future.