Devcon 3

0x: an open protocol for trustless, low friction exchange of ERC20 tokens

In the two years that have passed since the Ethereum blockchain’s genesis block, numerous decentralized applications (dApps) have created Ethereum smart contracts for peer-to-peer exchange. Rapid iteration and a lack of best practices have left the blockchain scattered with proprietary and application-specific implementations. As a result, end users are exposed to numerous smart contracts of varying quality and security, with unique configuration processes and learning curves, all of which implement the same functionality. This approach imposes unnecessary costs on the network by fragmenting end users according to the particular dApp each user happens to be using, destroying valuable network effects around liquidity. We present 0x: an open protocol and shared settlement layer for trustless, low friction exchange of ERC20 tokens.

A Modest Proposal for Ethereum 2.0

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

A Fast and Scalable Blockchain for Enterprise Users

Almost every bank and major financial institution inChina as well as across the world is eager to revamp their computing infrastructure through blockchain. What a blockchain designed for them should look like? Is it enough to replace PoW with PBFT? What else can we do to leverage the resources enterprise users have? You will find the answers in CITA.

1protocol – Virtual Ethereum Workers

1protocol is a platform that enables users with idle tokens and machines with idle computing power to collaboratively perform work for staking protocols on Ethereum such as Casper. Using 1protocol, users can trustlessly earn interest on their token holdings and machines can perform work for staking protocols without putting up stake.

A Standardized Business Model for Decentralized Insurance

We at Etherisc are building the first decentralized insurance on the blockchain. Decentralized means that we are not building a company only, but a standardized protocol and a platform on which many participants can build insurance products and trade risks.

AION: Connecting Blockchains over a Common Fabric

Mainstream adoption of blockchain technology in the enterprise ecosystem has been impeded due to inherent limitations of scaling individual blockchain networks. We are introducing AION – a multi-tiered blockchain system designed to address some of these core challenges. Core to our hypothesis is the idea that many blockchains will be created to solve unique business challenges, within unique industries. As such, the AION Network is designed to support many custom blockchain architectures, while providing a trustless mechanism for cross-chain interoperability. By utilizing our concept of “bridges”, this multi-tiered blockchain model will allow the creation of layers of connecting blockchain networks that are able to communicate and transact among each other.

Anatomy of an Ethereum Client

The overview of the building blocks of an Ethereum client: what any client implementation should have. A practical perspective on how Ethereum works under the hood.

Advancing Ethereum in Permissioned Networks: Integrating PBFT into Quorum

J.P. Morgan and Amis discuss Quorum’s latest consensus mechanism option. Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance (IBFT) is a native Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). This integration continues Quorum’s tradition of partnering with the community to produce innovations that bolster Ethereum.

Bringing the Non Crypto World onto Ethereum Through Social Impact

Alice is a decentralised social impact network built on Ethereum. It incentivises social organisations to run their projects transparently, so that funders can identify and scale those that are truly effective. We will share our experience (and the challenges) of getting our first application – a hyper transparent donation platform aimed at a mass/non-crypto audience – into production. We’ll also present the work we’re doing with large financial institutions and charities, and the future of the Alice network.

AKASHA: Unveiling The Next Experiment

Following the successful AKASHA alpha release, we started working in parallel on a complete code refactoring and an information architecture overhaul. In this presentation we will cover the lessons learned during the alpha, the progress made so far with the beta and our first token proposal designed to kickstart AKASHA’s crypto economic olympics.

Babbage: A mechanical smart contract language

In textual programming languages it is often almost impossible to see how different parts interact and fit together. Babbage is a visual programming language that consists of simple mechanical parts that aims to be understandable even by untrained people. Since interacting components have to be physically close, modularity is already guaranteed by design. The goal of Babbage is not to make it easy to create smart contracts, but to make it possible to create smart contracts whose functionality is easy to explain and understand.

Casper and Consensus

Emin Gün Sirer, Peter Czaban, Vitalik Buterin, Vlad Zamfir, and Elaine Shi discuss "Casper & Consensus"

Building an Ethereum assisted Decentralized Data Marketplace Breakout

Data has become a valuable digital currency in its own right over the past decade, but despite its utility, it remains consolidated at the hands of a few large organizations. We propose a new protocol layer for creating an open-access data marketplace. The protocol is decentralized, and allows anyone to publish data in the system in return for incentives. We will discuss the hybrid architecture of the protocol, combining Ethereum smart-contracts for managing data access and subscription, alongside an off-chain network for storing and transmitting the data. Finally, we will introduce Catalyst – the first application to make use of a decentralized marketplace of crypto-data.

Casper the Friendly GHOST: A correct-by-construction blockchain

Vlad Zamfir presents their talk titled, "Casper the Friendly GHOST: A correct-by-construction blockchain"

Blockchain for Humanitarian Assistance

In the past few years the humanitarian community has been increasingly adopting Cash-Based Transfers as the means to provide assistance to beneficiaries. With CBT instead of, for example, receiving in-kind food, beneficiaries receive the means to purchase their own food in the form of pre-paid bank cards, mobile money, vouchers, and bank notes. In order to enable CBT, organizations rely on financial service intermediaries that bring with them costs, risks, reduced beneficiary privacy, accountability concerns, and delays. WFP is piloting an Ethereum based blockchain project called ‘Building Blocks’ to address these issues and reduce duplication and fragmentation in the system by fostering interagency collaboration around a neutral blockchain platform.

Building a decentralized sharing economy on top of Ethereum

I will describe the technical architecture of the universal sharing network (USN) and will discuss some implementation details.

Cryptography on the Blockchain

I have a LocalCrypto.sol library (i.e. all in solidity) that supports El Gamal Encryption, One out of Two ZKP (i.e. either yes or no is encrypted), Pederson Commitments, Inequality proof (i.e. two commitments DO NOT commit to the same data), Equality proofs (i.e. two commitments DO commit to the same data), Discrete log equality proofs, and publicly verifiable secret sharing. I’m currently organising the code for public release (let others experiment with cryptography on the blockchain) – i’d like to present the library, its capability, some projects I have used it in and how people can start using it today.

Dapp Development using Remix, Mist, and Geth

Yann Levreau and Rob Stupay give their talk titled, "Dapp Development using Remix, Mist, and Geth"

Challenges Ahead for Smart Contracts

Ethereum has unleashed the power of smart contracts by creating a massively distributed, resilient, and replicated computing platform. In this talk, I will discuss the three challenges I see ahead for Ethereum, go over known techniques for addressing them, and will identify the future work that needs to be done because of the unique challenges faced by the Ethereum platform. First, we’ll talk about scale, touch upon known techniques for scaling on- and off-chain. Next, we’ll talk about program verification, what it can do, and why it is not the panacea that many people make out to be. In particular, I’ll talk about the kinds of smart contract properties that we know how to ascertain, versus the kinds of smart contract properties that we would ideally like to verify, and discuss the gap between the two. Finally, I’ll talk about the next frontier involving private data and private computation on a public blockchain, a combination thought to be impossible by some, and describe how we can achieve it with the help of secure hardware.

DappHub

Since its formation, DappHub has focused its attention on making blockchain development an ergonomic and efficient experience. We built our reputation on this topic by first creating a popular Ethereum development tool called Dapple. In the last year, our research has begun to produce significant results. This talk will be about the different tools that DappHub has created to add usability to the Ethereum blockchain.

Building Consumer Facing Interfaces for Trust in Supply Chains

Provenance is building a platform to make consumer product supply chains more transparent. Taking advantage of Ethereum and IPFS, we’ve been iterating through a number of pilots in different industries, from organic bacon to fair-trade coconuts to enable a simple shared and trusted way to share the proven claims behind our products e.g. organic or proof of payment of fair wages, and link that to the flow of batches of product. Throughout this journey, we have learnt a lot about industry needs, working with both small and large retailers and brands. We’ve also forged partnerships with sustainability standards e.g Soil Association organic and other data systems that we can connect to enable verification of claims and inputs for our Ethereum based app e.g. Sourcemap. User centred design is core to the work at Provenance – exploring how we can make blockchain backed data appear differently on the frontend and provide accessible links to inspect the chain. As a social enterprise largely built through grant funding and with the support of academia we are keen to share our learnings with the developer community and gauge interest in forming a group around the development of blockchain backed interfaces for trusted data sets.

Designing IoT Frameworks Using Ethereum

Shuang Liang & John Gerryts give their talk titled, "Designing IoT Frameworks Using Ethereum"

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.

Decentralised Autonomous Organization: Integral Platform for Climate Initiatives

DAO IPCI is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization operating, sustaining and developing the Integral Platform for Climate Initiatives, smart contracts and blockchain technology-based independent ecosystem designed for carbon market instruments, including carbon compliance units’, carbon-offset credits, other environmental mitigations credits, environmental assets, rights and liabilities registration, accounting and transaction data.

Data is the Missing Link

Thomson Reuters distributes 2.5m financial instrument price updates per second; data that is used to price over $3tn in assets each day. Blockchains rely on trusted sources of data and trusted mechanisms for data delivery, without which many of the use cases for smart contracts cannot be realized. This presentation will cover a range of active use cases that include Thomson Reuters data on people, organizations and tradable instruments being applied within financial services as well as other industries such as commodities and energy. It will introduce the complexities of having data as part of your value proposition, and look at current and future approaches for data commercialization on blockchains and DLTs. All of these key learnings have been developed through the use of the Thomson Reuters oracle, BlockOne IQ, that was designed specifically for Ethereum.

Deep Dive into WALLETH – the Ethereum Android Wallet

Devices that run Android are now often one (if not even the only) computer for a lot of users to access many services currently. So to bring Ethereum to the masses and replace current services we need good clients for this platform. WALLETH aims to fill some of this gap. After looking at the surface of in the short talk earlier at the conference: this talk I will dive deeper into WALLETH. Instead of looking from the users side we will look behind the curtains into technical details and development aspects of the project. And I also intend on seeding some ideas in this session – there is so much more possible with this growing codebase and other targets that could be deployed to like Android Things or Chrome-OS.

Developers, Developers, Developers – Ethereum for all your networks!

Péter Szilágyi gives their talk titled, "Developers, Developers, Developers – Ethereum for all your networks!"

Enter the Hydra – An Experimental Approach to Smart Contract Security

In this talk, we will demonstrate a new approach to secure smart contract development that we believe has the potential to remove a large class of implementation bugs that has plagued the ecosystem. We will discuss connections to other topics in secure smart contract development and announce an effort to build the most secure Ethereum contract ever launched on the mainnet! Philip Daian is a Computer Science graduate student pursuing a PhD at Cornell University. He specializes in smart contracts and smart contract security, as well as the confidentiality properties of distributed ledger technology. He brings experience in the formal verification and automotive domains. Before coming to Cornell, he worked with runtime verification and formal methods, first collaborating with the FSL on several projects as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later moving to the private sector. He looks forward to building the next generation of efficient and open financial cryptosystems.

Development Frameworks

Andy Milenius, Conor Svensson, Yann Levreau, Jack Peterson, Piper Merriam, Nick Dodson, & Iuri Matias discuss Development Frameworks.

ERC Identity

Fabian Vogelsteller (author of ERC20) will be talking about his new work on standard functions for a unique identity for humans and machines.

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.

Designing Future-proof Smart Contract Systems

Exploring techniques to build more modular smart contract systems that allow for more graceful upgrades and gas savings using delegate calls.

Ethereum for Python Developers

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

Ethereum Security

Martin Swende gives their talk on Ethereum Security.

EtherDelta: Off-chain Order Book with On-chain Settlement

This presentation will cover EtherDelta’s deployment of the first working off-chain order book with on-chain settlement. Topics covered will include scaling, security, user experience, onboarding, and real world results.

Evolution of Smart Contract Security in the Ethereum Ecosystem

A lot has changed in the smart contract development ecosystem in the year since DEVCON2. Our perspective as leaders of the smart contract security community OpenZeppelin shows us that the industry is maturing. We give a brief overview of how security patterns and practices have evolved in the past months, dive into some details of recent developments, and talk about promising projects and their plans for the future.

EthJS: Precision Ethereum Javascript Architecture for dApps

EthJS is a collection of presently 16 precision JS modules made over the past year to support the dApp developers of the Ethereum community. Currently, the modules are being used in the Truffle Suite, web3.js, wafr developer tool, and uport libraries among many other projects.

Evolving the EVM

A discussion focusing on the evolution of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

EVM-C: Portable API for Ethereum Virtual Machines

Pawel Bylica gives their talk titled, "EVM-C: Portable API for Ethereum Virtual Machines"

Exploring the Ethereum Blockchain

This talk is about my experience building and using a block explorer for the Ethereum blockchain, which will provide a statistics highlight of the Ethereum blockchain and demographics of the Ethereum user base. The demographics portion will based on analytical data generated over the past years from Etherscan.io, which will assist new/existing developers on building a better user experience by first understanding who their potential target audiences are.

Ethereum Protocol Testing

Dimitry Khokhlov gives their talk titled, "Ethereum Protocol Testing"

Evolving devp2p

Felix Lange gives their talk titled, "Evolving devp2p"

Hardening Smart Contracts with Hardware Security

Trusted hardware is not your enemy – as threats against cryptocurrencies are evolving (from dumb malware sweeping private keys to smart attackers attacking the presentation layers of smart contracts), we’ll review during this presentation a short history of trusted hardware, how Open Source code can be designed today on modern trusted execution environments to provide a flexible and auditable environment to delegate the security critical parts of smart contracts, and the security compromises made when dealing with the opaque features of trusted hardware.

IC3 – Crypto Bootcamp Project Presentations

A team member or lead of winning projects from the IC3-Ethereum Crypto Bootcamp present their projects and related current or future work.

How crypto payroll can improve the plight of temporary workers

Many temporary laborers throughout the USA suffer under gouging charges for check cashing and money transmission back to their families in Latin America and elsewhere. The current process isn’t just expensive, it wastes valuable time and results in delays for families in need.

Formal Verification

Phil Daian, Everett Hildenbrandt, Yoichi Hirai, Loi Luu, & Reto Trinkler discuss Formal Verification.

How to Build a Real World Supply Chain ecosystem using the Main Ethereum Network

We are building a platform for the Italian Ministry of Agricolture to track wine supply chain on the Main Ethereum Network. The platform is integrated with existing systems of the Ministry and, on a volutary basis, wine producers can legally certificate the traceability of all production steps, in fact replacing the current national certification system. Customers can always verify the authenticity of the production history scanning an NFC tag on the bottle with a dedicated mobile app. In this speech we will explain the platform architecture details and how we managed to solve all the legal, process and integration issues that such a kind of project implies.

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.

Extending Ethereum with Enterprise Smart Contracts

A depth walkthrough of extending Smart Contract logic into a secure, scalable cloud execution environment using Cryptlets and the Cryptlet Proof Engine.

iExec: Allowing Scalable, Efficient and Virtualized Off-chain Execution for Arbitrary Applications

This presentation is a follow-up to Devcon2 and EDCON. We’ll introduce the iExec SDK that allows to execute any legacy applications from Ethereum smart contracts. Using a set of simple CLI tools, developers can register, deploy and administrate their applications in the iExec distributed Cloud. We’ll present examples that explain the solidity smart contract API and illustrate off-chain computations.

Intro to Solidity 2017 Edition

Hudson Jameson gives their talk titled, "Intro to Solidity 2017 Edition"

IDbox – Cost efficient device for self-sovereign identity

IDbox (www.idbox.io) is a cost efficient device that enables people to create a unique identity where is no internet or grid-electricity. People can then use their analog phone to access land registry, healthcare, remittance, electricity, etc.

Julia – IR for Ethereum Contracts

Brief introduction to Julia, a new intermediate language to be used in the Solidity compiler. It reduces the complexity of the compiler, helps in auditing contracts and makes supporting multiple VMs, such as EVM 1.5 and eWASM, possible.

Introducing Rholang!

A correct-by-construction concurrent smart contracting language. We give a basic introduction and show a translation of ERC 20 token contract into Rholang.

JAAK: A New Engine to Power the Web of Content

Founded by Vaughn McKenzie, Freddie Tibbles and Viktor Tron, JAAK connects songs, films, and TV shows directly to the artists, producers, writers, and organisations that create, own and distribute them.We believe a simpler framework for licensing media on the web will unlock a world of new content experiences and untapped value opportunities for the entire media industry – we call it Smart Content.

Introduction to WALLETH – the Ethereum Android Wallet

Devices that run Android are now often one (if not even the only) computer for a lot users to access many services currently. So to bring Ethereum to the masses and replace current services we need good clients for this platform. WALLETH aims to fill some of this gap. Here I will talk about the concepts behind the user-interface and general ideas behind the project. Another area that I want to shed some light on in this talk is the special security properties mobile applications on Android have. We will not have time for much more in this talk but there is also one 30min deep-dive session later in the conference.

Introducing the TrueBit Virtual Machine

This talk will focus the economic and architectural mechanics behind TrueBit, a trustless, general purpose computer which obliterates Ethereum’s gas limit. By wrapping the new TrueBit Virtual Machine (TVM) inside a novel incentive structure, smart contracts achieve secure, scalable, and affordable computation. Decentralized big data applications loom on the horizon.

KEVM: Overview and Progress Report

Since the IC3 Crypto Boot Camp, we have been extending the KEVM semantics in several directions. At the time, we only supported the VMTests from the Ethereum Test Suite, it was somewhat difficult to write properties and proofs about programs in EVM, and EVM-PRIME was a simple demonstrative toy language. This session will cover the progress so far in addressing these issues, as well as our goals and intentions for the semantics moving forward. In particular, we are focused on providing tools to ease the process of writing and proving specifications about programs written in high-level languages. Everett Hildenbrandt is a CS PhD student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying formal methods and programming languages. He is focused on improving the scalability of symbolic reasoning for applications in both distributed and physical systems. In the context of blockchain systems, he is interested in formalizing the semantics of both the underlying languages used and the consensus protocols. To this end, he recently led the KEVM project which developed an executable mathematical model of the EVM in the K Framework.

Juzix: Maneuvering Data to Flow

Juzix (formerly Juzhen Financials) is an infrastructure provider for distributed data exchange using distributed ledger technology and multi-party computation. We started out as a financial infrastructure provider in 2014 and have now expanded to other industries interested in adopting distributed data processing and collaborative computation to enable secure data exchange. Juzix currently has over 100 employees, and working with the leading institutions in China to release the first open-source platform using Ethereum that comply with local standards and regulations in China. Version 1.0 (Chinese) will be released in July, 2017, and we think this will enable more Chinese institutions and start-ups to use Ethereum.

Intro to Casper Implementation

Chang-Wu Chen gives their talk titled, "Intro to Casper Implementation"

MetaMask: Dissecting the fox

Aaron Davis and Frankie Pangilinan give their talk titled, "MetaMask: Dissecting the fox"

Methods for deterministic parallelizing message processing

Martin Becze gives their talk on methods for deterministic parallelizing message processing.

Kleros: Building a decentralized court system to arbitrate smart contracts

Smart contracts can’t take decisions requiring outside-world information and subjectivity. However they are a great tool to enforce those decisions. We explain how by drawing jurors at random and providing them proper game-theoretical incentives based on Schellingcoin principles we can design a trustless arbitration mechanism for smart contracts.

Mind the Gap: Application-driven evaluation of Smart Contract languages

How can we quantify the expressiveness of smart contract programming languages? In this talk I’ll present research conducted over the past two years that answers this question with an application driven approach. We take several well-known applications as case studies (a random coin flipping gadget, fair off-chain multiparty computations, and payment channel networks), and attempt to implement them in both Bitcoin script (UTXO-based) and in Ethereum (contract-based). In each setting, we find that the UTXO-based framework requires additional asymptotic overhead compared to Ethereum (either time, computing power, or locked-up collateral). These case studies can therefore serve as a benchmark suite for evaluating new languages as well.

Oyente: Development update

Oyente: An Analysis Tool for Smart Contracts. https://github.com/melonproject/oyente

Missing Links in the Ethereum Stack

Observations about what developer tools missing from the Ethereum stack, yet currently available to traditional web developers.

Practical Applications of Off Chain Computation in the Light Client

A not extremely technical demonstration of how a new and exciting technology can help implementing advanced light client features like trustless instant syncing, fast log searching and more.

Morphing Smart Contracts with Bamboo

An Ethereum contract language called Bamboo mitigates common mistakes. A Bamboo program textually displays all states and transitions. A program runs always one-pass without loops or functions. Runtime checks never allow reentrant execution. Erlang folks might like the syntax. OCaml people, I need you.

Mist: towards a decentralized, secure architecture

Everton Fraga will be talking about challenges and latest updates on Mist development and Victor Maia will be talking about Mist Lite, a moonshot project for a more decentralized app engine for Ethereum DApps.

Package Management for Smart Contracts

Building the Ethereum standard library. Learn what package management looks like for smart contracts and explore the potential that a rich packaging ecosystem can unlock.

Plasma Overview and Transaction Data Availability

Ethereum faces both opportunities and challenges around scaling smart contracts, a proposed method using EVM contracts and a description of what changes to Ethereum are needed for optimal performance is proposed.

Programmable Incentives: Intro to Cryptoeconomics

Karl Floersch presents their talk titled, "Programmable Incentives: Intro to Cryptoeconomics"

Protecting your Privacy within the Blockchain Ecosystem

Robertas Visinskis gives their talk titled, "Protecting your Privacy within the Blockchain Ecosystem"

Presenting Parity: A Light Client for a Heavy Chain

I will present the Parity Light Client, summarize the protocol, and provide DApp development guidelines. I will also discuss light client use-cases in the mobile and IoT space, particularly when coupled with other key web3 ecosystem components like Whisper.

Pluggable crypto for Ethereum nodes: Masterchain experience

Ethereum has a few subsystems which use cryptography in their core functionality: 1. Transaction processing system, 2. P2P node communication, 3. EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), 4. Mining. So far all these systems use only one crypto library but they use it in different ways. We have developed an extra crypto-layer, which makes crypto to work as an additional abstract layer. The extra-crypto layer is completely transparent for all ethereum logic. It allows to switch crypto-algorithms to use in Ethereum.

Regulatory Update and Look Ahead

Whether we like it or not, regulations often affect the projects we are launching and building on Ethereum. This session by Coin Center will give an update on regulatory developments over the past year that may affect Ethereum developers and will also look at what we can expect over the coming year.

Real-World Smart Contract Development Lessons

Smart contract development tips you won’t find in the Solidity docs, from low level coding patterns to high level leadership skills. Raine Revere describes the techniques of central logging, modular libraries, arbitration, role analysis, context dependence, and skilled leadership in a talk for experienced and aspiring smart contract developers alike.

Scalable Onchain Verification for Authenticated Data Feeds and Offchain Computations

Ethereum smart contracts live like in a walled garden and they cannot fetch offchain data by themselves. One approach to securely feed offchain data into smart contracts is to provide attestation-backed data authenticity proofs that anybody can verify to ensure that the data-transport-layer is safe. By leveraging some new techniques, it is possible to do an effective onchain verification: the smart contract receiving the data can easily verify its authenticity onchain at a negligible cost and with a minimum amount of data.

Random numbers on the blockchain

Random numbers on the blockchain: How to guarantee randomness between multiple parties not trusting each other I will discuss the different techniques used to get random number on the blockchain. The talk will cover the security of the methods from technical and game-theoretical point of views. The first 4 techniques will be literature review. While the “Sequential proof of work” will also cover my own research.

Scalable Secure Scuttlebutt

secure-scuttlebutt is a secure gossip protocol with efficient data replication. This talk is about how efficient that data replication is. In the blockchain world, the first goal is global consensus – secure scuttlebutt throws this out the window, and goes for eventual consistency and local consensus, and that frees us up to get really great efficiency. Fortunately there are many useful and important things you can build without global consensus (for example, social networks, and things strapped onto social networks) and these usually benefit greatly from efficiency.

Semantic Ethereum – Linking Dapps together with data

There has been a great deal of interest in using blockchain technology in order to enable the web of trust, and to realize the original vision of the Semantic Web (more commonly known to developers as “linked data” and “microdata”). Two papers to look at for this talk: Block Chain Technologies & The Semantic Web: A Framework for Symbiotic Development by Matthew English, Sören Auer, and John Domingue A more pragmatic Web 3.0: Linked Blockchain Data by Héctor E. Ugarte

Scalable Responsive Đapps with Swarm and ENS

Daniel Nagy gives their talk titled, "Scalable Responsive Đapps with Swarm and ENS"

Securify: Not Your Grandma’s Smart Contract Verification

We present Securify (www.securify.ch), the first push-button security auditing tool for Ethereum smart contracts that is fully automated, easily extensible to new security vulnerabilities, and provides strong security guarantees. The core technical idea behind Securify is to soundly extract deep semantic information from the smart contract using automated abstract reasoning. This information is then used to ensure the absence of critical security vulnerabilities, such as reentrant calls, unprivileged storage accesses, and many others. Securify precisely analyzes real-world smart contracts within seconds, and handles any language that compiles to Ethereum bytecode.

Show and Tell

Virgil Griffith gives their talk titled, "Show and Tell"

Snopes meets Mechanical Turk on a Blockchain: Reality Keys, On-chain Truth Verification and Subjectivocracy

The next-generation smart contract oracle platform by Reality Keys crowd-sources the process of data gathering and fact checking with an incentive-based system on the Ethereum blockchain. Our system is designed allow contract authors to fetch arbitrary structured or unstructured factual data, without relying on a pre-existing trusted off-chain data source.

Sikorka – Proof of Presence for Blockchain Applications

Sikorka – Proof of Presence for Blockchain Applications

Swarm City: Decentralized Peer to Peer Commerce

We will describe the technical architecture of Swarm City. Specifically how we use Whisper to communicate and initiate the payment without having to send a public key.

SmartPool: using smart contracts to eliminate middlemen in cryptocurrency mining

We provide updates on SmartPool, a decentralized mining pool using smart contracts. Typically, we present our findings after running SmartPool privately on the Ethereum mainnet with the highest hashrate of 30 GHs for a month.

Status – Ethereum at the edges of the Network

Running an Ethereum node on resource restricted device has not been without it’s challenges, in this talk Jarrad describes some of the technical limitations faced, their solutions along with plans & proposals for making Ethereum accessible.

Secure Decentralized Oracles: Applying Intel SGX and TownCrier to external data, payments and off-chain computation

We will cover the need for secure and maximally decentralized oracles for Ethereum smart contracts. The focus of the presentation will be on how allowing data providers, payment providers, and various API-based services to be accessed by Ethereum smart contracts through a decentralized oracle network can greatly expand functionality, while maintaining the key security guarantees of smart contracts. We’ll focus on how TownCrier’s approach to implementing Intel SGX enables third party oracles to be provably secure, as is already being done on production using the currently live TownCrier implementation. We’ll also look at how oracle operations and off-chain computation can be written in solidity to be run entirely in an SGX Enclave, allowing provable off-chain computation and retrieval of external resources. Smart contracts need to retain a high level of security in both the network they run on, and the inputs/outputs they rely on, we aim to show how decentralized oracle networks, TownCrier’s approach to using Intel SGX for secure external access , and off-chain computation using solidity in Intel SGX can together allow smart contracts to remain secure as they access key resources outside the Ethereum network.

Swarm Development Update

An Update on the Swarm project. Current status, upcoming changes, roadmap; introducing project PSS, the FUSE driver, the Network Testing Framework, updates on encryption and encoding. Previews for the p2p breakout session on Saturday.

The Blockchain Virus: Can a blockchain pay to replicate?

Full nodes provide many services to a cryptocurrency network: data forward, blockchain storage and retrieval, and some privacy and DoS protection. But as the resources consumed by a blockchain network grows, so is the node cost. Full nodes are usually altruistic, they take resources from their peers and they give back. But there is no immediate benefit to give back. This problem, which can lead to a tragedy of the commons, was early identified in the “Red Balloons” paper. Some solutions involve using master-nodes, leading to centralization risks. In this talk we’ll show how to create a fully decentralized system for rewarding full nodes that is fully autonomous, and controlled by a smart-contract.

The Colony Reputation Protocol: a verifiable, scalable reputation system

Colony relies on a broad reputation system to facilitate governance and decision making. The reputation system we are building is far more complex than anything that could be done in a smart contract alone. Instead the system overcomes scalability/gas cost limitations with off-chain computation of the reputation scores which are provable on-chain to the contract. In this talk we will describe how this off-chain calculation with on-chain verifiability is designed and game theoretically secured. We will also describe what kind of actions in a Colony will earn you reputation, and how reputation is used in our collective decision making process.

The Future of Token Contracts: MiniMe, Governance, LiquidPledging & ERC223

The standard vanilla ERC-20 token has been heavily used in the Ethereum ecosystem, but the innovative application of tokens has not been explored nearly enough. In this talk i will explore: – The MiniMe token and its many applications, especially in decentralized governance. – The current status in the ERC223 token standard and my opinion on the path forward. – LiquidPledging, an innovative solution for fund management.

The Data Mechanics of Saving the Planet

This talk gives a first-hand account of a joint field research project by Terra Genesis International and Streamr. We present a technical report from an Ecuadorean cocoa plantation on how to collect real-time carbon sequestration data from IoT sensors and drone soil sampling, and how to transmit it securely to Ethereum smart contracts via a decentralized peer-to-peer data transport layer. We will share the scientific underpinnings with the audience, demonstrate the potential of the project in helping reverse global warming, discuss the use of automated drone technology for sensor distribution and sample collection, and visualize the methodology for solving connectivity and data collection issues in an important real-life use case.

The Melon security approach

Melonport is striving to build a vibrant and successful developer ecosystem of Melon module builders. An important part of that ecosystem is the security and behaviour of smart contracts that make up Melon modules as well as how they interact with the Melon core and each other. In this presentation, we’ll demonstrate our ongoing technical efforts to assist Melon module developers in creating safe, secure smart contracts and touch on the importance of getting the auditing process right and how others can learn from our experience.

The EVM: Leaner, Meaner, and Closer to the Metal

Dr. Greg Colvin gives their talk titled, "The EVM: Leaner, Meaner, and Closer to the Metal"

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.

The Open Vote Network: Decentralised Internet Voting as a Smart Contract

The Open Vote Network (OV-net) is a self-tallying (and self-enforcing) e-voting protocol i.e. there are no tallying authorities – anyone can count the votes. It is also the first extensive cryptographic protocol to be implemented as a smart contract (i.e. zero knowledge proofs) that *can work* on Ethereum’s official network today. I’d like to present the protocol, the technical difficulties I faced while building it (and the gas costs before/after hardfork if feasible), and the beauty of combining both cryptographic protocols and smart contracts.

Thunderella: Blockchains with Optimistic Instant Confirmation

Elaine Shi is an Associate Professor at Cornell University. Elaine’s research creates platforms and tools that aids non-expert programmers in creating systems that are “secure by design” and “secure by default”.

The Raiden Network

Raiden is a payment channel technology for fast, cheap, scalable off- chain token transfers. Introduction for developers planning to prototype applications on top of the Raiden Network testnet as well as μRaiden.

Turn-key Smart Contracts

How do we empower Rapid Application Development on Ethereum? How do we enable mass adoption of Ethereum? And how does one build such a platform? Now is the time to abstract development away from the “elusive and mythical creature,” or the average user as defined by Alex Van de Sande. UI driven development will finally bridge the gap between Ethereum developers and the average user.

Towards a Permanent ENS Registrar

Nick Johnson gives their talk titled, "Towards a Permanent ENS Registrar"

Verifying Casper

Why you can be certain that the four slashing conditions of Casper are enough to catch forks.

USCC – The Underhanded Solidity Coding Contest

João Gabriel Carvalho, Richard Moore, Martin Swende, Nick Johnson discuss USCC – The Underhanded Solidity Coding Contest

Web3.js 1.0

Fabian Vogelsteller gives their talk titled, "Web3.js 1.0"

Trustlines Network: Open Protocol for Decentralized, IOU-based Currency Networks

The Trustlines Network targets the problem of fair access to money by implementing money as peer-to-peer issued IOUs on the Ethereum blockchain. We present the basics of the protocol, as well as the prototype of the mobile app, which aims to provide a seamless onboarding experience to the Ethereum ecosystem.

Uport – Usable Key Management for Multiple Identities Across Multiple Chains

Exploring how private keys can be securely managed for multiple identities with an intuitive mobile user interface like the uPort app. In addition, we explore the notion of how identities can communicate and transact across multiple chains with varying consensus systems.

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.

Whisper: Achieving Darkness

Vlad Gluhovsky & Guillaume Ballet give their talk titled, "Whisper: Achieving Darkness"

ZoKrates – A Toolbox for zkSNARKs on Ethereum

Scalability and confidentiality remain two important challenges in the context of the Ethereum Blockchain. zkSNARKs promise to address these challenges, but they are notoriously complex and hard to use. To help bridge the gap between theory and practice, this talk will introduce ZoKrates: a toolbox for zkSNARKs on Ethereum, making zkSNARKS easier to use. This talk elaborates on the vision, features and design of ZoKrates as well as future steps.

Using Ethereum for Secure Decentralized Optimization

We demonstrate how complicated optimization problems can be solved by combining decentralized optimization algorithms with an aggregation step in a smart contract. Using tools from convex optimization, we decompose difficult problems into a set of subproblems with can be computed off-blockchain, finally reaching consensus on the global optimum by passing message with the on-blockchain aggregation step. We present an example of applying this approach to optimizing power dispatch on an electricity grid, but the approach can also be used to solve other problems in machine learning, coordinating robotic agents, or coordinating economic systems.