Devcon5 seen through the eyes of a Cosmonaut…
The Devcon is something incredible… it is a technology Burning man, where, for 4 days, all the Ethereum enthusiasts of the world meet, discuss, argue, swear, hug and above all present. The devcon is mainly presentations, many presentations, with huge range of topics.
This Post is my own personal account of what happened in the four days when the world of crypto stopped in Osaka, Japan, to reflect upon themselves and others, to reflect on the past and the future.
The long way to Osaka
It’s been 4 years since I joined my first Devcon in Shanghai, where I met Vitalik, Leonardo and Roy, and joined the most inclusive blockchain community in the world: Ethereum.
The fact that a few years ago I started to use Cosmos to develop my project Commercio.network does not mean that I lost faith in Ethereum. As a pragmatist, I believe that every blockchain, must have its own purpose and use the best technology available to achieve that purpose. For this reason I became a Cosmonaut, but I have never stopped and will never stop being an Etherian.
This year, as always, has been given a lot of space to different and complementary topics and technologies to Ethereum. My favourite panel was in fact the one on the interoperability of blockchain communities. The panel included Vitalik Buterin from Ethereum, Josh Swihart from Z-Cash, Jae Kwon from Cosmos and Terry Culver from Ethereum Classic. It was interesting to hear them discuss what unites them and what divides them. Above all to hear them agree that all projects MUST coexist, because Blockchain is not a zero-sum game. By letting the respective communities talk you can build a great 3.0 Ecosystem of specialized blockchains, all connected to each other, (perhaps using IBC) where the assets can move from one blockchain to another … what a beauty!
Vitalik talking about the most important values of the individual community, said that for Ethereum is anti-maximalism. I remember that in 2013 Vitalik abandoned Bitcoin and founded Ethereum, because any other project was considered SCAM by Bitcoin maximalists. (JZ Am I wrong?)
This must remind us of what we at Ethereum are not: Maximalists.
Devcon has opened its doors to many other projects because, the TRUE community of Ethereum is OPEN, it is not closed to other ideas. The personal best moment of all Devcon5 was when after two days of animated discussion with a dear friend of mine, he downloaded the paper of Tendermint’s Proof Of Stake and promised me that he would read it on the plane… This is the real Ethereum community: Open to ideas, open to the future. (Thanks Mirko!)
FIRST DAY
The most important panel of the day was the discussion on Ethereum’s most controversial topic: The roadmap, while the most interesting talk was Uniswap.
The Ethereum Roadmap.
My old joke about Ethereum 2.0 is that the number 2 corresponds to the years in which starting from each Devcon it will be developed.
That’s a joke… but actually it’s been 4 years since I hear that it will take 2 years… Also this year the Top Etherians sat in a circle and started passing each other the microphone describing the future.
The topics discussed were:
State Rent was suspended: the idea that developers have to pay a fee for the storage of Dapps was postponed. My hero Alexey Akhunov is developing a Stateless client to reduce the impact.
Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0: they will live in parallel, it will be possible to move ETH from one chain to another, most likely 1.0 will be a 2.0 shard.
Archive Node: It seems there will be a Mega-Pruning and clients will no longer have to keep the whole chain history, so maybe there will be more nodes.
ProgPow: must be discussed (not attacking people on Twitter) because attacking only leads to pushing people out of the community.
Uniswap and Plasma to create a scalable DEX
Uniswap and Plasma Group released a demo of a decentralized exchange (DEX) Layer 2 that showed us a vision of the future of a more scalable decentralized finance (DEFI) on Ethereum.
The demo, made on Ropsten testnet , now already is able to reach about 250 transactions per second, AT ZERO COST! and Hayden Adams said that a optimized version, would be able to reach about 2000 TPS. WOW!
The demo allows users to play with fake tokens to buy PIG or UNI, I suggest you try it… Very interesting!
SECOND DAY
The most interesting Talks of the day was first the announcement on the world’s most controversial cryptospace topic : Libra , while the second MakerDAO .
OpenLibra will be a Fork of Libra
Libra, the most controversial Facebook crypto currency will be forked in OpenLibra, an unauthorized version of ZuckChain , This is what Lucas Geiger of Wireline announced.
Behind this project is a group of developers and researchers from Ethereum and Cosmos (who simply funded the initiative through its ICF Foundation). This does not mean that OpenLibra is a project supported by Cosmos or Ethereum, but that simply, a group of independent people want to explore an alternative OPEN to everyone and not run by the (less and less crowded) group of companies. OpenLibra will be based on Libra’s native Move language and will use Libra’s stable coin, but it will have open governance and will be more economically decentralised.
MakerDAO announces launch date of Multi-Collateral Dai
The second most interesting talk was made by MakerDAO CEO Rune Christensen, who said that the multi-collateralized Dai will start on November 18, 2019.
I remember that MakerDAO was already talking about DAI based on multiple crypto currencies (in addition to ETH) since 2015. All the people interested in the world of #DEFI knew that the moment was near. Now, finally, there is a date for the launch.
Having a multi-collateral is crucial, because it increases the liquidity of the stable coin DAI and thus increases the scope of the DEcentralized FInance on Ethereum . Diversified collateral should also make DAI more stable and has the potential to increase the number of use cases for guaranteed loans, especially if Token holders decide to include as collateral TOKENs linked to real estate and equity assets, but I’ll stop here… because I recognize that this is a VERY controversial topic.
THIRD AND FOURTH DAY
The last two days (actually a day and a half, because the fourth day ended in the early afternoon), there were no major News to report.
Cosmos (Love) ETH
I have listen to various talks from Cosmos team to understand how best to explain the basics of Cosmos technology to Ethereum developers.
Here’s the list:
Interblockchain Communication & Interchain Topology di Chris Goes
Conservative Approach to a Radical Roadmap di Sunny Aggarwal
Batched Bonding Curves: Grieving DEX Frontrunners di Billy Rennekamp
Vulnerability Coordination and Incident Response in a Decentralized World di Jessy Irvin
I attended on Thursday afternoon the event organized by The Cosmos Guardian, and in the evening the fantastic Cosmos Party, where I could hug again Jae, Shelley, Brent, Chango, Sunny, Chris and Billy who are part of the dream team of Cosmos.
The last day was really special because after so many years of participation in Devcon, where I learned so much, for the first time I was able to give something back to the community. My speech was about “Doing Business With the Blockchain” which is also the title of my new book.
I tried to convince the Ethereum developers to:
BUIDL WHAT PEOPLE WANT
In essence, build something that solves a real problem, and not create solutions in search of problems. I suggested that the Enterprise world is not the absolute evil. Making a corporate project does not mean making a pact with the devil, because companies have millions of customers and if someone makes a project that solves a real business problem, the reward is millions and millions of users entering the blockchain ecosystem.
Did I convince them? by the enthusiasm during the presentation, the final applause and the line of 10 people who wanted my business card after the presentation … maybe yes.
So I hope I have given my two cents to the most inclusive crypto community in the world: Ethereum