Ethereum Devcon - The Grand Tour

Ethereum DEFCON 4 is the place to be for developers on Ethereum. I traveled to Prague to check out what was being built and this video is an uncensored cut of what it was like to be at DEFCON 4. And the Ethereum people are welcoming everybody. To work together. Yeah, they're working together with everybody. I'm going to talk about financial inclusion and about 73% of people are excluded from the system. We are thinking about how to bring them back using blockchain. So how do you get your ticket for DEFCON? Do some contribution to Plasma Cash and Plasma MVP. So I got a grantee from Ethereum Foundation and also got tickets in here. I think it's the best event I've ever attended. Whoa! Best crypto event. Yeah, I had the ticket to go to Malta in the middle of the week and I just canceled it. That didn't work. Proof of proof of work. That didn't work. Hypercube chains. That also didn't work. That also didn't work. Vitalik everybody! Happy and clapping. Vitalik is impressed. Over the four days of DEFCON, I spoke to a lot of different people working on different projects for Ethereum. Here's a compilation of all those projects and comments that will make Vitalik proud. My name is Xu Yuan. I'm from DHBC. Hello. I'm from Sparkpool. I feel like it's like a family reunion thing because I see a lot of good friends, good old friends here and all of like genius people talking about their insights in Ethereum and how Ethereum will work and will evolve. And I feel like I learned a lot from this. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Do you think it was a... What do you think of Ethereum 2.0? You know, like we've been talking about that a lot. Serenity is being like pulled out of the woodworks. What do you think about that? So we're not allowed to call it Ethereum 2.0 anymore. You know, so I really, I'm really excited for the Serenity and you know, this, this year's conference, I think is very informative in terms of like, what's going on with the, with the ecosystem. So yeah, it's been really nice. Awesome. Okay. Now we've been talking about, you know, the move to proof of stake for a while for Ethereum. So for the mining pools, are you guys upset? Are you guys, you know, um, you know, what do you think of moving to proof of stake? I'm fine. We'll see. It's unproven and we are really looking forward to it. If it actually works. If it actually works. So you're a little bit skeptical, a little bit. Being more practical. So the myth for projects, uh, is for the social and entertainment industry. Uh, we want to do build a ecosystem to tokenize the, uh, intellectual property. And we want to reward, reward the content provided in this ecosystem with myth token. So it's all about social media, right? So you want to, right now you have the lit app and rewards, um, social mining for that. So, uh, I guess, are you actively developing for that project? Are you, you know, what are you doing there? Oh, um, my title is, uh, VPO product engineering. I do the sound plug blockchain research and blockchain development and I manage the product team. The almost 15 people, 15 engineers in there. So we keep building the tools or like a vault and do a staking to gain your social mining power. Yeah. Okay. Now that you're on Defcon, do you see Vitalik? There was a shrine for Vitalik yesterday. Did you go and worship Vitalik? Is that, is that a thing we can do? No, I didn't to meet Vitalik. Yeah. That's why you say hi Vitalik. Hey, do you want to come to the camera and say hi? This is for YouTube videos and stuff. Okay. Poor guy. Okay. That's cool. We got Vitalik. Yeah. So we're the security token platform. We essentially guide companies through security token offerings, um, by, um, through the platform where we offer, uh, partnerships with legal, KYC, marketing, and advisory services. Um, you can speak on more on that. Yeah. We have the bunch of, uh, technical part. So we have a pretty much cool DAP. So where any issuers who doesn't have the technical abilities can game around and play with the DAP. And it's a simple two step process. Um, uh, by using that, they can launch their, uh, security token. And in a third process, uh, in a third step, they can, uh, launch the STO using the DAP. Accelerate is a layer two scaling project that is, uh, building on existing blockchains, including Ethereum. That's why we're here. And, uh, uh, what we specialize is to accelerate not only just payment, uh, using off-chain solutions, but also smart contracts. So we actually recently announced the, uh, um, we just recently announced the testnet and we already launched our first application, which is a cool board game that you can, uh, you can, you can play with the like people. So like every move is broadcast on blockchain. Uh, every move is not on blockchain. That's the key part. Right. So if you, if you broadcast every move on blockchain, this game will take like two days to finish. But this is actually, you know, off-chain skating, uh, where we build this generalized state channel. And, uh, therefore the smart contract is only executing between the involved party, which is you and me. And, uh, therefore the game is extremely interactive. And, uh, that's why, you know, we think this will actually bring mass adoption to blockchain. Right. So it's like, it's much faster to adopt. Okay. But why would I want to have, uh, my, my moves broadcast on blockchain? So right now I guess it's a demo. Uh, but why would I want, like, what, what sort of projects would use this kind of high performance scaling solution? Yeah, there are a lot of projects that can use this. In fact, we recently released our SDK. Uh, there are already exchanges that are starting to use our off-chain scaling solution to make a non-costal exchange. So basically the exchange doesn't need to hold users money, but still has the extremely efficient, uh, user experience like the centralized exchange. Right. So this is like an order book matching and this process. And we also have a cool things like a prediction market that you can build that in off-chain solutions as well. Right. Right. So like auger, but then, but the faster. Yes. Yes. In fact, we can help auger to scale. Right. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So right now in terms of the developers, are there a lot of developers approaching you? What's, what's kind of the whole atmosphere like over here? Yeah. So we recently also soft launched our C pilot program, which is our developer, uh, outreach in program. And we have like hundreds of people already signed up and we are all actively reaching out to them. And we'll release some tutorial about how to step by step build your, uh, application or accelerate your existing application on center. Before chatting to more people, let's buy some coffee with Ethereum. All right. So 2, 2.8 USD sending fee. I'm going to just be cheap. Can I be cheap and just send it with the lowest gas? That's okay. All right. You're based on zero information. Okay. Wait, wait, wait. Don't fill my password. Don't fill my password. Yeah. A lot of developers, this is like the best place for developers. I think talks are great. People are great. Everyone's building. Nice. Nice. Okay. So in terms of building, what, what projects are you interested in? Like what, what kind of like, are there certain things you guys want to learn or, um, you want to look at in Ethereum? So we're definitely looking a lot into WebAssembly and a Web3 foundation, parity, Leap2P, a lot of the infrastructure and the standardization that's starting to emerge in this, in the space. And we're using too. So we're trying to talk to these people, collaborate and so forth. And this is, this is a good place to do it. Okay. And we probably saw something about Ethereum 2.0 yesterday. Vitalik was dancing and singing a song about the struggles for Ethereum 2.0. What's your thoughts about Ethereum 2.0? Well, I wasn't at the talk yesterday, to be honest, but I, I do, I do know kind of like Ethereum 2.0 is proposing. I think it's great. I'm a big believer in that. I wish we could, I wish Ethereum could find, uh, maybe, uh, some, some way to kind of break this down into like smaller steps so that they can make progress faster. But at the same time, I think it's great. I think it's clear what needs to be done and needs to be solved to scale the system. And we're going there. And in terms of the Enigma project, what are you guys focusing on right now? Oh, so we're like heads down. We release a testnet. We have actual projects like building, uh, privacy preserving decentralized applications, which is what we want to enable, uh, like secret voting, auctions, machine learning over encrypted data. And there are quite a few projects building on that. And we're working together with them. And that helps us improve our own platform, uh, as we head out to the release in the next few months for mainnet. Right. So you have a mainnet release coming up. You're trying to work with people to test out how to do these secret contracts. Okay. So in terms of hard questions, are there any like kind of development pitfalls? Are there any things that you're trying to innovate and do better? You know, anything in terms of development front? I mean, all the time, look, we're, we're a very research driven, uh, um, uh, I guess project, right? Like we're doing a lot in the, in the, in MPC, security, public computation, which is very tough cryptography. We are trying to make, uh, SGX and trusted execution environments, uh, more robust, basically anything that goes to privacy preserving computation, which is a whole field in cryptography. We're trying to take from academia and bring it to the real world. And there's a lot of questions coming up. Awesome. Awesome. So I hope that develops well. And I'm really excited for your mainnet launch and we'll try to speak then. Thank you. Good to see you again. Hey guys. Hey guys, I'm here with Nicola, the CTO of and found co-founder of Fletcher. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Um, how are you finding Ethereum DevCon so far? So it's very lively. I would say there are a lot of people wanting to build more solutions, even in a very bare market. So that's very pleasant to see. So, okay. I have a question about, so who decides what coins can get added on to Ledger? So we don't really decide. Now our politics is to wait for, uh, external developers that will submit their applications. So it's open to basically everybody, as long as you can develop an application for it. Uh, then usually the step is that we review the application and when we are happy with it, so we just verify that the application is not doing anything nefarious. So we verify that the application is not stealing coin basically. And after doing that, we can publish it on our app store. So now we've been talking about supply chain attacks as well. So I was attending the Hackett conference and Peter Todd was there and he was quite concerned about possibilities of supply chain attack. People are intercepting Ledgers before they're made. Is there anything that can be done to prevent this? How is that being solved? How is that being solved? So today we are using a very simple, we are using very simple ways to offer the best protection in the market, in my opinion, against supply chain attacks. So first we are using secure elements. So which are secure chips that you find in credit cards and passports, which have a very specific property. Is that it can only be loaded with code that is signed by Ledger. And the chip is personalized for Ledger at factories. So which explains why we have long lead time sometimes and why people had to wait three months to get their Ledger last year, for example. And once the chip is in the factory, it can only be personalized by code, which is signed by us. So at every stage of the personalization, every Ledger connects back to our server and is personalized by an HSM. So which is an HSM is a hardware security module. So it's kind of a specific security unit running on a server that will establish a connection to the Ledger device, send our code, which is encrypted by us. So using multiple keys and then verify. Then we will ask the device to generate a key pair. We will assign the public key, send back the public key signed by us. And so we complete an attestation process on the secure chip. So that's the first step of the attestation. And it's very efficient to protect against people that would change, that would try to provide a fake Ledger, because then it would fail to pass the first step of the attestation. That's as long as the app that they install is legit. So maybe like, what if they don't install the legit Ledger Live app? You know, like, is there a possibility that they can get a wrong link to your Ledger website and then they install a wrong website to interact with the chip? So if you don't install Ledger Live today, there is no application on your Ledger after you personalize it. So the thing is, you can't do anything with your Ledger. So if you want to install an application on Ledger, you have at some point to connect to our server, which will do this test, which will reject you if you are not legitimate. So another way, I mean, so that's just a simple test. If you want to do a full test, you can open your Ledger today and verify that you have no extra chip, for example, on your PCB. So it shouldn't be necessary to do that for most people. But if you are extremely risk adverse, if you are extremely paranoid, I would say, but that's not, I mean, well, it's said as a state of mind, I mean, it's not said as something being bad or good. We offer a way in our frequently asked questions to verify what kind of PCB you have in your device and to check it against the picture. So if you're anal, you can open it up, check that it's the exact same PCB, and then that's why it's legit. Yes. So that provides you some additional guarantees. So I consider that this is today kind of the best solution we can provide for the cost, for the invested cost, because, well, we could add some extra stickers, for example, on top of the box. It doesn't really help because today we're producing a sticker cost about a few hundred euros. So I would say for a determined attacker, it's not really something that that's going to help. So you've been working on Kanya for almost a year now since we last talked to you. How's it going? Yeah, it's busy. We are definitely trying to focus on mainstream adoption, which is a lot of the user experience problems we're having at the moment. Trying to solve that to bring on board a whole bunch of new wave of new people who've never touched crypto before. So we're definitely trying to come up with some cool, elegant solutions about onboarding people into crypto. But as you know, Cam Work and Kenya, the ecosystem is all about the gig economy and the new age of freelancing that you don't need to pay Upwork or Uber or Airbnb 20% fees. You just pay directly the person you're engaging with your service. Here, I'm, hey guys, I'm Wolf Chee, the CEO of Quarkchain. So how do you find the conference so far? You know, is this your first developer conference or what's it like? Yeah, it's really good. I found a lot of interesting topic and also a lot of ongoing researches in the conference. And I'm really happy to also know a lot of people here and also discuss with people for new ideas. Any new ideas they can share with us? Like anything that you want to, how to push us forward? Yeah, I think several ideas, for example, Ethereum is developing new virtual machines based on the WebAssembly. Since we are also backward compatible with Ethereum, so the WebAssembly, like virtual machines, is also very important to us. And also several improvements of existing virtual machines, I think that we can adopt them. And in addition, since we are a sharding project, well, Ethereum also is doing the sharding in their rates. So I'm also learning what's the state of arms of sharding technology that is developed by Ethereum and how we can collaborate and make also Quarkchain benefit from those innovations. That's interesting. So it's a very sharing world. So even if they have some breakthroughs or if you have some breakthroughs, you're willing to share with each other rather than to just keep it to yourself. So if that is the case, then if everyone's sharing, how do you become competitive in the space then? Yeah, I think so even a lot of things are sharing, but I feel the space is more and more open because everybody knows that there's a lot of issues in the blockchain. And without collaborations with each other, it's very hard to just solve them by a single group. So in this space, we actually would like to also work with other projects. And you also met with several other projects like Elon and also others that they also come with us and discussing their sharding solutions. And so I think this is a very good formula for the blockchain community. Okay. So Quarkchain, you're doing sharding, you're doing a high transaction throughput. So when do we feel like we can see something like that in action? When is the layer one sharding solution, when is that going to come out for you guys? Oh, actually, we have launched our test nets on July the 7th, which we demonstrate that we are able to deliver more than 14,000 transactions per second at the moment. Right now we are holding a TPS competition. Actually, it just concluded when we were several hours ago. Right. And so we also encourage our community members to join and use our open source code to reproduce what we get. And so we are very happy that we get some numbers that exceed our expectations, get numbers that two times or maybe even more than us. Our like the best numbers that we launched on test nets three months ago. So, yeah. And also we encourage, we have additional competitions for the members during our travel in Europe that anybody who can challenge the first one, we get another additional bounties for the TPS competitions. Awesome. Awesome. So I hope to keep in touch. And then where are you based right now? So currently half of team members are based in Silicon Valley and half of the team members are based in China. Nice. And also we also setting up our offices in Korea. And also we have planned to set the office in Europe. So this is our first travel to Europe. But I think there's a lot of, I feel the atmosphere is just as it in European countries. So I think we would love to have more connections with local communities. I hope you guys enjoyed my coverage of Ethereum DevCon. For my next conference, I'm traveling all the way around the world to Asia, more precisely to Macau, the Las Vegas of Asia. There I'll uncover what's really happening in the Chinese blockchain scene. Stay tuned and I'll see you there. And I'll see you there.