text:
Watch / The Future of Digital Infrastructure
Duration: 00:14:54
Speaker: Matthew Spoke
Type: Talk
Expertise: Intermediate
Event: Devcon 2
Date: Sep 2016
How to Sell Ideas
Vinay Gupta delivers a talk on the importance of the way one presents an idea.
Vinay Gupta
Agreement Making in Solidity: A Legal Perspective
Bill Marino of Cornell Tech presents on Agreement Making in Solidity: A Legal Perspective.
Bill Marino
Matan Field presents on Backfeed (http://backfeed.cc), which develops resilient technology and new economic models to support free, large-scale, systematic collaboration.
Matan Field
Banking with Smart Contracts
Lee Braine (Barclays), Ian Cusden (UBS), Rex Maudsley (Societe Generale), Andrew Keys and James Slazas (ConsenSys) discuss banking with Smart Contracts.
Lee Braine, Ian Cusden, Rex Maudsley, Andrew Keys, James Slazas
Challenges in Public Economic Consensus
Vlad Zamfir discusses the challenges in finding public economic consensus with indirect relation to Casper PoS.
Vlad Zamfir
Colony (http://colony.io/) is a decentralized governance and community collaboration platform for contributing ideas, making decisions, doing work, giving feedback on the work of others and building reputation.
Jack du Rose
Communicating the Ethereum Narrative
William Mougayar (https://twitter.com/wmougayar) presenting on the best ways to ccommunicate the Ethereum Narrative.
William Mougayar
Dangerous Old Men: Cypherpunk's Failure, Ethereum's Success
Vinay Gupta presents on cypherpunk's history, it's failure and Ethereum's success. Vinay Gupta is a leading thinker on infrastructure theory, state failure solutions, and managing global system risks including poverty/development and the environmental crisis. He is inventor of the hexayurt. Vinay formerly served on Ethereum's communications and release management teams.
Vinay Gupta, Imogen Heap
Decentralized Reddit
Connor Keenan of ConsenSys (https://consensys.net/) presents on his decentralized version of Reddit built on Ethereum.
Connor Keenan
Ethereum's Wendell Davis takes the stage to announce the continuation of the Ethereum DEVgrants programme thanks to a generous donation from Omise (https://www.omise.co/).
Wendell Davis
Ethereum's Alex Leverington presents on "devp2p", Ethereum's networking protocol.
Alex Leverington
Ethereum in the Enterprise Environment
Ethereum's Taylor Gerring presents on Ethereum in the Enterprise Environment.
Taylor Gerring
Ethereum The African Opportunity
Wayne Hennessy-Barrett of 4G Capital (http://4g-capital.com/) presents on "Ethereum: The African Opportunity (Nairobi)".
Wayne Hennessy-Barrett
Formal Semantics for Protocols
Peter McBurney presents on Formal Semantics for Protocols at Ethereum's DEVCON1.
Peter McBurney
Gaming on the Blockchain
Panel focusing on gaming on the blockchain, chaired by Wendel Davis with Peter Borah, Julian Pittleman, Jim Berry and Tyler Smith
Wendel Davis, Peter Borah, Julian Pittleman, Jim Berry, Tyler Smith
History of the Blockchain
Nick Szabo takes the stage to present on the history of blockchain technology and his work on the Ethereum tech stack.
Nick Szabo
How Blockchain Technology Can Help us Achieve Prosperity
Don Tapscott takes the stage at DEVCON1 to discuss how blockchain technology can help us achieve prosperity.
Don Tapscott
IBM MTN Project
IBM's Henning Diedrich presents on the IoT MTN Project.
Henning Diedrich
Inflekt: Event & Community Management
Ashley Taylor of Consensys (https://consensys.net/) presents on Inflekt, an open source tribal network and events management platform.
Ashley Taylor
Insurance on the blockchain
Elias Haase of B9 Lab presents on insurance on the blockchain.
Elias Haase
Introduction to Consensus
Dominic Williams delivers a presentation on an "Introduction to Consensus".
Dominic Williams
Lightning Talk: Learning Ethereum & How to navigate the community
Hudson Jameson presents on the best way to navigate the Ethereum community and the tools they use to communicate.
Hudson Jameson
Middleware & on-chain Services
Ethereum's George Hallam moderates a panel on Ethereum Middleware and On-Chain Services
Roman Mandeleil, Piper Merriam, Christian Lundkvist, Joseph Chow, Nikolai Mushegian, George Hallam
Monadic Design Patterns for the Blockchain
Lucius Greg Meredith gives an update on "SpecialK" - the formal verification software being used with Casper + an overview of monadic design patters.
Lucius Greg Meredith
Myths and Facts of Reputation Systems
Andres Junge of Yaykuy (https://www.yaykuy.cl/) presents on the myths and facts of reputation systems.
Andres Junge
Rebuilding Enterprise Processes with Blockchains and Smart Contracts
Mathew Spoke of Deloitte presents on rebuilding the enterprise process with blockchains and smart contracts.
Mathew Spoke
Jessi Baker
Towards a Dynamic Economic, Social and Political Mesh
Joseph Lubin of ConsenSys (https://consensys.net/) presents on "Towards a Dynamic Economic, Social and Political Mesh".
Joseph Lubin
Transactive Grid: A Decentralized Energy Management Solution
Transactive Grid, decentralized energy managment solution An Ethereum-enabled Community Energy Market Sharing Economy for Microgrids is a joint venture uniting LO3 Energy (http://lo3energy.com/) and ConsenSys (https://consensys.net/).
Lawrence Orisini
Ujo Music
ConsenSys's Phil Barry presents on Ujo (http://ujomusic.com/), the recent revolution in digital music consumption – and streaming in particular!
Phil Barry
Weifund & Boardroom
Nick Dodson of ConsenSys (https://consensys.net/) presents on Weifund (http://weifund.io/), the decentralised crowdfunding platform and Boardroom (http://boardroom.to/), a blockchain governance DApp.
Nick Dodson
Beyond the Bubble
A presentation focusing on how we can address education and adoption challenges to expand the blockchain industry.
Taylor Gerring
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.
Bin Lu
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".
Dr. Virgil Griffith & Vikram Verma
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.
Philip Daian
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.
Tim Nugent
Ethereum Enterprise
A 30 minute panel exploring Ethereum's usage in enterprise environments.
Matthew Spoke, Marley Gray, Roman Mandeleil, Victor Wong, Henning Diedrich, Alex Liu
Ethereum for Resource Limited Devices
State of the union and roadmap for mobile, wearables, SBCs and IoT running Ethereum
Bob Summerwill
Ethereum in 25 Minutes
Ethereum Foundation Chief Scientist, Vitalik Buterin, describes Ethereum.
Vitalik Buterin
Full Stack on Ethereum
A presentation covering the ongoing efforts at Ether.Camp, including the block explorer, online IDE and EthereumJ client.
Roman Mandeleil
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.
Gilles Fedak
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.
Ming Chan, Peter Van Valkenburgh
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.
Matt Spoke
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.
Houman Haddad
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.
Raphaël Mazet, Jakub Wojciechowski
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.
Gregg Dourgarian
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.
Everett Hildenbrandt, Phil Daian, Loi Luu, Nate Rush, Haseeb Qureshi
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.
Giuseppe Bertone
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.
Peter Van Valkenburgh, Jerry Brito
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.
Aron Fischer
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.
Gregory Landua, Risto Karjalainen
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.
Garrett MacDonald
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.
Patrick McCorry
A Killer Ecosystem
Joe Lubin speaks about the progress of the Ethereum ecosystem and recent projects that have been developed in just the last few years.
Joseph Lubin
Building Cross Ecosystem Communities: A Playbook
Describing the playbook used to identify and then encourage cross project collaboration to solve problems affecting all projects in the ETH ecosystem. Drawing on lessons learned from ETHPrize, ETHSecurity, Web 3.0 Design, the Open Source Block Explorer Group and the Community of Communities (learning resource for Community Managers) --- a brief history around how these groups were built (each has become a cornerstone in the community for it's topic), the tactics and tools used to manage them, and how to set goals and get results. The format would be a talk around what these communities are reviewing the above and then an open workshop to come up with creative ideas for future useful communities and how to build them. The goal is to facilitate new community ideas where grouping stakeholders could be super valuable and come up with creative ways to either grow the existing community base or start new ones. I would like to split into small groups where people could come up with Community Ideas and then present them live to the group with feedback from a panel of community experts. There aren't many resources for building communities and even fewer talks and workshops on this topic.
Robbie Bent
Building self-sustaining ecosystems through governance
At 0x, we would like to move towards progressive decentralization of network ownership and control. As a first step, we will launch a community-managed developer grant program that is intended to provide funding for public interest projects that advance the community's collective interest and that drive platform growth. To take this one step further, we are developing a roadmap for transferring control of grant distribution and custody of grant funds to an on-chain decentralized governance system administered by the ZRX token holders themselves. The grant program will provide us with a unique opportunity to observe on-chain governance and community social dynamics when the financial stakes are real and no centralized authorities can interfere with the community's decisions.
Will Warren, Peter Zeitz
Decentralization Against Isolation
We propose a design for philanthropic or publicly-funded seeding to allow (near) optimal provision of a decentralized, self-organizing ecosystem of public goods. The concept extends ideas from Quadratic Voting to a funding mechanism for endogenous community formation. Individuals make public goods contributions to projects of value to them. The amount received by the project is (proportional to) twice the square of the sum of the square roots of contributions received. Under the "standard model" this yields first best public goods provision and some modest modifications can make it fairly robust against collusive or altruistic deviations from that model. We discuss applications to campaign finance, development ecosystems, news media finance and, more broadly, implications for the liberal-communitarian debate.
E. Glen Weyl
Decentralization and its Discontents
There is building movement to decentralize the web (or re-decentralize the web), and Ethereum plays a particularly significant role. Communities that engage with these technologies often frame decentralization as a moral good in and of itself - but to what extent has this claim been validated? We'll consider examples where censorship resistant networks are used to host content that is morally repugnant to their maintainers, at times when centralized networks are cracking down (stormfront.eth vs blacklisting by dns providers), cases where there is disagreement about what constitutes decentralization at all (POW vs DPoS), and seeming technical challenges that block decentralization (scalability and performance). The concept of decentralization appears, at least on the surface, to be the enemy of specialization - but yet the networks we hope to build are the product of specialized knowledge. Can we decentralize the building of decentralized networks themselves? Ultimately, I hope to make the point that decentralization without governance has few, if any, inherent moral qualities, and that we must consistently and intentionally consider not only how, but why and for whom, we decentralize.
Sarah Friend
Decentralize, Democratize, or Die
Cory Doctorow from the Electronic Frontier Foundation discusses the "crypto wars" & where we go from here.
Cory Doctorow
Decentralized Identity & Reputation
Since leaving Truebit, I have been focused on the problem of decentralized identity and reputation. This is an important missing primitive that enables some of the most exciting blockchain use-cases: governance (e.g. quadratic voting), airdrops, unsecured unchain lending, and security tokens. Reputation enables protocols to utilize iterated games instead of one-off games; and identity enables much better UX for usage of dapps. I would like to give a 20 minute presentation on our research into identity and reputation. I will begin by demonstrating the importance of reputation in the pseudonymous decentralized context, present the possible architectures under consideration (1) based on trust graphs and PageRank, 2) based on social collateral, and 3) based on attestations made by anchors, and finally discuss open problems in order to engage the attendees on this topic going forward. Our recent breakout session in San Francisco (with engineers from Metamask, Dharma, Protocol Labs, and Google Brain) demonstrates some of our latest thinking on this topic! – https://twitter.com/sinahab/status/1027639769910525952
Sina Habibian
Ethereum Governance: Showcase and Tools
Governance is hard, especially in a blockchain community. This breakout session aims to educate participants on the history, major groups, and interactive tools around Ethereum governance. We will have representation from major governance bodies such as the Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians, EIP editors, and core developers. The activities in the breakout session will include short presentations from each governance group, a Q&A session, and demos of software and tools used in the governance process, such as exciting new voting/signaling tools.
Hudson Jameson
Ethereum's Impact on Society Overview
Rhys Lindmark takes a closer look at Ethereum's impact on society.
Rhys Lindmark
Ethereum on Android - Chances and Challenges
In this presentation I want to talk about challenges and chances for Ethereum on the Android platform. This platform can enable access to a huge amount of users and open up a lot of use-cases. It can also help us improve security - e.g. by using old phones as offline signing devices, leveraging the app-sandboxing or really split application from wallet with UX patterns users are familiar with from online banking. But all these chances come with challenges. Light clients and their incentivisation layer here I will be a big topic here. I will try to address the challenges and point out possible solutions. This talk will also contain a small assessment of the current state of the art. Comparing several solutions and approaches. Not only of existing applications - but also standards in this area.
Marcus Ligi
Flyingcarpet: An Open Network for Building and Using Aerial Analytics Services
The Flyingcarpet network connects analytics-hungry businesses with a pool of data scientists who compete to create machine learning/artificial intelligence analytics-extraction models from visual data, such as drone and satellite imagery. The competition incentivisation mechanism uses bounties and a Token-Curated Registry of Opportunities (TCRO) running on the Ethereum blockchain to collect and rank machine learning model creation opportunities. From insurance companies, to agri-companies, to governments, the Flyingcarpet network enables actionable insights through rich AI-powered analytics. For example, last year, Flyingcarpet built a machine learning model that enabled a drone to autonomously count the number of coconuts in a coconut plantation in Papua New Guinea—a task which cannot be performed using satellites. The aim was to increase estimation accuracy and reduce the costs of crop yield predictions for the farmer. From a 20 minute autonomous flight, we were able to effectively collect data from the entire plantation, provide an accurate coconut count and translate that into crop yield predictions to be used on blockchain prediction platforms such as Gnosis. This information could also be used by the farmer to optimise distribution of fertilisers, water and so on. Tech paper: https://drive.google.com/open?id=10TM6bN6excBePftD6l4AoWEfZe484POp Website: https://www.flyingcarpet.network/
Julien Bouteloup
Genesis Block, EXODUS 1, Zion
Lisa Chu speaks about the EXODUS 1 phone from HTC.
Lisa Chu
High-stakes decision making: how to maximise your impact
After 10 years of sharpening my decision-making skills in the world of high stakes poker I discovered effective altruism - an intellectual movement that applies science, evidence and reason to figure out the most impactful ways to address the world's most pressing problems. Rigorous analysis shows that some non-profits are literally 1000s of times more cost-effective than average. Additionally, a significant portion of well-meaning philanthropic efforts produce little, or even negative effects on the problems they are trying to solve. Considering the many billions that are donated to charity each year, it is crucially important that all philanthropists develop the critical thinking skills to make these tough decisions - skills such as decision-making under uncertainty, correcting for bias and knowing when to (or not to!) use intuition. I expect many of Devcon4's attendees will strongly resonate with these concepts. As blockchain pioneers, they already understand the dire need for positive social impact on a truly global scale to ensure a safer and fairer future for everyone. Alongside my colleague - philosopher and barrister Natalie Cargill - I will present the decision-making framework that effective altruists use to ensure that the actions we take achieve the most good.
Liv Boeree, Natalie Cargill
How do we control the material world with smart contracts?
The long term vision for the Ethereum community has always been that car rentals, high finance and Cryptokitties would all co-exist on the same blockchain. However, some assets (like Cryptokitties) are purely digital whereas others are purely material (your house) and automatically subject to fiat regulation. How are we to manage fiat property using crypto tools? Vinay will present the results of several years of research in the practical legal technicalities of controlling fiat property from Ethereum smart contracts, with examples from a variety of real world use cases.
Vinay Gupta
How to Magician: Improving Technological Governance
The Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians is a self selecting group of people that collaborate to get to rough consensus and running code that improves the technology ecosystem of Ethereum and related decentralized & cryptographic technologies. We'll discuss what the EthMagicians have done to date, how anyone can join and contribute, and how to self-organize to reach consensus and commitment on subsequent action.
Boris Mann, Greg Colvin, Jamie Pitts
How will nations remain relevant in the 21st century?
Kaspar Korjus discusses how nations will remain relevant in the 21st century.
Kaspar Korjus
Is Ethereum compatible in Islamic finance?
Islamic finance works in a specific framework and guideline laid out by Shariah, which in brief is a divine law of Islam. Since the emergence of Bitcoin to the lime light becoming the buzz word of almost everyone a few years ago, much have been said and debated in the Islamic finance community whether or not it is permissible to deal with, whether it is halal etc. Blockchain has evolved a lot since then, with Ethereum now becoming the leading platform for the smart contract development. However, due to the complexity of the blockchain and cryptography concept, and also perhaps negative perception towards Bitcoin which previously was commonly associated with the excessive speculation activity in the market, there has not been much attempt by the Islamic finance community to tackle this subject in a serious manner. The Muslim community at large is still shrouded by ambiguity and uncertainty on the topic, and therefore one of the cause for the lack of participation and contribution by the Islamic finance community in the development of blockchain and smart contract application thus far. This presentation attempts to provide some insights and clarifications on the subject.
Wan Hafizi Wan Halim, Mohd Daud Bakar
Lessons from International Law: How to reframe our thinking around crypto governance
Governance challenges have plagued international politics since the beginning of time. As we think about governance in crypto, it's critical to understand the history of politics and law - because governance is inherently about human nature and behavior. Whether it's smart contracts, proof of stake, centralized nodes, or miner consolidation concerns, these are all rooted in age-old governance problems presented in a new form. In my presentation, I will cover the foundational principles of international law, its evolution, and how we can take those lessons and context and think about governance from a new perspective. Specifically, I will use examples of current global governance organization such as the UN (and its predecessor, the League of Nations), the ICJ (International Court of Justice), and the lessons that these organizations hold for the emerging field of crypto governance.
Katherine Wu
Lex cryptographica : the legal challenges of new blockchain-based lifeforms
Primavera De Filippi talks about the legal challenges of new blockchain-based lifeforms.
Primavera De Filippi
MakerDAO: A New Hope for Financial Reform
Aside from its practical applications, the blockchain movement can be seen as a populist response to the lack of meaningful reform within the financial sector since the crisis of 2008. This is the sentiment that was famously captured by the indignant inscription on the Bitcoin genesis block: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." At MakerDAO we believe that by adding the key feature of stabilization, Dai fully realizes Satoshi Nakamoto's vision of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. To do this, we have borrowed many different ideas from traditional finance and in the process created a truly holistic foundation for a more rational financial system. In this talk we will dive deep on the philosophical similarities and differences between MakerDAO and the world of traditional finance. We will discuss how MakerDAO represents significant reform of the global financial system by better aligning its incentives and radically increasing its transparency.
Andy Milenius
Melonport will not exist by Devcon 5
Melon is an experimental project developed during a 2-years workshop by Melonport AG. The ambitious endeavor undertaken by the Melon team was to build a decentralized asset management system powered by Ethereum. Mission accomplished. During this talk we'd like to provide a deep insight on our journey building the asset management infrastructure of tomorrow on top of Ethereum. We would also like to unveil Melon v1.0, together with the token economics (Melonomics) and the governance mechanisms of the Melon ecosystem. The token model has never been attempted before and leverages work that Vitalik Buterin and other renowned experts have written about in the past. Similarly, Melon governance system is unique in many aspects and will allow Melonport to step down as sole maintainer of Melon protocol, while ensuring the longevity and integrity of the protocol. This presentation constitutes the first step in the decentralization process of the maintenance of the Melon protocol, as we would like to make a call for applications to the Melon Technical Council (given our skilled governance model, the Devcon audience is the perfect crowd for that matter). Melonport will not exist at this time next year. Our talk will explain how we made this possible.
Jenna Zenk
Money is the killer Ðapp: crypto in Venezuela
We want to talk about real-world cryptocurrency use in avoiding forex controls, preserving one's wealth while fleeing an authoritarian regime, and escaping hyperinflation. Venezuela is in a deep economic crisis of its own making: relentless money printing and disastrous fiscal policies have brought the country to the edge of collapse. Eduardo will tell his own story of people using cryptocurrency as an unstoppable store of value and medium of exchange. Alejandro will recount how the crypto community, including projects like Zcash, BitcoinVenezuela.com, and MakerDAO, are researching how to allow Venezuelans to gain access to open money that, unlike the dying bolívar, will not consistently depreciate 50%+ each month, and that anybody could use.
Alejandro Machado, Eduardo Gomez
Pili-Pala Consensus
Elaine Shi speaks about the Pala Consensus protocol.
Elaine Shi
Post Nation-State Governance
The contemporaneous world order we have today emerged during the Westphalia Treaties of the 17th century after 30 years of war in Europe following a clear set of principles: frontiers, non-domestic intervention and power alliances that keep the peace through a Nash equilibrium. As the internet and blockchains become a dominant economic force able to break the limits imposed by Nation-States (ie: "Facebook and the Russians"), the quest to seek a new equilibrium of power has begun. Democracy Earth researches smart contracts able to deliver an alternative to traditional democracy using the Ethereum network addressing key issues of voting systems including coercion and bribe resistance.
Santiago Siri
ProgPoW - A Programmatic Proof of Work
Kristy-Leigh Minehan speaks about ProgPoW.
Kristy-Leigh Minehan
RICO - Making ICOs Fair, By Making Them Reversible
The ERC 20 had far more impact than I expected when I proposed the draft in November 2015. The massive amounts of ICOs following the adoption of this standard led to money collection becoming a breeze. As much as this democratised the space, it also led to massive amounts of money being collected, where not all projects lived up to the expectation they created, while opening the door to not ICO-able projects, as well as outright scams. It's time to bring back balance, by letting participants decide if they deem a project worthy their funding - over time. The RICO, or Reversible ICO is a proposal I introduced a few months back that has the potential to make ICOs more fair. This happens by releasing the funds over time and giving each participant the power to cut his funding to the project at any time.
Fabian Vogelsteller
Self-Sovereign Sexuality
If we're honest about what we claim we want to achieve—banking the unbanked and censorship resistance commerce for common folks—then we shouldn't be surprised when the first people that actually use crypto are those for whom banking and censorship are important, daily problems. Besides rogue states, drug dealers, and the impoverished, sex workers stand out as the next major group to adopt crypto to use in their daily lives. I believe we should embrace this community and build our dapps with them in mind. In this talk I want to discuss: Cultural parallels between the crypto and sex worker communities, Trust but verify - Escorts screen clients before the first meeting, Self-sovereignty, Crypto - we don't want anyone to be able to get in the way of how we spend our money, Sex workers - we don't want anyone to be able get in the way of how we use our bodies, Privacy - Fake identities / Protonmail / Cash, Challenges that sex workers face and blockchain-based solutions, Lack of banking access, Difficulty advertising, Rent-seeking intermediaries (pimps), Cancellations, The case for sex work decriminalization, The opportunity for Ethereum to welcome the sex worker community
Ameen Soleimani & Chelsea Palmer
Special Projects 2018
Grab bag of fun projects, including: fancy oracles, ETH-ETC relations and relays, fancy domains, new swag, new wiki release, islamic finance, opt-in backdoors, ether.cards.
Virgil Griffith
The Social and Economic Fabric of Decentralized Space Development
Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding has existed in the aerospace industry for decades, although usually they occur independent from one another. With the advent of cryptoeconomics, incentive systems can be designed that synergize crowdsourcing and crowdfunding in new ways to enable mass coordination in open source space development. Space Decentral is a DAO building a citizen-led space agency, with a novel governance model and ultimate goal of bringing humanity together to collectively accomplish the impossible. Project proposals are vetted and curated by the Space Decentral community, with curation leading towards project activation for volunteer-driven crowdsourcing. Ethical complications arise when volunteers help bootstrap for-profit entities without legal protections in place for ownership. To solve for this, Space Decentral's projects will use a tokenized task management system built on top of Aragon, that will track individual work contributions. By participating in Space Decentral, the expectation is: should a nascent mission spin-off into a new entity (such as a child DAO) each individual's stake will be measured by the non-transferable tokens collected, which will be transparently accounted for on Ethereum. This new collaborative model is generic and can be applicable to any organization that wants to combine crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.
Yalda Mousavinia
The Web We Want
Brewster Kahle discusses the Internet Archive's history & attempt at decentralization, the technology that's currently in place, and what's needed from the community. He also discusses the benefits of decentralization, the steps that will need to be taken to get there, and the challenges we'll need to overcome on the way. The presentation is followed by a Q&A session.
Brewster Kahle
Towards a socially scalable Etherean future
Ethereum and related Web3 technology stands a real chance of making the future fairer, more open, more inclusive, and more just. But up to now Ethereum has been the near-exclusive playpen of a tiny coterie of already-wealthy, never-marginalized, mostly Western and almost entirely male technocrats. Can Ethereum be more than this? Can it fulfill its mission to be the future compute platform for all of humanity? How do we overcome the enormous obstacles we currently face to mass adoption, things such as UX, the complexity of key and identity management, the public perception of scams and shitcoins, and the awful wealth distribution? I believe the answer lies in the concept of social scalability, conceptualized by Nick Szabo. This talk will introduce the concept, discuss how it relates to Ethereum, and examine present scaling, governance, education, marketing, and UX initiatives through this lens, with an eye towards developing Ethereum into a platform usable by and valuable to humans everywhere.
Lane Rettig
Unscrambling an Egg: Decentralization and the Zcash Foundation
The Zcash protocol we know today started as a project by the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company (commonly known as the "Zcash Company"), but it wasn't meant to live under the aegis of a single company. In this talk, the Executive Director of the Zcash Foundation—a separate, independent 501(c)3 from the Zcash Company—will cover the path forward for further decentralizing the Zcash protocol, share lessons from the Zcash Foundation's experience in governance applicable to dapp developers and Ethereum community members, and discuss trade-offs inherent in various approaches for bootstrapping cryptoeconomic systems.
Josh Cincinnati
AKASHA Reloaded: Unifying the Ecosystem with ethereum.world
AKASHA Reloaded introduces the idea of a social media framework. It might help to imagine it as a sort of "Wordpress for social networks." What if we would use this framework to build a social network designed to enhance the collective intelligence and collaboration potential of the Ethereum community as a whole? What if we would use this opportunity to integrate the Ethereum ecosystem of dapps and services into a unified user experience accessible to anyone - from meetup organizers to smart contract developers to researchers and beyond? Moreover, how would this play in the bigger picture where any other social network built with the AKASHA framework will have at their fingertips the equivalent of "Wordpress plugins" but in this case in the form of Ethereum services and dapps? We're almost done with the foundational work at the "framework level" and we plan to start in the next couple of months working on ethereum.world to showcase the potential of a modular, interoperable, open-source, social network powered by Ethereum and complementary technologies like IPFS, Verifiable Claims and DIDs. In the past I tried to encourage more collaboration within Ethereum but I think it was too early: https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/20/ethereum-builders-experiment/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/04/06/ethereum-builders-supercharging-github/What about now?
Mihai Alisie
An Anthropological Perspective on Ethereum
This talk offers insights on the Ethereum community from an anthropological perspective. Technology and society mutually constitute one another. Despite popular claims that depict blockchain as a "neutral technology", it is important to critically examine how blockchain expresses itself in different social, economic and political contexts. The famous media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, once stated that technologies are extensions of the human; this means that blockchain as a technology, reflects our values, beliefs, and biases. It is thus important to critically reflect on the kinds of narratives and values we prescribe to blockchain and how in turn, actors within the blockchain community and beyond are influenced by them. Topics in this talk range from exploring the relationship between Ethereum protocol design and ideologies, the dangers of techno-utopianism, techno-colonial solutionism, and general recommendations for how Ethereum builders can adopt more socially-minded frameworks in their work to create a more ethical and accessible Ethereum ecosystem.
Ann Brody
An Examination of Quadratic Voting
Quadratic Voting advocate Masahiro Yasu (CEO of ALIS Co., Ltd.), who, upon request by RadicalexChange co-writer, Glen Weyl, founded the Japanese division of Radical Markets, and Sota Ishii (CTO of ALIS Co., Ltd.) implemented and tested multiple Democratic Voting Mechanisms such as Majority Judgement and Quadratic Voting using his own Web3 community. The Economics Design involved in these experiments was supervised by Mechanism Design scholar and Professor of Economics at Keiou University, Professor Sakai. In this talk we will go over the findings done in these experiments that were based on economic theories, on an advancing Web3.
Sota Ishii, Masahiro Yasu
Assessing Risk/Trust in Decentralized Finance
In the last year, we have seen an explosion of smart contract based lending/borrowing, which has become the biggest sub-category of DeFi by far. But not all lending protocols are created equal. Different protocols have different risk/reward profiles, and comparing their rates are often apples to oranges comparisons. I would like to present a model I have been developing to assess the risk of different decentralized lending protocols that takes into account elements of both smart contract risk and liquidity risk. This model will be consumer facing, and will attempt to better inform protocol's users as they make important financial decisions. If we want people to be their own bank, we will need to provide tools akin to what current banks have when making financial decisions.
Jack Clancy
Better than free? The end of FAANG.
Revolution started with home PCs. Then the cloud came and freed us from storage worries, backups and availability but at the cost of privacy and surveillance. In this talk we suggest that the solution is a personally-owned distributed cloud. Home servers with redundancies that ensure availability and provide space and computation for other users to use in exchange for infrastructure usage payments. But FAANG (except Netflix) offer their services for free in a model where User Data is the revenue maker. They offer genuinely great UX for users, that happily trade their privacy away. How to compete with their millions of $ of R&D and market share? Many technologists in the Ethereum space agree that decentralization is inherently better, but in the past many projects have claimed to be better than the current alternative and failed. The 10x rule (loosely adapted) states that in order to challenge the status quo, something needs to be 10x better. So what's better than free? Getting paid for using it. Incentivization models and a robust distributed infrastructure layer are key. In our talk we put incentivization, TCRs, secure distributed computation and node federations together for the 10x next stage.
Eduardo Antuña Díez, Pol Bordas
Beyond DAOs: Evolving Human Organization
The hegemonic approach to human coordination (i.e. nation states, corporations) is being challenged as those underserved and disempowered by the current system search for more open, adaptable, and representative solutions. With the emergence of DAOs, decentralized governance, and token economics, we now have a new design space to engineer incentives and mechanisms that align human behavior. Projects like Aragon, DAOstack, Fairmint, Gnosis, Gitcoin, Commons Stack, and MolochDAO are all building, experimenting, and testing new ways to fund and govern human organizations. We want to build organizations that encourage sustainability over profit, stimulate regeneration instead of scarcity, and eliminate stakeholder misalignment seen in current cooperative models. To truly impact those outside the Ethereum ecosystem, we should be strategically aligning experimentation around counter-hegemonic goals and visions. Only then will we be able to move 'beyond DAOs' into an evolved future of regenerative, sustainable, and cooperative human organization. This workshop aims to: -Spark discourse and discussion on what future we're ACTUALLY building towards - Get those experimenting with new organizational models in the same room to discuss collaborative strategy, insights, and roadmaps - Workshop common frameworks and visions for new organizational models to eliminate project silos, form counter-hegemonic strategies, and move the whole ecosystem forwards.
Abigael Titcomb
Blockchain & The Law: interfacing the rule of law and the rule of code
This panel will feature prominent members of the COALA (http://coala.global) community. It will address the work that is currently being undertaken at COALA, with regard to interfacing the blockchain world with the legal world. It will focus in particular on the notion of "alegality" and how we can create legal APIs in order to help blockchain-based systems interact with legal persons. It will also discuss the need for legal reforms in order to accommodate the new opportunities provided by blockchain technology, and how the notion of "functional equivalence" can be used as a means to rely on blockchain technology as a "regulatory technology" in order to achieve similar regulatory or policy obec
Constance Choi, Rick Dudley, Silke Noa Elrifai, Maria Gomez, Kei Kreutler, Carla Reyes, Fennie Wang
Blockchain from the bottom up: Lessons from creating financial empowerment in remote pacific-island communities
For as long as the technology has existed, Blockchain has promised financial inclusion and empowerment for underserved communities. For the most part however, this promise is yet to be realised - projects to date have largely served people living in wealthy countries. If blockchain will truly create positive impact for those who need it most, we need to start working deeply with underserved communities, having real conversations to discover their dreams, aspirations and the challenges they face. In early 2019, international NGO Oxfam and social impact startup Sempo collaborated to launch the first stablecoin-powered humanitarian cash assistance program. Working alongside communities in the highly remote and disaster prone pacific nation of Vanuatu, we used vouchers collateralised by Dai to empower over 200 vulnerable people to buy what they needed, from local vendors, on their terms. The entire project was delivered working with communities with limited access to smartphones, banks, and where internet would go down for days. This talk is a joint presentation between Oxfam and Sempo. We will cover how we addressed the challenges we faced working in such an extreme environment, what the project meant for the people participating, and our vision for the future of financial inclusion.
Sandra Uwantege Hart, Nick Williams
Bridges to...Somewhere?
James Prestwich, Brian Behlendorf, Justin Drake, Joseph Schweitzer
COALA Workshop: Model Law for DAOs
The number of DAOs is growing, and yet most of these DAOs still cannot interact with legal entities, because they do not have legal personality or legal capacity. This workshop is aimed at drafting model legislation for governments to recognize DAOs as legal persons, provided that they possess specific characteristics that facilitate interaction with third parties, and that they provide minimum guarantees of soundness, oversight and accountability. The goal is not to create new types of corporate entities that could accommodate a DAO (c.f. the approach taken by Vermont and Malta), but rather to carve out some kind of legal recognition to DAOs that subsists in an "alegal" state (a.k.a in the blockchain world) and not in a particular geographic jurisdiction in which they would otherwise need to be incorporated. To the extent that blockchain technology has newly endowed DAOs with both technical and economic agency (c.f. their ability to own crypto-assets and to enter into smart contract relationships), it has become crucial for national jurisdictions to recognize these new technical opportunities, and grant DAOs with some kind of legal personality and legal capacity in order to enable these technical affordances and match them with newfound legal affordances. This work requires building a definition of who are the DAOs that should be recognized as legal persons, and what are the legal or technical requirements they should comply with to avail themselves of legal personality and legal capacity. Once this preliminary work has been done, we will work on drafting a model law for DAOs that could be adopted by a variety of national jurisdictions.
Constance Choi, Anuj Das Gupta
Conditional Tokens - Road to Futarchy
Conditional tokens are a new crypto primitive which in the broadest sense allow for the incorporation of conditions into fungible assets. There are a myriad use cases for these conditional tokens, ranging from conditional payment to synthetic derivatives and event futures. Conditional tokens also elegantly capture the fundamental concept behind prediction markets: Conditional tokens allow tokenization of future events and make their outcomes tradable. We developed a new smart contract framework for conditional tokens which allows seamless combination of conditions for multiple future events. This concept lays the foundation for taking prediction markets beyond the PoC stage by natively allowing (1) markets to show dependencies between events in a scalable manner and (2) showing how the value of a specific asset is impacted by a possible future. Showing these dependencies is one of the core mechanisms used for Futarchy, a governance model reliant on decision markets. In our presentation we will explain the implementation of our framework and how it can be utilized for Futarchy.
Friederike Ernst, Stefan George
Crypto for Activism
Micah White and Amir Taaki give their talk on Crypto for Activism.
Micah White, Amir Taaki
DAO Design Canvas
One of the most interesting innovations to come out of the cocreation in the Genesis Alpha DAO (DAOStack's first DAO) - The DAO Design Canvas Workshop utilizes a canvas-like tool developed by me to guide groups through the process of making the most vital decisions they face in the process of designing a DAO, soft and hard governance, on and off chain, no matter what platform. The process of exploring the purpose of groups with the canvas yields well defined use cases, powerful educational experiences and high quality dialogue that often leads into action. DAO Design Canvas has been used in all 5 continents and has been used to design the CuraDAO, the dHack DAOs amongst others.
Felipe Duarte
Data privacy and provenance with OpenAttestation
OpenAttestation is the framework powering the nation-wide blockchain based digital education credentials solution, OpenCerts, in Singapore. OpenAttestation turns documents into structured verifiable claims and allow the provenance of the documents to be verified on the Ethereum blockchain. These documents put users in control of their own data by allowing them to selectively obfuscate parts of the data in the document without compromising on the integrity of the document. This presentation will focus on key learning point from deploying such solution at a nation scale: Batch issuing large number of documents Selective disclosure of data Decentralized document templating and rendering Demo: https://opencerts.io
Raymond Yeh
Devcon50 preparation on the moon
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are change the world right now. Thousands of robots makes billions useful things every day. The power of Ethereum is lifting computing to decentralized world. Robonomics Network as L2 solution use Ethereum to control CPS over the world. Most efficient mechanism for this purpose is open market for service-oriented systems. On this workshop participants will try to build space station using autonomous robots on the moon.
Aleksandr Krupenkin, Sergei Lonshakov
Doing Business with the Blockchain
How to explain the blockchain to C-level managers. How to convince companies to become more competitive and grow their business by adopting the blockchain technology How to avoid the major pitfalls of the enterprise mindset .
Enrico Talin
Driving engagement in web3 communities!
Andreas Wallendahl speaks about driving engagement in web3 communities.
Andreas Wallendahl
Ending Planned Obsolescence in Tech
The apps we love are built to die. Planned obsolescence, a term most people associate with cheap physical goods, is just as problematic in the software industry, where it hurts users and stifles innovation. It should seem counterintuitive that a product consisting primarily of ones and zeros could have a built-in expiration date, and yet the applications we rely upon shut down or become defunct all the time. Just this year already two applications that our team relied upon and were willing to pay for, shut down, despite having large active user bases. How is it that products and services with almost zero marginal cost of distribution, can shut down amidst the protests of loyal users? In contrast to the manifestations of obsolescence were used to, the flaws here are subtle economic and technological shortcomings, rather than obvious physical defects. In this talk I will explore the history of planned obsolescence, the root causes for it in the information technology sphere, and how a long term shift in how we think about building software is poised to deliver something in the world of bits that we could never imagine in the physical world: permanent products.
Brandon Ramirez
Enterprise Ethereum is a Team Sport
The World Economic Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution works with public and private sector around the world to deploy Ethereum solutions in a fair, inclusive and well-designed way and to maximize the benefits for society. From investigating the use of the technology to increase transparency and accountability in government processes to reduce corruption, to encouraging inclusive supply chain deployments to moving ahead decentralized global trade identities. As an impartial party to a number of industry-wide consortium efforts to solve key global issues, it is clear that collaboration, fair and well-designed governance systems are a key barrier to Ethereum adoption. I will share and explore lessons and insights learnt from existing and in-progress industry consortiums, together with what good consortium collaboration and governance looks like in a decentralized setting. While the rewards from collaboration can be high, agreeing on what constitutes a fair and well-designed consortia governance system, let alone a joint blockchain platform, can be challenging. This is where many industry collaboration efforts have fallen apart. The presentation will focus on insights to foster industry- and ecosystem-wide blockchain collaboration - to increase the likelihood of success of Enterprise Ethereum adoption and thereby maximize the benefits of blockchain.
Nadia Hewett
Ethcon: build your local community's developer conference just like building an opensource together
Korean Ethereum community successfully hosted a local community-driven Ethereum developers' conference in May 27th-28th, 2019. 60 speakers, 500 participants, 16 donators, 16 sponsors, 11 media partners, and 20 volunteers made the conference together. Also, 'Ethcon Korea' could get grants from Ethereum Foundation for the effort to focus on the local voices and shed light on them. This speech tells about how we built that solely run by volunteering like building an open source together. To be more specific, we want to share our experience with other local communities and encourage them to make their own Ethcons through the following agendas: Why we started the conference How we prepared the conference in a decentralized manner What happened so How to make a community's own 'Ethcon'?
Brian Cheong, Tiger Kim, Wanseob Lim
Ethereum roadmap 2020 EEA Meets With Ethereum Community
Overview: The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) is interested in growing our relationship with the Ethereum Community and building a bridge for ongoing communication. We invite you to participate in an open forum co-hosted with the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum Magicians, and Ethereum Cat Herders such that EEA can better collaborate to serve users of Ethereum Mainnet. The goal of the workshop is a moderated large-group discussion where everyone in the room feels they have a voice.
Paul DiMarzio, Ronald Resnick
ETHLagos: onboarding developers and laying a foundation for 1billion + people
Through firsthand experience, our group of EF devs realized that hackathon participants often lack sufficient knowledge to create meaningful projects within the short timeframe of a hackathon event. This has led us to create a concept called ETHimpact. ETHimpact is introducing a novel approach to solving social and global challenges. By creating an inclusive environment and bringing together developers, designers, and industry experts into a week-long program to learn and co-create decentralized solutions for social impact, we effectively break down barriers between groups with a shared vision to drive towards a sustainable future. Our team is now made up of motivated individuals from all walks of life. We are supported by the EF, the German Development agency (GIZ), as well as local initiatives like the Africa Blockchain Alliance. We do not only end our engagement with the hackers after the hackathon/event, but will continue to work with the winning teams to build out the solutions into sustainable impactful projects. ETHLagos is the first iteration of this concept, and we would like to introduce it to the world at Devcon. In this first edition, we will focus on decentralized energy solutions: an area of prime importance for Nigeria in the wake of its current energy crisis. We chose Lagos because it is a thriving techhub in Africa, and because we've realized that decentralization is not a new concept to Nigerians and Africans in general. Ancient civilizations within Nigeria and Africa have governed themselves using decentralised concepts for centuries. Examples include consensus mechanisms, oracles and state channels. The ancient civilizations of Ife, Benin and Igbo communities within Nigeria have used these concepts and still use them today. This has also made it easier for the concepts of decentralization to be understood and accepted across Africa and helped in building a thriving community of blockchain enthusiasts on the continent through the Africa Blockchain Alliance. One of the fruits of the African community effort is the Ribbon Blockchain built on Ethereum. Ribbon seeks to automate public health through tokenized incentives. Ribbon enables crowdfunding for public health programs, then distributes proceeds as incentives to patients and healthcare practitioners to encourage healthier lifestyles and quality healthcare delivery. Funding is sent directly to patients, community health workers and healthcare practitioners; where the funding is used for preventative care, adherence to medication, quality care delivery and overall population health outcomes. A demo of the incentives app will be showcased. We believe that many more impactful projects in the energy space and more areas will emerge from this concept which we will keep supporting in solving some of the world's most pressing challenges.
Guillaume Ballet, Maurice von Glasenapp, Eseoghene Mentie, Benjamin Onuoha, Rob Stupay
Finding the Simplest Path to Digital Sovereignty & Security
Paul Gardnerstephen presents his talk on Finding the Simplest Path to Digital Sovereignty & Security.
Paul Gardnerstephen
Future of Open Hardware in a (Verifiable) Decentralised World
Matthias Tarasiewicz present his talk on the Future of Open Hardware in a (Verifiable) Decentralised World.
Matthias Tarasiewicz
Funding as Medium and Message: How We Get Capital and its Influence on #BUIDL
Access to capital is likely one of the most fundamental tools to #BUIDL anything. But do we ever think of funding as a core tool and the implications that it has? And how does our choice of funding affect our message? Funding has many sources, both centralised and decentralized, and many legal implications. And funding strongly affects incentives, human behaviour, how we communicate and collaborate with a community. This workshop will explore a topic that often feels taboo: namely how and why we obtain funding and what it means in a decentralized world. We will explore centralised funding (equity), non-profit funding (grants), decentralised funding (tokens), continuous funding (DAOs and bonding curves) and many more. More importantly, though, we explore what teams and developers should be aware of when looking for funding decentralized solutions, educating attendees on what sources are available in the Ethereum ecosystem, and what philosophical and behavioural implications funding actually has.
Paul Kohlhaas
Governance Strategy for Maximum Fork Readiness
In this workshop, we will present a case which will concern a fictional blockchain with characteristics similar to Ethereum and a potential fork of that blockchain. Based on an imaginary event, but with realistic elements, the fork will be linked to the phenomenon of tech giants issuing their own currency. We will present all the known facts of the case, important stakeholders, relevant circumstances of the fork, actions taken by individuals and the community as well as the rest of the information that influenced decisions taken by the involved parties. We will create three claims for each party which together form a dispute between primary blockchain community and the forked community. Attendees will be asked to form argumentation for both sides, analyzing and applying current customs, norms, and protocols with respect to crypto law and already existing practice in the blockchain community. The objective of the workshop is to form an interdisciplinary cooperation and practice combinations of expertise needed to create persuasive and complex argumentation. They will take into account practicalities, e.g. protocol design, the politics and efforts of stakeholders as well as the usual scenarios, communication management, expected public relation management, intellectual property hacks, and standard business ethics.
Anja Blaj, Marina Markezic
Governance Schizophrenia of Decentralized Protocol
Decentralized protocol has conflicting needs of governance during its life-cycle. In the early stages, the protocol needs fast, flexible and focused development. Such is usually achieved by the founding team controlling both roadmap and team composition. Autocratic leadership enables the protocol effective bootstrapping and fast time to market. As the protocol matures, more and more people become dependent on it. Characteristics of being fast, flexible (and centralized) transforms from an advantage to the unwanted feature. People who build their businesses and lock-in their future on chosen platform are not willing to undertake risk of their lives being governed by nontransparent organization. So, how can it be addressed? Building decentralized protocol with the governance transformation process in mind (from day one) is the answer. Let's elaborate on the most efficient and non-destructive governance transformation model that would put order to the noise of the protocol schizophrenic needs. From foundation to algorithmic democracy (DAO)...
Dušan Kovačič
Growing The Way We Support
What we're up to, what's different from last year.
Aya Miyaguchi
How ENS is taking Ethereum to the rest of the Internet
ENS is forming a bridge connecting the Ethereum and legacy Internet communities. We are doing this with DNS domain integration; support for other cryptocurrency addresses; resolution for IPFS and Tor .onion addresses; working on securing a new DNS record type for Ethereum addresses; relationships with ICANN, IETF, et al; and working on support for DNS records and other cryptocurrency addresses. This helps to further entrench ENS and therefore Ethereum as a basic piece of Internet infrastructure, used widely by people whether they are a part of the blockchain community or not.
Brantly Millegan
How are projects working with the international development sector? Perspectives from Ukiyo Conference
How are projects securing and scaling use cases in humanitarianism, working with the international development sector and better understanding the needs, risks and challenges of end-users?Hear from the people & projects:- use cases in direct cash transfers, digital identity, community currencies by projects + aid organisations. - researcher perspectives on design, data, privacy and the risks and challenges of deploying emerging technology.- feedback loops with the communities projects intend to serve to understand and test the needs, complexities and impacts of solutions being designed and built. [Ukiyo Conference occurs the day before Devcon in Osaka with the aim of designing and deploying solutions that consider the consequences and complexity of emerging technology.]
Kelsie Naben, Anna George, Mayato Hattori, Asuka Uesaka
How We Think About Storing Crypto is Broken
The original sin of cryptocurrency is not transaction speed, poor anonymity, volatility or a high Gini coefficient -- it's a digital format which is confusing to use, easily delegated to centralized exchanges and, most importantly, reliant on multiple layers of software and hardware trust. What if instead Bitcoin and Ethereum were like cash, a physical format that billions of people are intimately familiar with? To achieve a viable physical cryptocurrency, however, we need radically open hardware with cryptographically-secured guarantees of their face value and uniqueness anchored in silicon. We propose a novel, low cost, physical format for cryptocurrency -- more appropriately "cryptocash" -- that's intuitive to use and allows for free, anonymous, and instantaneously final transactions. By isolating cryptographic key material and operations from software and firmware in secure silicon, we can build a new hardware foundation that supports not only self-ownership of crypto assets, but broadly serves to secure the secrets users need for participation in the decentralized web. We'll hone in how shared trust in hardware and chips must ultimately be quantified through crypto-economic incentives such that we can move away from manufacturers that willfully or ineptly include backdoors in their products.
Cameron Robertson
Increasing adoption, the hard(ware) way
Everyday we use tremendous amount of computer power. However, nowadays all of this processing needs are fulfilled by 3rd parties and it is damn convenient to do so, even if it means sacrificing privacy and security. In the short term it is not very likely that families have servers at home that fulfil all their computing needs 24/7, let alone the nodes to run blockchains! The mass market is already buying and running, of their own volition, hardware that provides them with a service they extract direct value from: a smart hub home, a voice assistant, AI bots monitoring all sorts of data… These are entering the consumer market by the storm, but they are missing one key piece: a means to transfer native value within the networks they form. Can we leverage the hardware people are already accepting into their homes and give them more functionality? Can we equip these devices with nodes and increase node count? What needs to happen for this to become a reality? An incentivization layer, a more data-conscious cyber-culture and direct value to the user would get us there. This talk will explore how to put a node in every home.
Eduardo Antuña Diez, Pol Bordas
(In)Stability for the Blockchain: Deleveraging Spirals and Stablecoin Attacks
We develop a model of stable assets, including noncustodial stablecoins backed by cryptocurrencies. Such stablecoins are popular methods for bootstrapping price stability within public blockchain settings. We demonstrate fundamental results about dynamics and liquidity in stablecoin markets, demonstrate that these markets face deleveraging spirals that cause illiquidity during crises, and show that these stablecoins have `stable' and `unstable' domains. Starting from documented market behaviors, we explain actual stablecoin movements; further our results are robust to a wide range of potential behaviors. In simulations, we show that these systems are susceptible to high tail volatility and failure. Our model builds foundations for stablecoin design. Based on our results, we suggest design improvements that can improve long-term stability and suggest methods for solving pricing problems that arise in existing stablecoins. In addition to the direct risk of instability, our dynamics results suggest a profitable economic attack during extreme events that can induce volatility in the `stable' asset. This attack additionally suggests ways in which stablecoins can cause perverse incentives for miners, posing risks to blockchain consensus.
Ariah Klages-Mundt, Andreea Minca
Japanese, Human-Readable Smart Contracts
This workshop invites native or fluent Japanese speakers to create a Japanese-based smart contract language to create Ethereum smart contracts with that can be read by anyone who understands Japanese, and deployed directly to the Ethereum mainnet. Speakers of other languages who are interested in facilitating a Lexon variant based on their language are also invited to understand the process of adaption. The attempt is based on the Open Source, human-readable smart contract language Lexon that is a subset of natural English. This workshop is a hackathon-like event where the Lexon compiler source code and grammar is altered to see if a Japanese version of Lexon is possible. Coding skills are NOT required from participants. Lawyers and impact-oriented participants are highly welcome. Only one or two programmers — likely the tutor — will be working on code. The actual work will be for the audience to understand how the Lexon grammar is structured and to propose what has to be changed to make it work with Japanese. The result may be a working Lexon compiler for smart contracts written in Japanese, that anyone who can read Japanese can understand, and that can be compiled and run on the Ethereum main- and testnet immediately. This is possible because the Lexon grammar is relatively concise and changes to it can be made in a straight forward way that could lead to immediate results. At the least some experimental output should be achieved from an alpha version of a Japanese Lexon compiler. This is a different proposal from the workshop that teaches people how to write human-readable smart contracts in English. This Workshop is complementary, hands-on research part to the proposed 20-minute session about Human-Readable Smart Contracts. It will allow participants to shape the way forward for the project. (For your convenience, the following is a repeat from the complementary 20-minute session application that focusses on reading and the science behind it. 'Human-readable' smart contracts expand the audience of people who can read smart contracts by a thousand times. They democratize them beyond the ranks of developers and provide a means for expert validation, human debate and consensus. Lexon is a new type of program language that can be read by anyone without any preparation, made to create smart contracts that run on the Ethereum mainnet. It has been built from the ground up, over the course of two years, to allow lawyers and non-programmer experts to understand first-hand what a smart contract means. The result turns out to be enlightening for any community that wishes to allow their non-technical members to read for themselves what its DAO or smart contract code actually means. Turns out that's everyone except re-centralizing start ups. LEX Escrow Contract. "Payer" is a person. "Payee" is a person. "Arbiter" is a person. "Fee" is an amount. The Payer pays an Amount into escrow, appoints the Payee, appoints the Arbiter, and also fixes the Fee. CLAUSE: Pay Out. The Arbiter may pay from escrow the Fee to themselves, and afterwards pay the remainder of the escrow to the Payee. CLAUSE: Pay Back. The Arbiter may pay from escrow the Fee to themselves, and afterwards return the remainder of the escrow to the Payer. The enclosed paper draft explains the concept in-depth and has longer examples. Lexon is an Open Source project by the Lexon Foundation. It was created by the presenter and implemented by Marcelo Alaniz, Nicolas Guzzo and him.
Henning Diedrich
Is Market Capitalization an Objective Measure of Cryptoassets' Value?
The cryptoasset industry is fixated on market capitalization as a metric in determining the success of any particular project. In this talk, we will shed some light on how market capitalization can be easily manipulated and is not entirely the best metric to value cryptoassets. More due diligence should be applied before trusting any market capitalization number published anywhere.
Bobby Ong
Legal troubleshooting for DeFi projects
This will be a practical course and discussion around navigating decentralized finance projects through troubled waters of global regulation. It will cover issues universal for many DeFi areas, as well as those specific to most popular products (DEX-es, stablecoins, etc.), in a cross-jurisdictional context. The goal is to cover many topics neglected in mainstream media discussion, yet crucially relevant for DeFi projects creators. Not planned to be a lecture delivered ex cathedra, but an actual workshop for all DeFi movement participants present at devcon.
Jacek Czarnecki
Living On Defi
Living in Argentina but getting paid in Dai, I can access financial systems that are usually not available to us. I want to show how Ethereum's DeFi movement has been working fine for the last 2 years, by leveraging Dai and secondary lending platforms, and how that is changing the financial reality for people in developing economies. Someone in South America getting paid in crypto can access more stable currencies than their local ones, with better interest rates, and this is all happening right now, and scaling right now.
Mariano Conti
Machine Learning Resistance for Human Rights on the Blockchain.
Bitcoin's original white paper description of "one CPU one vote" (Nakamoto, 2008) shaped the software industry to think governance centered around machines, instead of humans. Although a fundamental right to privacy bent early blockchain design toward anonymity, this property facilitates the malicious use of Sybil Attacks (Douceur, 2002) significantly undermining the governance capacity of protocols. The importance of formalizing human identities can be inferred from centralized networks: major social media platforms were established when they achieved a sufficient level of consensus over their identity protocols, thus creating a trust layer on top of which a myriad of social applications could be built. This networked social infrastructure has in turn facilitated the emergence and spread of multiple borderless political movements. However, being highly vulnerable to several artificial intelligence exploits such as addictive algorithms, bots and deep fake technology, the underlying architecture of current protocols exposes society to political manipulation as well as data theft. On this talk we'll explore the different approaches to reach a "one human one node" graph, providing protocol specifications able to serve as a source of legitimacy in the governance of digital networks and strategies that can keep these protocols free from AI.
Santiago Siri
Measuring Decentralization of Blockchain Networks
We introduced the concept of measuring "decentralized transactions per second" in this paper (https://consensys.net/research/the-maximally-decentralized-settlement-layer/) and have invited the community to help us define it. We will have data and insights to share at the time of DevCon V. Decentralization is a fundamental blockchain concept, but how to actually determine or quantify decentralization—and consequently, how to value one blockchain's potential over another—is more complicated. Currently, transactions per second throughput is the most popular competitive metric for comparing blockchains, but this emphasis on speed ignores the essential feature of decentralization. In Balaji Srinvasan's 2017 "Quantifying Decentralization," he proposed the use of the Gini and Nakamoto coefficients to attach an objective measure of decentralization to a blockchain. By applying Srinvasan's logic of measuring comparable blockchain characteristics (i.e. node decentralization) and representing it numerically, we propose a measurement we can call DTPS, or decentralized transactions per second. The purpose of DTPS is to factor a blockchain's decentralization into the ecosystem debate of judging one blockchain's transaction throughput against another's. There does not exist, however, a way to factor all that information into a single comparable statistic that factors in near-objective decentralization with objective TPS.
Mally Anderson, Everett Muzzy
Money At The Edge: How People Stay Afloat in Venezuela
The Open Money Initiative has gone into the field to understand how Venezuelans survive in the midst of heavy capital controls, criminalization of free markets, and hyperinflation. We'll share stories from places like Cúcuta, where worthless bills are used as art and home decor, and Caracas, where individuals are saving in bitcoin, trading it for local currency only at times of essential purchases. We'll discuss concepts for products and services in places where regimes have a tight grip on society, and how they relate to cryptocurrency.
Alejandro Machado
New Markets In The Arts
This presentation explores new markets to facilitate the arts, breaking it down into three broad categories. 1) Patronage & The Always-On Auction Through Harberger Tax. 2) New Generative Economics & The Creation of Autonomous Artists. 3) Markets As Arts. Exploring New Arts Through Markets-As-Medium.
Simon de la Rouviere
Open Community Discussion
An open community discussion featuring many voices from the Ethereum ecosystem & developers.
PANEL: Community Interoperability
Vitalik Buterin, Terry Culver, Josh Swihart & Jae Kwon discuss Community Interoperability.
Vitalik Buterin, Terry Culver, Josh Swihart, Jae Kwon
PANEL: Emerging Technology and Social Progress
Natalie Cargill, Will Ruddick, Adam Bornstein & Lucas Geiger discuss Emerging Technology & Social Progress.
Natalie Cargill, Will Ruddick, Adam Bornstein, Lucas Geiger
Peers and Intermediaries in Indonesia's P2P economy
While 'peer-to-peer' emerged as a technical term, growing traction means it is increasingly used to describe a wide variety of complex socio-economic transactions. Anthropologist Keith Hart observed that "A lot more circulates with money than the goods and services it buys. Money conveys meanings and these tell us how we make the communities we live in." Arguably, the exchange of digital money also comprises far more than a simple financial transaction, and far more than can be summarised in an elegant acronym. Who are these so-called peers? Who are these (multiple) intermediaries, subtly obfuscated behind the '2', and why do people rely on them? And what does disintermediation mean in such a context? This talk unpacks these questions, by drawing on ethnographic research on the use of digital payments in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. It analyses the various relationships between different types of users and the power and responsibility that the intermediaries have in configuring socio-economic dynamics when developing technology. The talk shows how 'access' to financial services and technologies is neither a binary nor static category. Rather, providing a viable technological alternative to conventional financial services means supporting people's ability to transition flexibly between forms of digital and tangible money.
Sunniva Sandbukt
Protocols: the control structures of decentralised networks
Protocols are essential for the formation of (decentralised) networks, both for humans and machines. Protocol designs directly influence the interaction between agents and also the kinds of networks that are able to form. This is especially important when trying to build inclusive and open networks. This talk will give the audience a glimpse into the protocol design world and should serve as an entry point for people to get interested in the topic. I will cover some philosophical angles, what it actually means to design protocols; provide motivation as to why making a conscious effort to design protocols is necessary—also motivated by the growing popularity of DeFi applications and their influence on all levels of the blockchain stack—and give pointers for things to watch out for when it comes to writing specifications.
Sascha Hanse
Audrey Tang, Taiwan's first Digital Minister for Social Innovation, presents the RadicalXChange.
Audrey Tang
Realigning Incentives for Nonprofits with Ethereum
The Nonprofit space is a victim of our incomplete economic model. Our current economy does a great job at assigning value to individual wants and needs, but shared resources (infrastructure, the environment, public goods, etc) and taking care of the less fortunate members in our society are not assigned any value at all. Instead, when entrepreneurs do value calculations (profit projections) they are incentivized to extract everything they can from "externalities" because that improves the numbers on their spreadsheet. This is an impossible battle to win for the nonprofit world. Nonprofits will not out-compete for-profit companies when the economic model is working against them. We need to build new economic models around causes, so that we can actually attribute value to these "externalities" appropriately. I will introduce the various tools we have in the Ethereum space: Harberger Tax, Token Bonding Curves, DAO Governance Models, Escrows, Traceable donations, etc and how they can be used to build parallel economic models to fill the gaps in the current system. We have the tools to design, simulate, test and iterate solutions that can level the playing field for nonprofits! Let's get to work!
Griff Green
Robotics under Ethereum computer control
Ethereum as a world computer is the best way to control big and complex cyber-physical systems like smart factories, sensors networks or drone bases. The decentralized computer doesn't have a single point of failure and that feature is important when we want to use autonomous robotics systems.
Sergei Lonshakov
State of Blockchain Governance Breakout
Governance is a hot topic in Ethereum and other blockchain communities in 2019, and for good reason. Blockchain tech continues to evolve rapidly, but our "social infrastructure" lags and major blockchain communities including Ethereum haven't invested nearly as much in building robust, socially scalable governance as they have in scalable tech. This governance-focused breakout session will invite core stakeholders from major blockchain platforms, including Ethereum, Tezos, Cosmos, Polkadot, Near Protocol, Zcash, Decred, and Spacemesh to present in turn the good, the bad, and the ugly of governance in their ecosystem. It will include talks from academics in fields including economics, political science and philosophy, legal theory, philosophy, and ethics, putting the blockchain governance landscape in the context of the overall evolution of human governance systems since democracy was born in Athens. It will introduce participants to essential governance concepts and challenges such as DAOs, on- and off-chain governance, voting, identity, formal vs. informal governance, governing the commons, and aggregating preferences. The breakout session will include a hands-on "challenge" section where participants need to self-organize and race to solve governance challenges in a decentralized fashion, to appreciate how hard the problem is.
Jacob Arluck, Federico Ast, Adrian Brink, Joshua Buirski, Josh Cincinnati, Meltem Demirors, Hudson Jameson, John Light, Jack Platts, Illia Polosukhin, Lane Rettig, Ryan Selkis
Swarm - Storage and Communication for a Sovereign Digital Society
Swarm is a core infrastructure to the Ethereum powered Web3. It augments the consensus layer of the blockchain with secure file storage, content distribution, and communication.In this breakout session we explore how Swarm can help scale Eth 1.x and 2.x. We showcase what Swarm can do for dapp developers. We present new research on data encoding and data structures specifically adapted to the decentralised web. We host a workshop on incentivisation in Swarm. We talk about what the team has achieved so far and the challenges ahead.Topics include, but are not limited to:"Infinitely scalable trustless database services""Ethereum State on Swarm""Running and testing large scale Swarm deployments""SWARM - A core infrastructure to augment Ethereum with distributed storage and secure messaging.""When Merkle Met Entanglements""Distributed storage meets incentivization on Swarm"
Swarm Team
Tales from the field - using Ethereum for a decentralized ISP in rural America
My rural town of 1800 people suffered from lack of internet access. In this talk, I'll explore how we built a decentralized, crypto powered ISP to solve that problem. Homeowners, businesses and farmers own different components of the network and earn ethereum for forwarding bandwith, instead of using large towers and centrally held infrastructure, Everyday people buy eth on their phones and load it into their routers to pay for internet. Building a network in this agile and versatile way has allowed us to reach people more efficiently and provide cheaper and faster internet service. Which means Linda's flower farm is earning eth just for having a few antennas in her yard, and young Beatrice can do her homework at home now instead of the library.
Deborah Simpier
Taxonomy of DAOs
The term DAO appears here to stay. From its first use, the phrase Decentralization Autonomous Organization conjured an array of potentialities, including legal representation and management for natural systems to imaginaries of independent Skynet-like entities. However, despite the resurgence of DAO projects in 2019, we still lack a common vocabulary for different types of DAOs. From "human-work DAOs" to "superscalable" organizations, this breakout session aims to develop a working taxonomy of DAO projects with differing structures and objectives. We will provide a worksheet for participants to evaluate a specific DAO project instance, based on its decision-making processes, ease of entrance and exit, and broader governance mechanisms, with helpers from each project on hand to provide insight. We will also provide basis for existing organizational forms, such as co-operatives and mutual organizations, that DAOs both mimic and exceed. This breakout session seeks to establish a working group on DAO taxonomy, and chart both existing categories as well as the as yet unknown feats of DAOs.
Kei Kreutler, Yalda Mousavinia
Technological Sovereignty, Blockchain & Human Dignity
Being aware that the self-determination and freedoms of the peoples of the world will be increasingly linked to technological sovereignty and the preservation of ethnosphere. The Fourth Industrial Revolution challenges us to approach in a multidisciplinary manner the development of Artificial Intelligence, the Blockchain, Robotization and other disruptive technologies so that they are compatible with Human Dignity and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The promotion of democratization and decentralization of technologies, open source software, open data, web neutrality and the adoption of new technologies for the progress and preservation of the tangible and intangible resources of humanity is becoming increasingly necessary. A multidisciplinary response is needed to create pragmatic proposals on the adoption and implementation of the Block Chain in order to preserve human dignity and promote sustainable development.Work at the highest level to advocate the adoption of Blockchain for the preservation of Human Dignity. To adopt this and other emerging technologies, it is necessary to promote a more structured multidisciplinary process of intergenerational cooperation and knowledge management. We build bridges between academia, regulators, civil society and the private sector for the adoption of the Blockchain for the achievement of sustainable development goals and the preservation of ethnosphere.
Martin Diaz
The DarkTech Renaissance
Amir Taaki gives his talk on the DarkTech Renaissance.
Amir Taaki
The Future History of the Open Internet
Human communication systems have always ebbed & flowed between being open & closed. From the founding of the Free Software Foundation in 1985, to the beginnings of the open source movement in the 1990s, to the historic battles between Linux & Microsoft, to the publication of the Bitcoin Whitepaper in 2008, to the rise of Github, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, there is a rich history of progress on open, permissionless, systems.The internet is the most powerful human communication system in history. The internet changed the world because it allowed humans to move information across a network; and now we have the internet of money: the ability to move financial value across the internet. What will participation in the internet of money look like? What will the future history of our era of the internet look like? In this talk, Gitcoin Founder Kevin Owocki will talk about the history of the open internet + project these trends forward into 2020 and beyond.
Kevin Owocki
The Divorce of a Lifetime - Separating Money and State
The aftermath of the financial crisis made it evident that there was a real need for non-state money. When explaining the need for cryptocurrencies I draw from the analogy between the freedom to choose one's religion and the freedom to choose one's money. Simply put, Ethereum is the separation of State and Money. Growing up in school all of us learn about the separation of church and state, which happened hundreds of years ago. We are taught why it is so important that humans can live in societies where their religion, something very precious to them as individuals, is unethical to leave under the management of the government. In the future, this same philosophy should and will be applied to the freedom of choice towards an individual's money. Today, one can argue that a separation of money and state might be, if not more important than, freedom of religion. Money is as fundamental to our lives as religion, because it affects almost every aspect of your life. The choices that you make about your finances impact your life and those around you, so to have money controlled by a central entity is comical.
Paul Almasi
The Future of P2P Applications
The web today is dominated by the monopolies that won the internet land grab. I personally spent 10 years working for these companies, working on Google Cloud infrastructure as well as Gmail and Google's collaboration apps. It's a hard engineering problem to solve, but we should be able to coordinate work on Devcon6 using decentralized tools. To provide people with an alternative where they own their data, we've build p2p replacement for Google Docs and Slack that works in the browser. For 18 months leading up to Devcon5 we've been working on creating open source network for p2p applications. To build out the underlying p2p stack for the whole decentralized ecosystem, we also led team of p2p projects/experts to create p2p-ecosystem report and position paper where everyone agrees on highest impact work to be funded. As the next step we've also built p2p focused DAO on Ethereum to distribute grants with initial $400k funding.
Rich Burdon, Chris Waclawek
The importance of open assets and their support.
The Internet has a lot of open communities supported by goodwill. Open Source Software, Open Access papers, etc. But communities that have been supported by goodwill are often questioned about their sustainability. If the Open Source Software's system was not a massive ecosystem like today, would Ethereum have been born? This problem is still alive. We considered these communities as "assets" and launched a project to create an economy by securitizing. For assets that previously had no opportunity to be evaluated economically, Ethereum can create its chance. I want to talk about the importance of the many assets where goodwill are considered to be a single point of failure and our solutions to them.
Hiroyuki Hara
The Invisible Obelisk: Marshall McLuhan and Media Studies on the Blockchain
The so-called Toronto School media theorists, including Harold Innis, Walter Ong, and, most famously, Marshall McLuhan, pioneered a new way of thinking about media and communication technology. For them, innovations like the telegraph and railroad were not merely faster ways of transmitting the same messages that had ridden horseback a century earlier. Instead, they were fundamental re-fashionings of the core of human life, changing the speed, size, and internal dynamics of society itself.Similar transformative potential has been claimed for blockchain technology, specifically for its ability to create unique, non-duplicable data objects. But little thought has been given to exactly whatkind of transformations we're talking about. The Toronto school gives us tools for thinking about the nature of this pending change in detail, such as McLuhan's work on 'warm and cool' media and Innis' work on 'time binding vs. space binding' media. This presentation will be based on this chapter draft: https://medium.com/@dzanemorris/the-invisible-obelisk-mcluhan-on-the-blockchain-part-1-70b668c3778e. It will argue that blockchain tech, because it is both digital and durable, is a truly novel sort of media technology. It will explore how it is different from what came before, and consider some implications for the future. This application was solicited by Maria Paula.
David Morris
The paradox of centralized tools doing accounting for decentralized finance
This talk is going to be about a paradox that has been prevalent since the early days of Cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies were made to empower the individual, to be their own bank and to enable financial freedom without having to rely on centralized institutions. The paradox lies in the contradiction that when people want to do accounting or analytics for this new financial system they happily turn to centralized tools. This act enforces the status quo of finance being managed by centralized platforms and goes against the spirit of decentralization, undermining everything we are building. The talk will present multiple examples of this paradox in the world around us, from the way people do analytics (Blockfolio e.t.c.), to the way they do tax accounting (Bitcoin Tax e.t.c.). There will be some theorizing on why this is the case and underline why this is bad for the ecosystem and exceptionally dangerous for the people who utilize such services. Finally potential solutions to this problem will be presented, showing how a tool that performs decentralized financial analytics, accounting and tax reporting should look like in order to respect user's privacy and fit in this new era of decentralized finance we are now entering.
Lefteris Karapetsas
The Use of Utility Token Staking Rewards
The utility token is based on the concept of user ownership. In principle, token-based voting can empower the users of a utility token project to oversee its long-term development. In practice, however, a very large proportion of circulating utility tokens are held by speculators, rather than actual users. The talk will discuss our efforts to improve the utility token model through the introduction of a staking process that incentivizes user ownership. We will explain the process we followed to map our governance objectives into a specific staking mechanism. The talk will explain how this mechanism incentivizes ownership among a target user group, penalizes socially harmful behaviors, and collects and distributes fee revenue in a manner that satisfies basic fairness norms.
Peter Zeitz, Will Warren
Upgradeability of self governed contract
On-chain wallets offer many features that more traditional private key based account lack. This is why many projects are pushing toward broader adoption of multisig wallets to represent users' identity and improve the UX. Yet, all are different and it's unlikely that any of the multisig available right now will be relevant more than a few years. There are features we haven't even though about that will be important to have in the future.ERC725 proposes to build a minimalistic proxy and change its owner when the users feel the need. This allows you to keep your address and not have to move your token to a new wallet. But with this approach, the ownership logic doesn't own the assets so meta-tx with refund is more complex.A better solution would be to allow the proxy to be the multisig itself while offering the same upgradeability potential. Since EthCC 2019, KitsuneWallet has been building a framework that provides upgradeability by design it an increasing number of project (UniversalLogin, Shipl, ...). With this framework, users can upgrade their on-chain wallet to benefit from new features or even change the entire interface to move from one UX to another.
Hadrien Croubois
Weaving Cultural Fabrics With Tokens
Many people in the crypto ecosystem have long operated under the same assumptions that Satoshi operated under in his original white paper: that we should assume that there's no trust among actors within an ecosystem, and that they'll make purely rational decisions to benefit themselves. Since then, we've seen the flourishing of tokens, each of which has their own communities with individuals orbiting at various distances. What we've seen practically is that in reality these actors do end up trusting each other in various ways (such as the way that BTC holders all trust each other to enforce a 21M supply cap), and that similarly, actors don't always act rationally (the proof for this point will be left as an exercise for the reader). In light of these updates, it would serve us well to begin thinking of our protocol designs in a manner that not only incorporates the "hard" side (the one which treats actors like rational machines), but also the "soft" side: the one which takes into account human actors, their emotions, and the cultural fabric or "soft layer" which can sit atop the "hard layer" for a system to work in its entirety. This "soft layer" already exists informally-- on crypto-twitter, in telegram groups, through memes, and at the myriad of conferences which take place year-round in our space. However, there would be significant benefits for us as protocol designers to begin intentionally designing these soft layers alongside the hard layers (even though doing so will necessarily require the input of social scientists and not computer scientists).While many perceive extrinsic incentives (like reputation or value) as being at-odds with intrinsic incentives, this talk will illustrate (with examples) how the issuance and distribution of tokens can enable humans to connect with each other in a decentralized fashion, creating a force which unites them around a set of shared principles or goals. By using tokens not just for utility or fundraising but rather as focal points around which communities may organize, we may begin to intentionally weave these cultural fabrics, to be more successful in building new communities and protocols.
Mark Beylin
What Do We Do About Libra?
Lucas Geiger talks about Facebook's Libra & its impact.
Lucas Geiger
What's Next for DeFi?
The DeFi movement, which rethinks the conventional financial services and builds them in a decentralized manner, has enjoyed great momentum. After the humble beginnings in 2018, this year was fruit-bearing: building blocks for open financial protocols have been laid out. Looking forward, we have to challenge ourselves – what are the missing pieces to make this movement truly accessible and how can we achieve global financial inclusion? MakerDAO is one of the oldest projects in the Ethereum space that has, aside from bringing the first decentralized stablecoin build on this blockchain, introduced a powerful decentralized credit system. Maker Protocol transitioned into both: a DeFi bedrock and a building block in the set of services never seen before. Look ahead with the project founder Rune Christensen – he has a major revelation planned to finish off the keynote - more on this TBD.
Rune Christensen
2022 statistics on MakerDAO voter delegation
In the summer 2021, MakerDAO implemented voting delegation. How does it work and how did it affect their governance?
Emilie Raffo, Tadeo
A More Regenerative, Interactive Commons
"The concept of the commons is not that of a resource; a commons comes from a different way of being in the world where it is not production which counts, but bodily use... established by custom." At KERNEL, we've spent 2 years establishing customs which embody regenerative ways of living, both internally and in web3 projects. We'd welcome sharing KERNEL customs in an interactive workshop, where we get to know each other & our commons through 4 words: trust, value, freedom, and giving.
Vivek Singh, Sachin, Paul Gadi
Buidl the Buidlers: How You Can Create the Next Generation of Web3 Contributors through Education, Peer Review, and Professional Development
We all know there are not enough qualified people in the world to fill all the roles Web3 is asking for. We've got to *create* those people! Join our workshop to learn ways for developing good contributors. We'll start with an open office session where you can ask us your most burning questions. Then we'll move into workstations where you can get 1on1 guidance on specific aspects of Web3 talent building. This means web2 to web3 conversion AND sharpening contributors who are already web3 native.
Lenka Hudakova (Lenkla), Loie Taylor, Melanie Davis, Safder Raza
Composability and Gamification
Web3 tech provides features that have been practically unexplored by game designers. Games use DeFi mechanics, or self-custody and P2P marketplace mechanics, but few have used composability to create new game experiences for incentivization. This presentation by PhD in gaming Andy Boyan will explore how composable Web3 standards enable a revolution in gaming far beyond ownership and collection, featuring Infinity Keys, an achievements game built on composable assets across Web3.
Andy Boyan
DAOs and Biomimicry
The talk would essentially be a distilled version of this piece I wrote around biomimicry and DAOs/coordination/governance https://pop.mirror.xyz/NbNlmtjw3hTzVHiCU9dBjcgFDxpD91UY8DOtl5Ht_x0 My general view I would like to impart with the audience is that what we collectively work towards should be rooted in balance, non extremist behaviour and mindfulness - with concrete examples of the work I have already done in practice across Gitcoin DAO, ENS and soon Element.
simona pop
Exploiting Inattention & Optimism in DAOs
Many DAOs have adopted Oracle based tools to make gassless votes executable. I demonstrated an exploit of one such oracle that was possible because the other users on the oracle app were undercapitalized or not paying attention. This type of attack highlights the weaknesses and risks of many assumptions people have about the attention span of DAO members, and execution conditions. I will show common misconfigurations of tools that are the most risky, and show people how they can fix them.
Isaac Patka
Fixing the Internet with Layer 2 Governance
Web3 opens the door to a new cyberspace—one not only occupied, but governed, by its citizens. [The Optimism Collective](http://optimism.io/vision) is our attempt to correct meatspace's market failures with an L2. But this talk isn't on scaling. It's about... ...the past: why Ethereum is not an opportunity, but a responsibility. ...the present: what we're doing to take this seriously & how it impacts our governance designs. ...the future: the path towards summoning Ether's Phoenix.
Ben Jones
Funding Ethereum with the Protocol Guild
This talk will include an overview of Ethereum Public Goods, existing funding mechanisms and their limitations, our design responses to shape the Protocol Guild, and an update on the 2022 Pilot.
Trent Van Epps
DAO Governance Design Jam
Premiered during devconnect in Amsterdam earlier this year, the DAO Governance Design Jam is a workshop focussed on common DAO governance issues. Leveraging design-thinking methodologies, we will guide participants through the innovation process—alternating between divergent and convergent thinking. At the start of the workshop we will pick a workshop goal based on what resonates most with the group, upon which we will facilitate the creative process and open-source the resulting innovations.
0xdeniz, Tiago Varandas
Mental Health and Avoiding Burnout in Your Crypto Gig
Ethereum culture is 24/7 and always on. This brings with it a lot of challenges for DAOs and crypto orgs who need to balance growth and fast paced crypto culture with mental health. Without the proper knowledge and steps in place burnout can run rampant in a team. This talk discusses some of the things to watch out for, how teammates can be accountable for each other, and how to strive for a work/life balance.
Hudson Jameson
Open Problems in DAO Science Workshop
This workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss and collaborate on open problems pertaining to DAO Science. This session will be run by the DAO Research Hub, organized by the DAO Research Collective, Metagov, and SCRF.
Eugene Leventhal, Joshua Tan, Ellie Rennie
Open Sourcing and Coordinating DAO Research for the Public Good
DAOs are cutting-edge organizational structures and there is limited precedent to help DAO stakeholders understand how to operate. DAOs are now starting to research legal, governance, treasury management, tax, and other issues, but much of the foundational learnings of DAO stakeholders are siloed within their own communities. My talk would focus on how we as a community coordinate, procure, and open-source research foundational to DAO operations to more effectively scale the industry.
Connor Spelliscy
Parameter Optimization and Emergent Behavior in DeFi: Agent Based Simulations and Reinforcement Learning
As in any complex system there may be emergent behaviors in DeFi protocols. In this workshop we will show the basics of how agent based simulations combined with reinforcement learning can be used to explore these and also for optimization of various protocol parameter values. This will be based on https://github.com/vegaprotocol/vega-market-sim and https://github.com/msabvid/cpm_agent_based_sim . Ideally, try to follow setup in Vega-market-sim beforehand, but we'll go through it together.
David Siska, Marc, Tom McLean
Shielded Voting Using Threshold Encryption
Shutter Governance is a tool for governance platforms to introduce shielded voting for their users. It uses threshold encryption and is designed to fix issues with misbehavior, voter apathy, and voting incentive. Simply put, with Shutter Governance, votes are encrypted during the voting period. The votes are decrypted and thereby only revealed after the poll closes. The talk will include a live demo of Shielded Voting as developed in partnership with Snapshot.
Luis Bezzenberger, Jannik Luhn
State of the ENS
An overview of ENS's innovations and progress in the last couple of years. Learn about how the ENS DAO is developing new approaches to decentralised governance, and how the development of ENS's offchain infrastructure makes trustless access to data held outside L1 easier for everyone - enabling both ENS's expansion to L2s and much broader applications.
Nick Johnson
Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling: How Do We Fund Community And Ecosystem Growth
"Institutions are functional when they promote a delicate balance between what people can do for themselves and what tools at the service of anonymous institutions can do for them," Illich writes in Tools for Conviviality. Governance is one tool that helps with resource allocation towards what we want to see more of, at the protocol level and at the social level. Let's explore different ways of funding ecosystem and community growth including grants, on-chain funding, and new mechanisms.
Juan, Anna Kryukova, Alp Ergin, abbey
The Future of Social Coordination of DAO's
We build tools to make it easy for projects to align the incentives of all stakeholders (community, VC's, team members, users etc etc). The direction of the talk will be to talk through the lessons we learnt, how other DAO's and teams can take the success stories to their own projects and give an overview of the aspects of what we did that worked. This talk will also go through the experience that have not worked and a critical view of why they did not.
Chandler De Kock
The History and Future of Decentralized Operations at MakerDAO
MakerDAO is one of the foundational projects in Ethereum that originally created DeFi, and the creator of the DAI stablecoin. The project has a rich history of gradual decentralization and, today, is one of the largest and most advanced DAOs in the space. In this talk I will outline the evolution of decentralized operations and governance at MakerDAO. We will have a look at a few of the most recent scaling challenges, how they developed, and how MakerDAO is dealing with them.
Wouter Kampmann
Why Crypto Protocols Are Failing at Governance, and How to Fix It
Governments have failed and evolved over thousands of years. But some web3 projects were built as though they'd get it right on the first try. That's not realistic. And it's not working. People don't vote, the rules are complex, and protocols aren't inclusive. No one solution fixes all our problems but what we can do is build more adaptable governance systems. With a flexible, upgradeable, and modular foundation, governance systems can increase innovation & participation and decrease turmoil.
Charles St. Louis
Working Towards a Plural Public via Common Knowledge and Designated Verifier Proofs
Often cited virtues of blockchains are immutability, transparency, decentralization, openness, and trustlessness. Many also think of their most natural applications as financial. Yet a critical affordance of such systems is often missed: the way they are uniquely suited to facilitate cooperation. Here I show how via CK and DVPs.
Shrey Jain