Hot topics at ECC Paris 2020: DeFi, games, NFT and EthVC
Ethereum Community Conference Welcome Speech first level title The 3rd Ethereum Community Conference (hereinafter referred to as ECC) was held in Paris from March 3rd to 5th, 2020. According to official statistics, more than 250 speakers and more than 2,000 spectators participated. March 7th is EthParis, a hackathon officially organized by ECC, which will be held in the form of an open-topic discussion to promote communication among developers. The ECC conference is held in the form of free speeches. The speakers and participants mainly give speeches on the ecological projects of the Ethereum community. At the same time, this conference has added a link of EthVC. IOSG Ventures is also honored to be invited by the organizer to participate in the Roadshow special session and get in touch with 30 early-stage projects in the community that are being funded. first level title Ethereum General Review The early vision of Ethereum was to become a decentralized world computer, allowing developers to create applications on the blockchain and providing them to users all over the world. As the earliest underlying infrastructure, the network effect has gradually become prominent. In 2017, CryptoKitties entered the public eye and became the most popular game on Ethereum after two months of being online. In terms of daily active users and transaction volume, the popularity of Cryptokitties once caused network congestion, and high-performance throughput has also become the exploration direction of a large number of infrastructure projects in the later stage. Ethereum 2.0 has a clear vision to build a more complete network: increase security by converting to PoS consensus mechanism, reduce the need for PoW mining, and expand throughput and speed through fragmentation, which is the expansion of Ethereum 1.0. In addition to the expansion brought by sharding technology to Ethereum, ZK Rollup and Optimistic Rollup have also become important expansion directions of the Foundation's research. In addition to the richness of the Ethereum ecosystem brought by DeFi and the game track, we also see the ambition of Ethereum in enterprise-level commercial applications. Last week EY, Microsoft and ConsenSys jointly created the Baseline Protocol, a middleware solution for private communications and transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Phase 1 of ETH2.0 will start the implementation of sharding on the Beacon chain, and deploy an execution environment that supports different types of Dapps for each shard. image description The Three Phases of Ethereum 2.0 secondary title Decentralized finance was certainly one of the most discussed topics at the conference. Joe Lubin said that in the next few years, we will gradually see the Ethereum community gradually grow, and applications built on top of it will gradually become mainstream, and more traditional financial practitioners will start to learn Ethereum and gradually create more simple and easy-to-use financial products, and decentralized finance will produce the first killer application of Ethereum. We will also see decentralized applications that are more civilian, can properly restore lost assets, allow easy access from mobile terminals, and provide a better user experience. In addition, many hot issues about DeFi have also been discussed: 1. Standardization of products. Zerion believes that one of the biggest problems of DeFi products is the independence of all DeFi product interfaces and the lack of unified standards. The solution of this project is to provide simple interfaces for open protocols to make the underlying DeFi protocols accessible to users. 2. Flash loans. In February this year, the DeFi hotspots related to the discussion on flash loans were also the focus of the whole meeting. We (IOSG Ventures) also expressed our views on Medium for the first time (article link: https://medium.com/@IOSGVC/our -thoughts-on-the-recent-defi-flashloan-attack-afe856b0a849, interested friends can check it out). In 2018, the Marble protocol published an article introducing its mechanism and introduced the concept of quick loan, which is exactly the same as Flashloa's idea of realizing loan and repayment of principal and interest in the same transaction. In 2019, InstaDapp's Bridge Contract is similar to Flashloan. Flash Loan allows users to borrow without collateral, but only if the loan and repayment occur within a transaction transfer. Stani, CEO of the former ETHLend lending platform Aave, shared his views on flash loans at the meeting. The former users of flash loans were mainly developers, but as the developer community began to build various products for end users, such as borrowing and repaying If more complex and sophisticated transfer operations are performed in a block of funds, we will see more opportunities other than arbitrage robots, such as mortgage swaps, interest rate swaps, self-clearing liquidity pools, etc. At the same time, the warning of the attack on bZx is that, first of all, developers should fully consider their own resilience and the provision of additional liquidity when building DeFi protocols; secondly, regarding the risks brought by flash loans to governance tokens (such as MKR), Stani said that flash loans have always existed, and the project needs to consider comprehensively in terms of token economy, especially the possible risks in the market segment. We believe that the flash loan model has triggered a lot of thinking in the industry. We have experienced the whole incident of lending agreements, decentralized exchanges, oracles, decentralized insurance agreements, and the composability of stablecoins. More opportunities, mainly around the following aspects: Decentralized insurance protocol. After the attack, Nexus Mutual paid two claims for development risks (such as smart contract vulnerabilities or algorithms being arbitraged), verifying the effectiveness of the model to operate in a timely manner under the crisis. Compared with the rich insurance products (CDS, CLN, TRS, etc.) in the traditional financial market and DeFi is still in its early stage, we believe that there will still be more high-quality projects on this track. Decentralized futures exchange. The flash loan model realizes unsecured lending, and for margin transactions that also involve borrowing, the future cost will be much lower than it is now. Since the repayment is guaranteed, the risk of liquidation will no longer exist. When a safer and cheaper decentralized derivatives exchange emerges, it will pose a threat to centralized futures exchanges. To C-end products. As mentioned above, ordinary users cannot take advantage of flash loan arbitrage at present, but this does not mean that it will not evolve into a to C-end product in the future. For example, the aggregation platform deploys flash loans to support users' one-click mortgage swap and refinancing. For another example, professionals develop high-frequency arbitrage strategies and create strategic buying and selling markets. 3. DEX. The developer community has been pursuing a fair, efficient, permissionless decentralized exchange that is also suitable for low-liquidity tokens. According to Dune Analytics data, in February 2020, DEX trading volume reached 372.2 million US dollars, an increase of 62% compared to 292 million US dollars in January. Before that, the highest DEX trading volume was 358.5 million in July 2019 dollars. From the perspective of transaction volume distribution, we can see that Kyber and Uniswap occupy the top positions in the current Dex market due to the rise of the defi ecosystem. Oasis and Tokenlon (0X) are emerging platforms with the fastest rising transaction users to capture higher market value. 0X (V3) and IDEX (2.0) have also begun to introduce new ones, and at the same time, aggregation exchanges such as 1inch.exchange that help users choose the optimal path (lowest slippage) have also begun to develop rapidly. Prediction platform Gnosis introduced the latest attempt at DEX practice. Early attempts include DutchX, which uses Dutch auctions to allow participants to provide prices and quantities themselves. The transaction price is determined according to the final bid, which can avoid early transactions to a certain extent, and is an effective price discovery model. But its disadvantages include time-consuming, the whole process is designed in a 6-hour bidding period, the seller has no knowledge of the final transaction price and the lack of sufficient trading pairs. The team believes that the future will be a split multi-currency market, and there will be a need for conversion between different tokens, between ERC20, between ERC20 and different stablecoins, instead of being mainly used by several trading currencies now. Monopoly, hence the launch of its latest attempt, dfusion. dfusion will improve liquidity through the transaction ring (similar to the settlement function in the central counterparty CCP), batch transaction entrustment ledger to reduce the spread (spread), and unify the settlement price to maximize user utility. The team started research in 2018, and the project is about to go live on the mainnet. image description Ethereum Community Project Gitcoin Thinks ETH Is Financial Lego 1.4 DAOs. A multisig wallet is a DAO because a vote is required before any action can be taken; Bitcoin is a DAO because all progress is made without coordinating all code-based incentives. The two examples explain DAO to a certain extent, and also illustrate that DeFi can provide higher transparency and efficiency. In order for DeFi to truly achieve "De"Fi, decentralized custody, price oracles, profit sharing (including liquidity pools, mortgage returns, etc.), access without thresholds, and open and decentralized governance are required. Centrifuge from Berlin, which is dedicated to solving supply chain finance, believes that DeFi currently lacks the support of DAO. A perfect DAO should meet the following conditions: Voting rights and resolution rights cannot be blocked or changed by a centralized organization Governing members are directly or indirectly rewarded to ensure alignment of interests. image description MetaCartal Ecosystem Decentralized applications of early Pre-Seed such as MetaFactory. secondary title Games & NFTs Most blockchain-based games write the game rules and prop usage characteristics into smart contracts, and define every meaningful behavior (such as action, attack) as a transaction transfer. Currently common token standards in games are ERC20 (basic currency), ERC721 (unique props), ERC1155 (universal props, partially homogeneous). At present, the driving force for the application of blockchain in the game industry lies in: unilateral economy. Players are just observers and cannot enjoy the benefits of game profit growth or affect the direction of the game. Blockchain games make players more "immersive". Property ownership. Players do not have real ownership of game props. Blockchain games use encryption to confirm rights, and props are privatized. Players really own props and can choose to hold them or go to the decentralized trading market to resell them for cash. Trust is missing. Game producers manipulate game parameters at will or maliciously. Blockchain games make the rules more transparent. Compared with the early blockchain games, the Demos displayed by several games at the meeting have obviously worked hard on fun and user-friendliness. The number of speeches about games is catching up with DeFi. On the one hand, everyone agrees that games will be an opportunity to drive Ethereum into the mainstream. On the other hand, it also comes from the concern about the growth of the non-homogeneous token NFT market. The improvement of the Ethernal.world game in this regard is that after the user registers and binds the wallet, he will make a one-time payment into an escrow account, and the background of each transfer will replace the payment of gas fees. When the account fee is not enough, the system will Remind users to save money (similar to Burner Wallet). EOS Knights game company believes that the core of blockchain games is to create sustainable and interesting games, and pointed out that in the past games, in the four major scenarios of user registration, login, payment and item trading, due to blockchain applications (such as specified Premature intervention of the wallet) caused a decline in user experience and restricted the entry of ordinary players. Therefore, in new games, we may see more registration and login through SNS (social network services, such as Google, Facebook, WeChat), The design of the blockchain application is only designed when the payment or income needs to be realized (similar to the Brave browser mode). image description image description Source:https://nonfungible.com/ image description A list of some early projects in EthVC This year's ECC has added an EthVC segment. The organizers screened 30 early-stage projects in advance and held a special roadshow with 35 investors mainly from Europe. The following will share some hot items on the event. Alice image description The activity is in full swinghttps://alice.si/ Stasis Decentralized Public Goods Funding Protocol. It allows anyone to raise funds on the blockchain, and the premise of getting financing is that the project team realizes the promise of product delivery. Since all transactions will be realized on the blockchain, transactions will be transparent and efficient. The latest version will allow the project team to transfer the risk of project failure by allowing the project team to transfer the risk of project failure at a low price with discounted transaction payment rights, so that the project team will receive an upfront payment, and investors will receive benefits if the project achieves product delivery on time. website:https://stasis.net/ Autark A compliant tokenization platform and released a stable digital currency EURS based on the 1:1 anchor of the euro. Compared with USDT, its advantages are transparency, compliance and redemption. Cryptocurrency is still relatively new to the European market, and it is believed that the euro stable currency will be more attractive to European institutional funds. Dune Analytics Aragon-based decentralized autonomous organization to achieve collaboration among large open source projects, similar to Asana with a DAO governance model. After working remotely for a long time, the advantages of the decentralized collaboration platform will gradually become apparent. In particular, blockchain-based DAOs will provide more fair and effective collaboration among projects, teams, and communities, decision-making, and token incentives. But how to stand out among many competitors (such as Colony, Gitcoin), the project needs to find a clearer position. website:https://www.duneanalytics.com/ The Commons Stack A visual reporting tool for analyzing and displaying data on the Ethereum chain. Users can query data on Dune through SQL, create real-time charts and share them with the community to provide visual charts. The project already has many free users in the Ethereum community. The project uses Dune Analytics to easily capture data extraction charts to better provide users with transparency. But how to obtain paying users and further expand will be the difficulty of such projects. website:https://commonsstack.org/ Quid.li Provide sustainable VC-style funding for public goods such as open source software, open source research, or other altruistic endeavors. How to provide support for open source projects has always been one of the problems that the developer community hopes to solve. Oscoin in Berlin uses the degree of dependence and contribution to determine the value of open source projects and provides reward support based on algorithms. The project will help open source projects through token economic design. website:https://quid.li/ Axie infinity Purchase digital currency as a company benefit provided to employees. As more and more people become curious about cryptocurrencies, using cryptocurrencies as employee rewards is a novel way to motivate, but the most direct project on how to deal with corporate taxes and employee taxes has not been considered. website:https://alice.si/ Coinrule Based on the development of Ethereum, collectible game players can buy pets with NFT properties for raising, fighting and trading. The token economy is analogous to security tokens, enjoying profit dividends. website:https://coinrule.io/ Kleros An automated trading strategy platform for beginner traders. website:https://kleros.io/en/ Paraswaps Decentralized dispute resolution platform. Kleros' vision is to resolve multiple types of disputes in an affordable, fast and transparent manner, and therefore a single court and divisions have also been established. The project's governance mechanism will allow each branch to adjust fees, timeframes, and various parameters individually. The risk of this type of project lies in the consideration of how the project can effectively reduce bribery, motivate referees to join, and the opportunity cost of staking tokens. Decentralized exchange liquidity provider. The project collection decentralized exchange data provides users with the best and fastest transactions.https://paraswap.io/#/ secondary title Ethereum Killer App - Community This year's ECC lectures on UI/UX also attracted a lot of attention. We were pleasantly surprised to find that developers began to emphasize communication with users to continuously upgrade products, and at the same time try to weaken the presentation of blockchain in product demonstrations to improve user experience. experience. Starting from the original perspective of solving technical problems, we began to focus on actual scenarios and user increments, and whether product releases will bring positive impact to society. For example, the Pepo product brought by the OST team is a decentralized social software similar to TikTok built on Ethereum. The product supports 30-second short videos, and tokens will be rewarded for every like. Since its release, Pepo products have also been applied in various Ethereum conferences (EthLondon, EthDenver) and become official social software. In addition, we have also seen more and more enrichment of mobile clients to improve user experience, including building wallet services on smart contracts, without mnemonic phrases, and through pre-set "supervisors" in smart contracts to help transfer funds and retrieve them Argent wallet with lost funds (recently announced $12M investment from Pardigm). At present, most Dapps are based on the web-side. It is believed that the improvement of the interactive experience between mobile wallets and web-side applications will become a bright spot in 2020. OST CEO Jason emphasized the importance of user experience and community at ECC Not only does Ethereum have the largest and most diverse developer community in the world, but the communication and collaboration between community projects also makes other infrastructure projects far behind. For example, the Pepo product developed by OST mentioned earlier embeds the Safe mobile wallet developed by Gnosis into the application. Another example is the decentralized prediction market Omen.eth developed by the Protofire project, funded by the Gnosis Ecological Fund and operated by dxDAO. Many early project members in the Ethereum ecosystem are also continuing to help support more entrepreneurs and applications, such as MetaCartel, the first decentralized autonomous venture capital organization introduced above.https://www.ethernodes.org/ image description Ethereum's global node layout - country division, in which the US and German nodes are far ahead. Source: What will be the killer app of Ethereum? DeFi has undergone rapid changes and innovations this year. More and more DeFi modular component companies are introducing new ones. Protocol innovation has gradually become a topic in the Ethereum community. We have also begun to see more types of more user-friendly DeFi enhanced products, including Curve, AAVE, set protocol, Zerion, defizap and other different products have sprung up one after another. Although the emergence of Flash loans allows us to see the extreme form of DeFi's "combinability", it is the cold thinking that this extreme attack and profit behavior brings to the community, which in turn makes everyone more convinced of the possibility of product innovation and decentralization. Evil discussion. I believe that flashloan is not the first and will not be the last to attack the DeFi protocol. The composability and module relay innovation of DeFi will continue, and this kind of attack will continue to exist, but it is the freedom brought by these protocols It will make more developers believe in the future of this platform. Similarly, in the past few years, we have seen the ecological funds of many platforms provide financial support to attract developers to build applications, but there are only a handful of surviving projects. It may not be difficult to build a community, but to maintain a durable, active, mutually supportive community that can be automatically upgraded and can continuously inject vitality into the entire ecology, there may only be Ethereum at present.image description
The conference was held at the Maison de la Mutualité in the city center. This conference has 1 main venue and 6 sub-venues, and at least 4 parallel speeches are going on at the same time. During the sensitive period of the outbreak of the new coronavirus in Europe, I originally thought that the number of participants would be less than in previous years, but we rushed all the way from Berlin to Paris. There were already a lot of spectators at the venue, and few people were seen wearing masks at the venue. . In fact, the core developers of many teams were all present in order not to miss the wonderful speech and the opportunity of Networking in the French community.
DeFi
At present, MetaCartel holds a total of 200K US dollars to provide funds for the project. Although the fund in charge is limited, we believe that especially for early projects, the value of community power cannot be underestimated. We also believe that this is the Silicon Valley incubation investment institution Y-Combinator and 500 Startup. A key part of being able to succeed. We will also establish effective information communication between entrepreneurs and high-quality post-investment projects, and provide early entrepreneurs with the power of community incubation to form a closed loop through the feedback of community power.
The highly anticipated blockchain game Decentraland was finally launched last month. This is a product with the concept of "blockchain + VR + Second Life". The core asset in Decentraland is the limited and passable 3D virtual space LAND, which is a NFT assets maintained by Ethereum smart contracts. LAND holders, that is, landlords, can fully control the content environment and applications they create, ranging from a static 3D scene to applications or games with more interactive functions. LAND can also further form themed communities, also known as communities, so as to form a variety of interest tribes and shared spaces with rich uses. Gaming and NFT tracks have also recently spawned a lot of start-up teams. Cryptovoxels is an interesting and hard-core NFT concept blockchain game. The founder, Ben Nolan, is a former employee of Decentraland.
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