Devcon news and thoughts: Ethereum has taken shape as a country, rich in technology and lack of applications
Original author: kirinparadise.eth (Alen), co-founder of y2z Ventures
This is the second time I have come to Bogota this year, and it is also the first time I have come to Devcon. Unfortunately, things have changed.
Colleague Dazhuang has always said that this year's Devcon is the first time in three years. In 2019, Devcon in Osaka saw DeFi projects such as comp and uni. So from the beginning of the year, I feel that this Devcon is very important, especially when the narrative cycle has passed and innovation is lacking.
Talk about a few running accounts and impressions:
1. Ethereum has shown the embryonic form of the network country
At the closing ceremony, it was said that there were 6k people who came to Devcon this time, from 113 countries. After the curtain closed, the moment the dance troupe "Encore" entered the venue, raised the national flags of various countries, and sang and danced with unique Latin American dances, the audience went "hi". Jumping all the way from the 5th floor to the 1st floor with the participants, the atmosphere is not Devcon, it is simply carnival, Spring Festival Gala, and Olympic Games.
I believe that every participant who arrives will have a sense of identity, regardless of nationality, but a sense of identity participating in the Ethereum or cryptocurrency revolution.
Holding Devcon in Bogota demonstrates the ambition of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) to expand into developing countries, combining a very important part of this Devcon, Global Impact and Public Goods.
Everywhere at Devcon, various organizations can be seen earnestly trying to promote concepts and implement technologies.
It can be said that compared to an organization, Ethereum really already exists like a "network country" and is actively exporting values and influence.
Perhaps in the next few years, Devcon will carry a beautiful symbol of global peace and equality like the Olympic Games. Considering that the probability of future wars will greatly increase, the new light of civilization is worth looking forward to.
2. Abundant technology and lack of application
The technical keywords of this year's Devcon are basically ZK, L2, Daxian Xue MEV, and new hotspots should be given to Danksharding and AA (account abstraction).
Not a technical guy, let me talk about my thoughts:
1) ZK, I don’t understand all kinds of hard-core technologies. The platoon is so large. It is said that the progress must be faster than before, but after asking, it is still far away from the real landing. In addition, the intuitive feeling at the venue is that compared with the popular ZK Infra, the Scroll scene is more eye-catching and more down-to-earth.For the Showcase of ZK's application, you can take a look at this Part, but the video didn’t seem to be uploaded yet, and they couldn’t get in the queue at all that day.
2) MEV, although there is no MEV in this year's category, MEV and Validator basically occupy the Cryptoeconomics category. Compared with technology, we may pay more attention to the changes and opportunities of the size and distribution of the MEV cake in the future with the changes in the Ethereum ecosystem.
3) Danksharding, a new hot topic at Devcon this year is Danksharding. Using DAS to solve the problem of Ethereum expansion is very complicated, and it is estimated that it will be officially launched in 2 years. But Proto-danksharding (aka. EIP-4844) will be launched next year, and it can also be used, which will benefit the two OP Rollups.
4) Account abstraction and derivative 4337 is another big hit this year. It should be the technology that can be implemented the fastest from Mass Adoption in this year's meeting. The second place team of the AA theme Hackthon said that the most attractive point of AA is that the user can control the account with the private key, and they can change the wallet at any time if they don’t like it. After the smart contract wallet in the future, users can no longer control their accounts purely with private keys. This will bring about many changes and explorations of business models.
can seeThis thread from the unipass team：
To sum up, next year Proto-danksharing+L2 will be able to solve part of the expansion problem through sewing and mending, and then AA will solve the problem of user import, and we look forward to some applications that can play some tricks that can be used in a large area of CX through the above.
However, there are no projects in the application that may bring about the dawn of the bull market, such as Comp and Uni in 2019, which means that the innovation cycle of this round may be longer than expected.
The most impressive thing in the application is the physical card that ENS and poap cooperate with. Register a swag on the ENS website, and you can get a physical poap tag, and you can get a proof of "meeting xxx at Devcon6" with just a touch of the mobile phone NFT. Two days ago, the queue for getting the physical poap was the longest. This application case is simply a marketing genius, and there is even a leaderboard. I met many people who came to scan my poap just because they saw it. Comparable to the best artifact for breaking ice. The consensus between ENS and poap is terrifying, and I am looking forward to what other interesting applications will grow on top of it.
poap entity card
What amazed me the most was 0xparc's onchain gaming engine mud.dev designed by first principles and the two games above (an RTS and an on-chain minecraft).
For two consecutive afternoons, in the basement with the cyberpunk lighting atmosphere of the venue, the 4-person group PK of Dark Forest was directly carried out, and there were also two game trials. Team nuts, high atmosphere.
On-site public beta, unfortunately the network is poor
(In the future, investment institutions must personally participate in the "stealing game" to obtain tokens 23333)
Compared with the richness of technology, the application is missing.This phenomenon, onchain gaming may be the best epitome of it, just like "It's gonna be nuts" in the above ppt, although I believe that onchain game will be the future, but its longterm lack of commercialization is also the status quo, and it can only be said that nuts are responsible for technology Underlying and crazy innovation, the final large-scale promotion depends on other opportunities and organizations, but it has not yet appeared in this Devcon. Otherwise, it will be difficult for Ethereum to truly affect all mankind and people in developing countries.
"I'm in charge of being beautiful, and you are in charge of making money to support your family." Decentralization, composability, modularization, each perform their duties to winwinwin.
Before the opening of Devcon, when I visited the site, I found that the Colombian Coffee Expo was being held opposite the venue. I was fortunate to be a "reviewer". I tried 6 kinds of coffee at one time, and when I tasted them at the same time, I usually couldn't drink them. The difference can be seen intuitively. But most ordinary coffee lovers will not taste n kinds of coffee at the same time. Reminiscent of the chess metaphor in space a few days ago, I think it is very appropriate to use it as a metaphor for the current status of technology and applications.
The current architecture is like a recipe, and various technical categories on the architecture are like ingredients. Such as tomato scrambled eggs. The recipe appointed by God V describes how to fry a plate of delicious tomato scrambled eggs, so various technologies began to study how to grow good tomatoes and raise good eggs. If zk technology is compared to tomato farmers, various technologies One point is like one saying I want to grow sour tomatoes, and the other saying I want to grow sweet tomatoes. If L2 is compared to an egg supplier, all kinds of projects are saying that I am a native egg, I am a sterile egg, and so on. But what is exasperating is that the suppliers of the above-mentioned ingredients have come back, but they all said that it will take 1 or 2 years before I can supply the goods, and they are still growing.
But not all diners will pay attention to the 100 ways of tomato and eggs, just like not everyone has the opportunity to taste 6 kinds of coffee to judge the difference.
text
When it comes to cooking, which country do you think cooks the best?
3. The balance between "orthodoxy" and EF's substract philosophy
"Orthodoxy" is a universal problem-solving vocabulary in the currency circle. It seems that for all problems, when the three words of orthodoxy are endorsed, everyone has patience and smiles brighter. This time, we came to the "orthodoxy" base camp , like a spring breeze.
After the rollup day, I discussed some MEV issues with Mr. Lin @blankerlin. He said that it is difficult to discuss many issues together because there are too many backgrounds of many technologies. Just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the branches are getting more and more complicated, and each hero is still getting a sequel. If newcomers haven't watched the previous complete works or Lorre's n-minute summary video, it is basically impossible to discuss together. Of course this is normal. But in this environment, so-called authority is easy to be born. Due to the special technology and academics, it is placed in the traditional market. This may be called a schoolboy. When the schoolboy is combined with capital + media, the right to speak and price is greatly reduced.
Ethereum has been upgrading, and each upgrade will bring a group of new project opportunities (such as new concepts such as danksharding and account abstraction wallet), and new concepts and new projects mean new benefits. And "orthodoxy" is a universal vocabulary to capture the interests of this layer. Whether Ethereum can orthodoxy move toward small circles and nepotism.
In some categories that lack sufficient competition, "legitimacy" is required.But in a category track that can fully compete, perhaps "orthodoxy" should not be overly mythical, just like arbitrum is to op.
Conversely, orthodox benchmarks define the track and valuation, and the valuation inversion caused by the prejudice against challengers may be an investment opportunity. As Chess said, religion is sacred, but the impact of dimensionality reduction on high productivity is also very realistic.
Aya, the CEO of EF, also mentioned in the opening ceremony that the Ethereum Foundation mentioned the concept of "restraint" in senior management, minimize governance, distribute opportunities, and allow peripheral organizations to have more opportunities to play, etc. Its real antidote to the above problems, at least conceptually.
Hope it can be balanced.
restraint philosophy
4. The collision of decentralization and regulation
Another important topic of this Devcon is the face of regulation.
As the volume of Ethereum or the cryptocurrency circle becomes larger and larger, more and more governments see the value or "threat" in it. Naturally, a collision with centralization cannot be avoided. For example, Europe has begun to implement foreign exchange controls or various quotas on US dollar stablecoins like China, as well as the supervision of Ethereum nodes. However, I haven’t heard much about this, but what Tang Han said about the supervision thread is very inspiring (ps . From Tang Han's words, I felt the same cry as Teacher tt, the power of scarcity! Touched!)
Beginning next year, it will be a big year when the decentralized world and the centralized world regulation "border" head-to-head.
At the opening ceremony, compared with the previous awkward dance between V God and the Ethereum Foundation, this time invited a local professional black dance troupe from Colombia, and the effect was much better. But in the foreseeable future, it is difficult to say that various external environments will be "friendly" to cryptocurrencies. If the Internet country really lands and relies on cryptocurrencies to continue the spirit of globalization, it must encounter many realistic "hard bones" in advance. At that time, there may be no time to enjoy the professional dance troupe, but it does not prevent the cypherpunks from having the energy to dance in place again.
