A glance at the key trends at ETHDenver 2023
ETHDenver, held from February 24th to March 5th, is one of the largest and longest-running Ethereum events in the world. This event will be open to Ethereum and other blockchain protocol enthusiasts, designers and developers. It is reported that more than 35,000 people participated in this ETHDenver event, breaking the previous record for the number of participants!The event site is full of developers' technical ideas and practices, making it an annual event not to be missed in the encryption field.
This year's ETHDenver has fully demonstrated the prevalence of Web3's global developer culture. The event is divided into multiple sub-venues, including infrastructure, DeFi, DAO, NFT and other tracks.first level title
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"Fat App"
JRoss, co-founder of Hype.partners, made a summary and reflection after attending the meeting. He believes that all public chains and protocols are currently in the fierce competition of the "application layer". Projects that win at the application layer will do so by:
build sticky applications;
Establish partnerships and gain integrated development advantages;
Attract early community users to participate and use feedback to improve products in a timely manner;
The project has 1-2 developable development channels;
Coincidentally, the development trend of encryption applications is also reflected in the 18 projects selected by the jury for BUIDLWeek this year. Among them, a total of 6 projects were selected in the infrastructure category, and a total of 12 projects were selected in DeFi, DAO, NFT metaverse and public products.
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"Infrastructure Forever"
But this does not mean that infrastructure protocols have lost their momentum in Web3. According to the statistics of Crypto Fees, seven of the top ten projects by revenue half a year ago were applications, and so far, applications and protocols among the top ten projects by revenue are evenly matched. In fact, in order to capture the development opportunities of the application layer, the first step is to choose the infrastructure, which is especially important in the early stage of Web3 development. This is why in the current encryption field, there are rounds of application booms, but the protocol layers of several major applications are evergreen.
Cross-chain tool
There are many infrastructure solutions worthy of attention at this event. The developer tool platform is mainly based on API and SDK middleware, among which the cross-chain infrastructure is the most dazzling. for example:
Koii Labs and Idexo announce a brand new cross-chain middleware that can be safely and efficiently deployed on-chain with just a few lines of code;
Swing Platform can update the configuration and deploy updates without changing the code, reducing the cost of cross-chain deployment and DApp update;
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Accelerating ZK Technology Adoption
This year's ETHDenver has a ZK DAY. Zero-knowledge proof technology has been widely recognized by the Ethereum community - the organizer of the event "hopes to see privacy-centric basic technologies in the future!" However, the difficulty of ZK technology has become an insurmountable gap in the process of its technology promotion and application. So the event hopes to help build the ZK developer community.
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ZK development trend
Focusing on ZK technology and use cases, encryption project parties are looking forward to multiple explorations, some of which are summarized as follows:
Zk-EVM: Zksync focuses on ZK scalability and Zk-EVM, and is committed to being highly friendly to developers;
ZK algorithm optimization: Cysic, Ingonyama provided solutions in terms of hardware acceleration;
ZK & chain game: Based on StarkNet technology, Topology is a chain game solution with the background of the three-body story;
ZK & DID: Semaphore, a zero-knowledge tool for creating anonymous membership certificates on Ethereum, and Axiom, which enhances blockchain consensus through ZK technology;
ZK & NFT: Bazaark, the project selected this year, achieves holding and management by inputting ZK attributes into NFT.
ZK & Infrastructure: zkPoEx is a ZK-based tool designed to reward hackers for discovering vulnerabilities, through which white hat hackers can build proofs of attacks, proving the type of attack. Earn bug bounties without exposing the attack itself.
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Crypto Wallet Use Case Innovation
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data backpack
WalletCon program speaker McMullen proposed what he called a "Data Backpack," an extension of the concept of a wallet to something closer to a digital identity with a large number of off-chain credentials. These credentials could include a person's age, ownership of a Twitter profile or membership in a group.
account abstraction
account abstraction
WalletCon announced at the event that the Ethereum smart contract 4337 has been deployed and tested, and will officially open a new era of smart accounts. This shift in design capabilities means allowing wallets to run as programmable smart contracts, enabling Ethereum users to quickly retrieve lost private keys.
Developers interested in this technology can refer to"The Future of Ethereum Account Abstraction - EIP 4337"one article. In addition, the new paradigm will also use "Social Recovery", "Pull Payments", which will allow people to pre-approve transactions with certain parties, enabling automated billing that is currently difficult to achieve in the crypto space Operations such as paying are much easier.
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Women Power in Web3
On International Women's Day, which just passed on March 8, UN Women used "DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality" as the theme of this year, calling for women to be Equal rights and capabilities to participate in technology and innovation.
One of the themes of this year's ETHDenver is "Women in Web3 Hackerhouse" co-hosted by TPG X NEAR. During the event, the focus will be on female groups, and Hack activities will be carried out in the form of seminars, technical speeches, and diversity groups to give them equal buidl power and opportunities in the Near ecosystem.
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Web3 is unstoppable
In the bear market, there are so many people who focus on technology and care about the future development of the industry to participate, which also shows that Web3 is unstoppable from a perspective. According to the participating topics, in general, with the continuous improvement of Web3 infrastructure, such as a more complete underlying public chain ecology, safe and efficient interoperability between chains, better clients, wallets and browsers wait. On this basis, the way the application layer captures network value becomes more direct and convenient.
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