(crossposted from r/ethfinance - would love to see more action here)
EthCC day 1 recap
Notable talks:
"MEV, toxic flow and its consequences" by Robert Paluba (0x).
A very interesting deep-dive into the analytics they have done on mev strategies for the biggest UniswapV3 pool, ETH/USDC. In the past three months hft market makers have taken over mev for this pool completely and pushed sandwich bots into unprofitable territory. It's just a handful of entities with deep pockets now that run the show and by combining dex/cex arbitrage with transaction frontrunning and block building. Surprisingly, this actually improved slippage for end-users but takes revenue away from other LPs in the pool.
"Introducing Lens Protocol V2" by Stani Kulechov (Aave)
Lens gets a bunch of new features including "actions" and a composable nft-based identity. There still is a waitlist for new users though.
"From self custody wallets to self custody payment - annoucing Gnosis Pay" by Martin Köppelmann (Gnosis)
The just-launched Gnosis Pay combines a Gnosis Safe wallet with real-world fiat payments via visa card or sepa bank transfers, all in a convenient dapp. They utilize a Polygon zkEvm L2 settled on Gnosis chain L1. Early access preorders for the visa card are available for EU residents via a POAP given out during the talk. To me this looks like an exciting product where a lot of puzzle pieces suddenly fall into place for a great user experience, I will definitely order the card to replace my cex visacard (sorry Bitpanda).
"Lessons from a seasoned web3 security firm" by Mehdi Zerouali (Sigma Prime)
Good overview over smart contract security best practices. Sigma Prime also just published a lot of their audit reports, and they offer 8-12 week internships in case anyone is interested.
"Introducing Uniswap v4" by Alice Henshaw and Sara Reynolds (Uniswap Labs)
V4 allows extensive pool customization with smart contract hooks for all important pool interactions. The new singleton contract design optimizes gas usage while "flash accounting" helps with transactions spanning multiple pools (sorry, didn't quite understand the example they provided).
"The New Frontier of Liquid Staking" by Jordan Sutcliffe (StakeWise)
Stakewise V3 has exciting new features: staking vaults are highly customizable and enable "white label" liquid staking solutions for all kinds of organizations. You can mint 111% overcollaterized osETH tokens against your staking deposits and use them in defi. They currently run a public testnet (pacific.stakewise.io) and are eager for feedback from users.
"The Verge: Converting the Ethereum state to Verkle trees" by Guillaume Ballet (Ethereum Foundation)
Description of the different possible strategies for bringing verkle trees to Ethereum. Migrating the existing Merkle-Patricia-Tree state is computationally expensive and will probably need to be done gradually over the course of weeks of months with high gas prices.
Random observations
the sponsor stalls in building B are in a big hall with super high noise level, making it hard to have meaningful conversations
the nethermind devs said snap sync should take only a couple of hours, so there was definitely something wrong when my resync a couple weeks ago took 6 days to complete. They recommended bringing this up in their discord
I have neglected getting a party invite for today and will instead hit the climbing gym :)
Of course today had manyinterestingtalks and Vitalik's keynote, but there is one talk I want to specifically highlight because it resonated strongly with me and my beliefs. This is what we as a community or society in whole should all work on, instead of dreaming about lambos:
"Rewriting the shared myths that run the world" by Tamara Helenius of Commons Stack.
Oh yeah, and Polygon premiered their zkEVM documentary "SCALE" today after the conference closed. It was more or less an infomercial celebrating and thanking the great people who worked on it. I'm a bit of a fanboy myself, but there was not much to learn here.
(oof, nearly went to bed forgetting my crosspost from reddit)
Just got back from the ether.fi x obol x ethstaker x dappnode x avado side event at EthCC, so bear with me as I'm slightly drunk.
Met the one and only u/nixorokish and some other nice poap-wielding folks, we had a great time at Café de la Presse near Bastille.
Sooo, time for the holdrcon ethcc day 3 recap!
There were quite a few notable talks I want to share, thanks to the great recording crew they are all on youtube already:
"Ethereumverse... loading. Or: Why we NEED horizontal scaling"
Friederike Ernst of Gnosis (forgot which sub-company) made a case for scaling with l2-native dapps and assets that are not bridged from l1. I am impressed with what they are doing, a week ago I still held the narrative that Gnosis Chain is just an Ethereum testnet and suddenly they have a real world payment solution with visa and bank partnerships and more in the pipeline (e.g. the "hashi" cross-chain-communication protocol).
"A Token Decentralization Journey Under Fraud, Rug Pulls and Scam Attacks: The OCEAN Story"
As part of the token engineering track, Trent Mcconaghy of Ocean Protocol gave an interesting insight on the evolution of the OCEAN token. Through several rounds of community feedback, emergency rugpull reactions and simulations using the self-developed "tokenSPICE" tool (analog circuit design anyone?) they arrived at a point where the protocol is close to fully decentralized and they can focus on pushing adoption. He also referenced a bunch of blog posts that might be an interesting read if you are designing a token model yourself.
Lea Schmitt of Scroll gave a good overview over the development of evm-compatible l2s since EthCC5. To me however, Scroll is still a mystery: who are they? do they have a community?
Georgios Konstantopoulos delivered a very confident pitch for the latest contender in the execution client playfield. After overcoming some challenges like incomplete API specs they now have an alpha version that can run mainnet and offers vastly improved performance over geth and nethermind and is designed as a moddable base for further development. Nice! Also, they seem to have really cool, focused team and look for contributors with a mentorship program to help onboarding.
"Next Gen Cross-Chain Bridges & How All Bridges Still Suck"
Today was a lot about l2s and bridges, but Daniel Lumi's talk was all you need for an overview over the different types of bridges and their weaknesses.
the sponsor stalls in the "B" venue were swapped for a whole new groups of projects. This means new swag, and I loved to meet the POAP team, (ex. Gnosis) Safe and Gnosis pay. Not too thrilled about seeing "Neon EVM" (an evm compatible runtime on Solana) but whatever.
four days of EthCC is a lot, I'm actually considering bailing out tomorrow and visiting one of the side conferences (Impact Blockchain) for a change
traffic in Paris is surprisingly chill: only cars seem to follow rules while cyclists/pedestrians/rollerskaters/... do whatever they like. Still everybody seems to get along well, I wish it was the same back home...
Wrapping up the conference from the train back home as good as I can (on-train wifi is spurious and seems to rate-limit youtube and social media).
Notable talks:
"Ethereum Protocol Fellowship: Becoming a core developer"
Mario Havel of the Ethereum Foundation talked about the fourth cohort of the EF fellowship for protocol level development. The application period for this round is over, but access to the program is permissionless and you can run along the selected participants and receive support and benefits if you have an interesting project to contribute.
"Real-time monitoring of your validators. For you and the ETH network!"
Emmanuel Nalepa (Ethereum Foundation Fellow / Kiln) showcased the software they developed for monitoring validator health and performance. Cool stuff, I can use that!
"ETHcc meets QPL - a meeting between crypto and quantum"
A panel discussion of math and quantum geeks Fabrizio Genovese, Justin Drake, Stefano Goioso and Matty Hoban. Most of the discussion went over my head, but my key takeaways were: one-shot signatures could be another important cryptographic primitive for crypto, and while real quantum devices are still scarce a lot of computational optimizations have trickled down from the work on quantum computing to traditional math.
As indicated yesterday, I was getting fed up by the conference topics and decided to quit in the afternoon. Instead, I headed over across the Seine to https://impactblockchainconference.org/, a parallel conference under the "blockchain for good" umbrella for two panel discussions and an nft exhibition.
Summing it up, EthCC[6] has been a great experience and I want to applaud organizers, team, speakers and volunteers for what they have put together! If I would be asked for critical feedback, my only advise would be to not grow any bigger, as the vast amount of content from conference and side events combined was overwhelming.
For your reference, here are playlists for all the recordings grouped by room:
Thanks @kbrot for setting us up with the magazine (will take a while to get used to this title) and 100x thanks to @ernest for making kbin in the first place!
Yes, the server is slow and there are things that could be improved, but everyone can help making this great:
Weekly General Discussion - July 17, 2023 <-> July 23, 2023
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Weekly General Discussion - July 10, 2023 <-> July 16, 2023
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Daily General Discussion - June 12, 2023
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Daily General Discussion - June 7, 2023
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