…from a Devcon Scholar’s perspective
As I’m writing this, it’s 5.00 a.m. over here in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and I have been cracking my head over the past hour on how to possibly compose a comprehensive article on what has been a life-changing week at Devcon in Bogotá, Colombia from October 7 till 16. I started by asking myself, “What did Devcon mean to me?“
To the folks over at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), the quoted snippet below from the Devcon website is what Devcon is all about.
Devcon is an intensive introduction for new Ethereum explorers, a global family reunion for those already a part of our ecosystem, and a source of energy and creativity for all.
But to me, it was about understanding the overall dynamics of the ecosystem such as the synergy in place that existed between the ecosystem players that were focusing on different aspects of Ethereum (scalability, adoption, privacy, etc.), and how this helped solve key problems that are typically observed in developing countries such as banking the unbanked, censorship resistance, preventing identity fraud, among many others.
Okay…now, how did I come to this understanding? 🤔
Simple.
It all started from the opportunity I was given by the EF to be a part of the Devcon Scholars Program which led to my participation in ETHBogotá, and Devcon Bogotá. These 3 major components helped formed the right environment for me to learn, adapt and grow throughout Devcon Week, and this is what I would like to share with you more.
Ethereum is a coordination mechanism for all of us.
- Skylar Weaver (EF) during Devcon Bogotá opening
I felt that the quote above aptly resonated with the purpose of the Scholars Program and in the 50 scholars that were selected to attend Devcon, there was proper global representation! 🌍
It’s so important to have global representation as it’s evident that for Ethereum to be a proper coordination mechanism, it needs to have that global reach. People have to know about it, build or interact with it, and it needs to reach those developing regions with some of the painful problems I mentioned earlier.
It would not have been possible for me to attend Devcon this year if not for the Scholars Program. I am forever grateful to them for providing this opportunity to me, and for giving me the space to meet Scholars from other parts of the world, learn about their aspirations and challenge my world views. It was my first time traveling to the other side of the world, and it was more exciting than daunting (notwithstanding the numerous safety guides surrounding Bogotá 👻 )
When filling out the application form for the Scholars Program, I was asked to share 2 desired outcomes from attending Devcon. These were:-
To develop a better understanding of Ethereum through the tracks that are provided in Devcon.
To network with people who are contributing to Ethereum’s growth and understand what the majority are focusing on improving or building.
A week after Devcon, I am confident that my outcomes have been fulfilled and a big part of this was because of how welcoming the Scholars Program was. The facilitation that was done before, during, and after Devcon is one to be remembered.
My favorite activity pre-Devcon was the matchup sessions, where I was randomly paired with another Scholar and we were required to arrange for a 20-minute call to break the ice. We were given a guide as shown below to kickstart the convo. The conversations were productive as they helped me set realistic expectations on what to expect from Devcon and what things I might have overlooked.
🤔 Who are you and what do you do?
✈️ What do you hope to accomplish at Devcon?
🌎 What do you see as your role in the Ethereum ecosystem?
At the start of Devcon, we had a kickoff breakfast session, and some key moments from this was when we did a sing-along with a fellow scholar to the song “ Todo Es Posible”, which meant “Everything is possible”, and it was empowering just knowing that there is an entire community of builders that are in this journey with you working to create change.
Toward the end of Devcon, we had a farewell dinner and we were greeted by a special guest, Aya Miyaguchi, the Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation who played a big part in giving life to the Scholars Program. Each of us had a chance to meet her, and given how I was fascinated by the subtraction philosophy she used to run the EF, I learned from her how to use the same philosophy in aligning my focus with the things I would like to achieve in this space and remain consistent and focused at that. Another thing I loved about the program is how they wanted to keep the scholars in touch and keep each other informed on any initiatives we were working on so that they could support us in any way possible.
Here is where I make a special shoutout to Madison Adams, Serena Tan, Aya Miyaguchi, Dustin Lau from the EF, and many more behind the scenes who have worked so hard to ensure that we get the best out of Devcon. Thank you so much!
Not forgetting my family, and friends who have supported me every step of the way in the application process for the Scholars program, especially my colleagues from Etherscan, and the community members of ETHKL who were the main reason how I found out about the program and also provided a recommendation for me. LFG 🚀
ETHBogotá was my first web3 hackathon but the 36-hour experience was both exhausting and rewarding given that this A-team won 8 sponsor prizes with our solution, GiveFire!
We met over breakfast on the day of the hackathon and at the time, Eason (the guy with white joggers) and I were looking for a team with an idea while the other 3 team members (Alex, Gary, and Kim) were looking for 2 developers, so it was just the right fit! We were a diverse team of 5 from Malaysia, Singapore, the United States, and Mexico.
GiveFire is essentially a collective giving protocol that makes the ritual of consistent collective giving go viral. We took some inspiration from the social media app BeReal to instigate the giving habit where every week you and up to 4 friends can browse web3 non-profits to donate to, propose a non-profit to donate to, and if everyone agrees to donate, then up to 10 dollars from each member of your circle will go to a wallet controlled by the non-profit.
Some key takeaways from this hackathon were:-
Focus on the minimum viable features required to show the essence of the solution given the time constraint. It is common that sponsors to want to see how are their products best used in your solution because they would also like to know what are some of the innovative use cases that are possible with their product.
Enjoy the process. The ideation, building, and testing stage that went into developing the hackathon project forced us to be innovative and iterate rapidly which was new to me too but I had to adapt eventually.
I also enjoyed the presentations by the 12 finalists of ETHBogotá and I highly recommend you check them out here. These projects also gave me a fresh perspective on different types of problems that need to be solved and creative ways of solving them.
There were just too many good talks, I couldn’t catch them all, but thank god for the Devcon Archive. If you could not attend Devcon Bogotá IRL, the sessions are recorded so check them out!
In the opening session, the Merge Song, Aya’s talk on “Executing with subtraction in the Infinite Garden“, and Vitalik’s talk on “Ethereum in 30 minutes” were iconic. The Merge was no small feat, and the song truly commemorated the people behind it as shown in the picture below.
Key Takeaways:
3 guiding principles are used to run the EF: long-term thinking, stewardship of values, and subtraction.
Our brains are trained to add, so naturally, when we are given more resources, we are inclined to add/spend more without thinking about the option to subtract.
Subtraction became the underlying strategy to support the Ethereum ecosystem because the path of addition was long. The idea was to support the Infinite Garden (Ethereum ecosystem) through multiple initiatives by boosting external groups critical to Ethereum’s growth.
Subtraction is critical to Ethereum’s decentralization and aims to achieve 2 goals that are to seek the right balance and to focus on what is most important.
Key Takeaways:
Ethereum is a general-purpose blockchain. Blocks are made up of transactions. Attestations confirm blocks.
Accounts are the information (“state“) that the blockchain keeps track of. Externally Owned Accounts (EOA) are accounts that represent the user. Contracts are computer programs that live on-chain and have code and internal storage.
Gas is the unit of resource computation within Ethereum. Each transaction costs a base of 21000 gas. Each computational step costs ~2-10 gas. Editing a storage slot costs 5000 gas (20000 gas if the slot is not filled yet). Each byte of data costs 16 gas (4 if 0 bytes)
A full transaction object consists of a:-
tx type
chain ID
nonce
max priority fee
max fee
gas limit
destination
amount
data
access-list
signature (3 fields)
Ethereum’s future directions:
The Merge: DONE! (PoS can be improved with single slot finality)
The Surge: Improved scalability through rollups, danksharding, and ZK-SNARKs
The Verge: Replace Merkle Trees with more efficient data structures that let Ethereum nodes be much lighter (“stateless clients”)
The Purge: Clearing out old data and technical debt
The Splurge: account abstraction, EVM improvements, Proposer-Builder separation, etc.
I have also listed 4 of my favorite talks across the Developer Infrastructure, Security, L2s, and ZKPs tracks.
ELI5: Account Abstraction
Key Takeaways:
Account Abstraction just means a smart contract account that is managed by the user
Flexible key management and recovery
Arbitrary access control mechanisms
Gas payment can be abstracted
Better efficiency and usability
Opportunity to innovate in UX
Experiment with ERC 4337 by building wallets
Add useful tools like batching and key recovery
Build new features that were not possible with EOAs
Check out the SDK (https://github.com/eth-infinitism/bundler)
Decentralized Threat Detection Bots
Key Takeaways:
Check out Forta (https://github.com/forta-network)
Most attack follow a general pattern of Funding -> Preparation -> Exploitation-> Laundering
ELI5: Scaling Ethereum
Key Takeaways:
Scalability is not just about transactions per second, it’s about the right balance of resources (compute, bandwidth, and storage) between block proposers and verifiers.
Some recaps from the session
ELI5: Zero Knowledge
Key Takeaways:
Zero-knowledge just means that you want to prove a fact without wanting to share information.
Some use cases are in privacy and scaling.
The recommended curriculum is as follows, check out the zkp-app-boilerplate github repo
…final words ser?
I hope that in the midst of reading this article, you are motivated to attend Devcon in the upcoming years (for those of you that haven’t gone to one yet) while also trying to give a shot for the Devcon Scholars Program. In writing this article, a part of me also wishes for more Southeast Asian representation in the Ethereum ecosystem as I think Ethereum can do a lot of good in this part of the world too.
In the meantime, please don’t mind me shilling 2 initiatives that I’d like to see more traction of.
The first is Blockscan Chat. It is a wallet-to-wallet messaging platform built by the team behind Etherscan. We recently launched SDKs for developers to easily use Blockscan Chat APIs, check it out here. It is still in the Alpha release and we’d appreciate any feedback on making it more robust. Vitalik loves our product too! He requested E2EE for the platform a few months back and we delivered ;)
The second is ETHMalaysia 2023! It will be the first major event in Southeast Asia, you can check out Jason Chew, the project lead pitching about it here.
I only believe this is the genesis of my path to something greater, and throughout the entire journey, I am grateful to everyone who has been my mentor and has been patient with educating me given that I’m relatively new to the space. I think the best way to learn is in a community and to give back as much as I could because the more you give the more you get.
Cheers 🍻
Till the next Devcon!