And we’re done! We discussed ETH2.0 developments, heard inspiring stories from around the world, gave talks, ate amazing food, sang karaoke with complete strangers, petted dogs, and came out of Osaka with wonderful memories. As we return home and start recovering from the jet lag, we look back at our week at Devcon V.

Sunset at the outdoor auditorium while Vlad talks about the legal aspects of smart contracts

Discussions, discussions, discussions

Of course, the main value received from attending Devcon lies in being able to sit altogether in one venue to hear about what we’re all building, what challenges we are facing, and to get our peer’s thoughts and feedback. In total, there were over 300 different talks, presentations and workshops covering a very wide spectrum of the Ethereum ecosystem ranging from scalability to privacy, UX/UI to DeFi, and governance to developer tools.

There was quite a bit of attention around how we move from ETH1.0 to ETH2.0 (one idea being ETH1.0 will carry on within a stateless execution environment on ETH2.0) and what the shards atop the beacon chain will look like (64 shards instead of 1024, and 128kb shard block size instead of 16kb for now). There were also discussions around how DeFi will fit within this sharded setup and whether composability will be broken or not.

We also heard a lot about optimistic rollups, tales of financial hardship in the hands of incompetent or corrupt central authorities, and forks of Libra. Overall, the mood within the Ethereum community remains very much positive, yet it also reflects the fact that everyone is aware there is still a lot of hard work to be done and many major challenges lie ahead.

We highly recommend going through the list of talks and watching the ones that interest you the most. You can find them here.

Liquidity, Decentralized Finance, and Kyber

As one of the key liquidity providers in the Ethereum and DeFi space, we always feel that we, as Kyber, can provide additional value to the community by sharing our own insights from the experience gained from building Kyber Network and being so closely involved with the DeFi space.

To this end, it was a pleasure to participate in multiple talks and panels throughout Devcon week. On Thursday Loi deep dived into topics around liquidity in a Devcon talk titled “Connecting Decentralized Liquidity for Decentralized Finance”, while I participated on a panel on rebuilding finance and how to overcome the first hurdles in mass adoption, together with MakerDAO, Shapeshift, and Aave.