Last week, ConsenSys helped sponsor the 2018 BuildETH conference in San Francisco. BuildETH brought together engineering experts from around the Bay area and from afar to talk about the past, present, and future of development on the Ethereum blockchain. Read recaps of the talks, panels, and workshops below.

Last week in San Francisco, the BuildETH conference brought together technologists, engineers, speakers, and sponsors to inspire developers to build decentralized applications. Sponsored by ConsenSys, the Ethereum Foundation, and Amberdata, the one-day event featured speakers and panelists from across the ConsenSys mesh as they shared their experiences and thoughts on the decentralized future. Summaries of talks and panels by/including ConsenSys members below, including Robby Greenfield, Sarah Mills, Michael Wuehler, and more:

Robby Greenfield “Real-World Hacks for Social Impact Dapps”

Robby Greenfield of ConsenSys Social Impact kicked off the speeches by ConsenSys members with a discussion on the applications of blockchain technology towards social impact use cases — specifically, war crimes and sexual assault. Summary below:

The challenge of blockchain for social impact is applying the technology towards the nuances and behavioral standards of sensitive subjects such as war crimes and sexual assault. One of the most basic use cases for blockchain technology is “immutable reporting.” And though a simple use case, it is a key solution for many organizations. For war crimes, the time lapse between submitting a report to an international criminal court and that court reaching a conclusion is significant. Between that time, crimes may continue, lives are in danger, and evidence can be destroyed or tampered with. For sexual assault reporting, proof needs to be proven immutable. In Oakland, CA at the moment, to report a sexaul assault you must write it down by hand and then fax it to the district attorney’s office. Proof and accountability are hard to come by with such an antiquated process. Both uses cases — war crime evidence and sexual assault reporting have traditional systems in place that leverage some sort of digitized process — albeit out-dated. Importantly, neither use case can afford to disrupt the “user experience” of the victim by asking them to interact with the complexities of the blockchain — including downloading MetaMask, paying in crypto, or determining transaction fees. It is crucial we do not impose cryptoeconomics on these users and others who may interact with social impact organizations. In the social sector and public services, a simple use case of blockchain technology can ameliorate a lot of the issues with current systems, but we must remove the barrier to entry from users. UPort does not ask users to pay transaction fees due to their creation and use of Sensui, which serves as a transaction payment and forwarding service. Solutions like these — which in this case removes transaction fees from the eye of the user — may even push us towards scalability that lowers overall operating costs.

Robby Greenfield of ConsenSys talks about tailoring smart contracts towards social impact use cases

Panel “Token Economy — ERC 20 and ERC 721”

This panel was moderated by Simone Brunozzi, founder of Fabrica. Panelists included Aparna Krishnan of Thundercore, Dave Pekar of Rare Bits, and Andy Moy of Token Foundry / ConsenSys. Summary of moments from the panel below:

Brunozzi: What is token economy? What do we mean?

Krishnan: The token economy refers to the incentivization of players across all layers of the protocol. We have seen incentivization of a great many players, but often on different layers of the protocol, resulting in heavy and unequal development. A token economy, as a whole, is a balanced and wholesome incentivization.

Pekar: Virtual economies have existed for a while. However, now with blockchain technology those economies are re-defined. Communities (token holders) are endowed with more fundamental rights. In a token economy, we have a more fair and democratic version of existing digital economies.

Moy: The token economy is a global economy powered by tokens. Importantly, this economy was previously unavailable. This new economy is borderless, instantaneous, more personal, trustless, and more equitable. Brunozzi: What are the challenges of tokens and why are they important?

Krishnan: Blockchains don’t make money. Crowdsales & token sales helped people raise money with blockchains. The new gap in the market, however, is for people who are working on upgrading existing protocols. Why is this year the year of new blockchains instead of just the year of building off Ethereum? Right now, there’s not much money in just upgrading — it’s an open gap in the market.

Pekar: Economies are about coordination and incentivization. No true digital economy will just exist of a currency. It has to exist of a blend of currencies, services, and goods. There is a gap around coordinating those elements of an economy. Companies are good at building currencies, goods, and services separately — but not good at building them together. There’s an opportunity here for interoperability.

Moy: There’s an institutional side of the token economy, and many companies look at it differently. Tokenization is viewed in the incumbent enterprise world often through the lens of traditional finance. There should be efficiencies to promote growth and development, but until legislation is ironed out, we are forced to view this new economy through a traditional viewpoint, which can be challenging.

Joseph Chow “Analysis of Failed Contracts”

Joseph Chow, smart contract expert at ConsenSys, talked through the DAO hack, which caused the ETC / ETH hard fork, and the multisig wallet hack, which led to 500k ETH unaccessible. His talked focused specifically on the weak points in the code, highlighting that the faults were previously unknown or unrealized to developers. His talks highlighted the difficult truth that not all potential hacks and weak points can be identified and fixed — as often times bad actors exploit weaknesses previously unknown. However, he imparted salient advice, including maintaining the assumption that your smart contract is at risk in order to push yourself to make it secure, ensuring your code is as short as possible to provide less room for exploitation, and to take your time with rolling out your code.

Sarah Baker Mills “User Experience in a Decentralized World”

Sarah Baker Mills, head of Product Design at ConsenSys, took the stage to talk about bridging the gap between the new world of decentralized apps and the often-stubborn world of user experience. Summary below:

Sarah Baker Mills of ConsenSys talks about the importance of “low fidelity” designing to staying agile and iterating quickly

For us to realize this decentralized future, we must make this space more accessible for novices and new users. Though technology continues to evolve rapidly — with blockchain technology as the next frontier — human behavior and design principles (and how those translate into UX) remain fairly standard over time. Consistency is key across platform. Standards are key. The blockchain ecosystem, as decentralized as it is, hasn’t yet arrived at a set of standards that allows users to jump from dApp to dApp with relative ease. There are many different dApps being built for many different purposes and audiences, yes. But there are some key challenges and key low-hanging fruit we can identify. Challenges include: 1) Gas. During the CryptoKitties buzz this past year, the network wasn’t slowing down…people just weren’t paying enough gas. But how could they have known that without knowing the details about Ethereum? The solution would to be to have a slider from “cheap” to “fast” to determine how much a user would pay. 2) Time. Getting left on a transaction page is not user friendly. Tell people how long it will take — an estimate, at least. And while they’re waiting, give them another task to do. 3) Private keys. Most casual users don’t know the nuances of private keys, or are rightfully nervous about them. Give aliases to private keys so the characters aren’t so daunting. Walk people through the process. Over-communicate to them.

Mike Pumphrey “Tuning up your Contracts with the Truffle Solidity Debugger”

Mike Pumphrey of Truffle hosted the first workshop of the day to demonstrate the Truffle Solidity Debugger program, launched by Truffle as part of the Truffle Suite. The room — packed despite being a bit hidden — was testament to the fact that Truffle is nothing short of an essential tool for Ethereum developers. Plug for Truffle — their first event, TruffleCon, is happening in Portland, OR October 5–7. Learn more here.

Fireside Chat with Michael Wuehler, Tongtong Gong, Sid Coelho-Prabhu/Toshi, Michael Wuehler, Aya Miyaguchi

The fireside chat was moderated by Grant Hummer. Panelists included Michael Wuehler of Infura / ConsenSys, Tongtong Gong of Amberdata, Sid Coelho-Prabhu of Toshi, and Aya Miyaguchi of the Ethereum Foundation. Summary of moments from the panel below:

Hummer: What worries you about Ethereum? What keeps you up at night?

Wuehler: I think scaling is one area of worry for us. From an Infura standpoint, scaling and transaction throughput are elements we rely on and focus on frequently. We process a tremendous number of requests today and we expect that to grow. The community is strong, though, and we are seeing many scaling solutions deployed and in the works.

Coelho-Prabhu: I would agree — scaling is a concern right now. If a developer builds a successful business right now, they will hit a ceiling where customer adoption cannot continue because of scaling solutions. I also agree the solution will come.

Gong: Not much keeps me up. I’m really quite optimistic. I don’t worry about Ethereum. I have tremendous confidence in the developer community. It is larger than any other blockchain dev community in the world. The issues will be solved. Fifteen years ago we didn’t think we’d be able to stream movies online.

Miyaguchi: What keeps me up at night is that I’m not only organizing and coordinating projects within the EF, but also within the entire ecosystem — which is huge. I feel overwhelmed, I guess — not stressed — about the future. Interestingly, we don’t have many examples to learn from and emulate. This is all a completely new way of doing things. Hummer: Infura is not cheap to run, but it is a critical piece of infrastructure. What’s in your future? Do you plan to start charging users?

Wuehler: The use of Infura has exploded. We revealed it in Shanghai two years ago. We went from 10 million requests a day to billions of requests a day now. On one hand, traditional businesses would be crazy to operate like Infura does without trying to monetize. However, we are trying to build a community and leverage the developer community. We don’t want to burn money, but as long as we keep building the ecosystem and the pie keeps growing, we don’t see a need to monetize or change. In the long run, possibly we’d monetize, but there will always be a free Infura to onboard people to Ethereum. Hummer: Where do you see Ethereum in 10 years?

Wuehler: Well, 10 years is impossible to say. But 5? In general, the future is positive and optimistic. Energy and dedicated people will push this ecosystem forward.

Gong: More and more dApps. And more real use cases for blockchain solving real problems.

Coelho-Prabhu: Simply put? All the current issues will be solved.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.