Joseph Lubin, ConsenSys founder

Last weekend the largest Ethereum hackathon ETHWaterloo of this year happened. Apart from the hackathon itself, there were a lot of great speeches by Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin, ConsenSys founder (one of the largest blockchain companies) and others.

Here we present a brief summary of the most interesting parts from ETHWaterloo.

Let’s start with a few facts regarding Ethereum development:

In 4 years BTC reached 1B $ cap. In 4 years ETH reached 30B $ cap

There are already 50000 ETН developers in the world

63% of central banks are working with ETH technology

44% public institutions are working on ETH

300+ enterprises seriously develop ETH projects

731+ dapps are created https://www.stateofthedapps.com/

1500 + startups work with ETH

1.5B $ raised in last year

VC is the new VC. Virtual currency is a new venture capital

Joseph Lubin said that the future of IT would be in many private enterprise blockchains, many private consortium blockchains and some public blockchains and other decentralized resources.

Also, he believes that blockchain will radically change sharing economy.

Jeff Coleman from Ledger Labs stated that mechanism design might greatly benefit from using blockchain as blockchain can directly enact consequences. Currently, it is necessary to wait when the system becomes big enough to work properly. The example is a huge amount of retweets famous people have on Twitter what means that their content is useful. Blockchain will change it. It will have an impact on people’s behavior in the system just from its creation.

Vitalik had a very interesting talk on Blockchains and Privacy through Strong Cryptography

He explains that blockchain is not good at privacy as everyone can see each other’s addresses.

There are different solutions to this issue like mixers (Helix) and private chains. But both these methods have disadvantages as you should trust the third party and other parties respectively. As a solution, Vitalik suggests using sidechains (like Plasma) and Ring Signature cryptography.

BANKEX hackathon

At this hackathon, BANKEX created a demo version for the smart asset exchange which uses Plasma protocol. It allows exchanging smart assets — in this case, cards with superheroes you want to collect. You can buy, withdraw and exchange these assets.

A video from the presentation:

The code is available on BANKEX Github: https://github.com/BankEx/ethwaterloo-hackathon

What is the BankEx?

BANKEX is a Bank-as-a-Service blockchain platform on Ethereum building Internet of Assets (IoA), powered by Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our mission is to deliver liquidity to assets around the world that are underrated due to the organization of classic financial markets.