On the Road

DappCon 2018—a Recap

Vitalik’s Hell for centralized exchangers — Dante & Virgil watch in the background (Bouguereau 1850)

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

— Robert Frost

The Ecosystem

Of all the roads less travelled by, Dante picked the toughest one for himself. Climbing all the way down to the pit of hell and then all the way up to the peak of heaven is no small feat. Dante had good company, though — in his guide Virgil, another poet. Good company is all human beings need to perform exceptional feats.

We too, the citizens of the Ethereum ecosystem, have picked a tough road for ourselves. It is indeed one of the least travelled by in modern times, insofar as it forks unwaveringly away from the highway of centralization, which humankind has steadily if blindly marched on for most of its history. Luckily, we are in good company.

On July 19–20, 2018, Postbahnhof in Berlin was the site of DappCon, the nonprofit global developer conference focusing on decentralized applications, tooling, and foundational infrastructure on Ethereum. Here are some terrific numbers: 87 speakers, 59 talks, 8 panels, 13 workshops, and 535 attendees. But the main result of DappCon was a celebration of comradeship and solidarity, paired with intense and competent dedication to our demanding tasks.

Heir to a tradition that began with Adam Smith’s invisible hand and evolved into an enlightened appreciation of individual autonomy, agency, and self-actualization, the Ethereum ecosystem is synonymous with decentralization. On our path to decentralization, we have reached the crossroads where four main strategic arteries intersect, namely:

Decentralized Exchanges

Scalability

Wallets & Smart Contract Security

Decentralized Governance

These were the main thematic nodes dealt with by most talks and panels at DappCon. Let’s take a closer look at each of these four arteries, keeping in mind that they are mutually interwoven — mobile wallets and scalability, for one, are all over the place, and so are various concerns about resiliency, trust, convenience, and usability.

Postbahnhof, Berlin

Decentralized Exchanges

On your way to creating a robust decentralized exchange, you must pack your traveling bag with the following, essential items: liquidity, market depth, fair prices, small bid-ask spread, contained price slippage. For concision’s sake, one could claim that the first item, liquidity, is a valid surrogate to all the others.

Yaron Velner presented the Kyber Network’s decentralized on-chain liquidity network, which aims at connecting the fragmented tokenized world by enabling cross-chain swapping of tokens. It consists of reserves that bring liquidity on chain to smart contracts, taking this liquidity respectively from participating centralized exchanges, OTC markets, decentralized exchanges, token teams, etc.

Christiane Ernst presented the DutchX, a decentralized trading protocol for ERC20 tokens, with low barriers to entry and integration (hence enhanced liquidity), and soon-to-be governed by a DAO. It is based on the principle of discontinuous, one-on-one token auctions. Christiane announced to a captivated audience the smart contracts’ launch on the Mainnet. The DutchX can be used by any decentralized application in need of exchanging tokens and/or integrating a price feed.

Don Mosites described the Airswap widget, designed for p2p atomic swaps; each trader may autonomously unlock decentralized trading from their own wallet; the mechanism for peer discovery functions as a loudspeaker of the trader’s intentions.

Logan Saether (Chronologic) touched upon the promising notion of delegated off-chain execution. Hadrien Charlanes (VariabL) described p2p derivatives, aimed at hedging risk and competing with centralized infrastructures.

Scalability

Alexander Hermann talked about Gnosis Batch Auctions on Plasma. The premise of batch auctions is the existence of stablecoins that would induce more numerous trading pairs than the ones currently dominated by few legacy coins. Ring trades on several pairs will enable the exchange of baskets of coins, i.e., multi-asset batch auctions, where multiple and intersecting order books will be mapped onto a single, multi-dimensional order book. Out of this order book, a set of uniform clearing prices, and a corresponding maximum trading volume, will be determined. The second part of the talk translated this financial model into a Plasma implementation.

Edmund Edgar (Reality Keys) presented Realitio — a fast, cheap, and socially scalable smart contract oracle platform. It is designed to crowd-source the process of data gathering and fact checking with an incentive-based system on the Ethereum blockchain.

Gonçalo Sá (ConsenSys Diligence), Lefteris Karapetsas (Brainbot), Bogdan Batog (Sailo), Peter Czaban (Web 3), Balazs Deme (Herdius), and, in their own juicy code distillates, the Solidity chaps, Christian Reitwiessner, Alex Beregszaszi, contributed to the further mapping of this pathway.

Wallets & Smart Contract Security

Richard Meissner described the logic of the Gnosis Safe. The Gnosis Safe Personal Edition targets individual users; the Team Edition is geared towards teams managing shared crypto funds. Gnosis Safe is designed to provide a seamless, straightforward, and cheaper user experience. Creating a Safe implies deploying a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. All the individual user needs to do is download the Safe app on their mobile device and the Safe browser extension on their computer. The two devices sign and authorize each transaction, further simplifying usage.

Alex van de Sande (ETH Foundation) presented the model of an easy-to-create, universally usable and unique Ethereum ID for every user. It consists of a two-factor multi-sig self-sovereign smart-contract-controlled identity. More simply put: A public-private key pair is created on each user’s device and never leaves the device, so that it’s the device itself that signs transactions. Each device links with the same identity smart contract holding the user’s funds. The contract is identified by its ENS username, i.e., by the user’s unique ID mentioned above. In a transaction, all the user does is sign messages with their ID.

Pedro Gomes explained how Wallet Connect means to provide a unified API and smoother user experience for all of the user’s wallets, be they mobile, hardware, or browser wallets. True facts: we have too many uncoordinated wallets, and frequent usage of seed phrases makes us vulnerable to hacks. In Wallet Connect’s approach, we have one mobile wallet, usable on several devices, which holds our private keys and connects with desktop dApps.

Nicolas Bacca explained Ledger’s cryptographic approach to the integration of the hardware wallet into the browser, and how such integration may be protected from attacks by means of an innovative API.

Nick Munoz-McDonald (Solidified)’s presentation consisted of a persuasive ode to the benefits of bug bounties, completed with a comprehensive how-to manual on auditing smart contract security.

The panel on future roadblocks (inclusive of Martin Köppelmann, Jarrad Hope, Jaya Klara Brekke, and Trent McConaghy) is where I gathered some reassuring pearls of long-term wisdom, courtesy of Joseph Lubin.

It’s also where I was hit by a Chinese-box epiphany: a congregation of past, present, and future architects of Ethereum’s core infrastructure and applications had just gathered for two days under the roof of Postbahnhof, a striking piece of 20th century Berlin architecture, for a conference whose thematic unfolding had something architectural to it — which I, for one, missed at first. Do I need to remind anybody that Postbahnhof is located, of all places, in a street named after the Paris Commune of 1871?

On the Road (to Futarchy)

On your way to laying down the foundations for robust decentralized governance, you must pack your traveling bag with the following, essential items: values, beliefs, consensus, self-sovereignty, reputation, incentives, anonymity/pseudonimity. And you know in advance of two Caudine forks waiting for you on this winding road:

First fork: The ethic and pragmatic constraints dictated by decentralization levy a much heavier toll on the attainment of consensus than the constraints yoking centralized organizations.

Second fork: Blockchain-based governance has more effective powers of incentivization than the law of the land but weaker powers of coercion. Regarding the latter, a judge can put you in jail for life while code can at most fine you the entirety of your stake.

À propos, Matan Field, Martin Köppelmann, and Brett Sun engaged in a charming trio.

Matan described DAOStack’s holographic approach to consensus, based on the distinction between the prediction market trader as information provider, and the reputable information user as decision maker. (DAOStack is tasked with handling the consensus-related dynamics of the DutchX.)

Martin (Gnosis) provided the contrapuntal melody to Field with his considerations on the “Road to Futarchy”. The prediction market speaks in the language of monetary value; the design of governance translates this speech into standards of communal values, inclusive yet transcendent of the economic utility at their root. Futarchy does not have to be value agnostic, in sum.

Brett spoke of DAO as digital jurisdiction, pointing out how the times are ripe for a transition away from the centralization of legacy systems of governance, and toward new and original decentralized systems. Given the relatively low costs of computation, self-sovereign governance has this significant advantage, that it can be experimented with at the speed of software. Aragon is very much engaged in this sort of experimentation.

Evan Van Ness (ConsenSys) and Pavlo Makarov (Dapp Dev) added finely tuned variations on the theme. By the way, keep an eye out for futarchy curated registries, which were discussed by Chris Whinfrey (LevelK).

Afterthoughts

Being a machine learning scientist myself, I was enthralled by the big-data intelligence apparati set in place by Alethio, eth.events, Token Analyst, and Bluezelle, described respectively by Dominik Muhs, Sascha Goebel, Jai Prasad, and Neeraj Murarka. As Dominik implied, our ecosystem’s “educated decisions” call for a greater adoption of big data semantic analytics.

I’ve been “on the road” for too long already, so, I won’t certainly witness the post-Web system described by Jarrad Hope (Status). Can I even picture writing this post in the post-symbolic communication Jarrad talked about? I’m afraid not. My loss.

In my modest opinion, the closest mind to the silicon of the machine was Alexey Akhunov’s with his Turbo-Geth.

Try hard as I might, I didn’t manage to make myself ubiquitous. At times, it’s individual talks that were thematically ubiquitous, so, my quadripartite classification must often feel rather restrictive — apologies for that. All the brilliant talks which I only heard about second hand, and are not mentioned here, are my sorry shortfall.

You can watch all talks on YouTube here.

A page from the famous typescript scroll of Kerouac’s On the Road

Still Rolling

There are many ways of taking to the road, from Dante’s to Robert Frost’s to, of course, the King of the Road himself, Jack Kerouac’s. Since I discovered the beatniks in high school, so many from my generation have followed in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac. So few have made it to their destination, though. Even less have made it back home. It must have been one of those wayward travelers, the first to claim that what matters is the journey and not the destination. Just keep rolling… Well, I’m sorry to say that such statement is inaccurate. Whether we like it or not, the individual autonomy, agency, and self-actualization promised us by the Ethereum ecosystem will only come at the end of the road-less-taken. Therefore, it matters quite a bit, as witnessed at DappCon, that we are journeying in good company.

Long term, that’s going to make all the difference.