San Francisco Blockchain Week and ETH SF was a non-stop bash of coding, presentations, events, team meetings, and excellent dinners. Keep was proud to be a sponsor of ETH SF and a Gold Sponsor of San Francisco Blockchain Week. Since we are a fully remote team, we always cherish the time we get to have together. The week felt like both a sprint and a marathon and it all started with the biggest Ethereum hackathon ever!

ETH SF (10/5–10/7)

A walkthrough of ETH SF at the Palace of Fine Arts.

Jack Knutson

ETH SF is a part of ETH Global, a worldwide series of Ethereum hackathons that take place over a weekend where teams have about 36 hours to build a decentralized application. Team members including designers and developers come together and leverage their knowledge, as well as applications and code from existing projects, to build an application on top of Ethereum.

I arrived from Minnesota in the early afternoon on Saturday, made it to my Airbnb, had a quick lunch and went right over to The Palace of Fine Arts. Corbin got in earlier that week so I was able to link up with him. He gave me a quick tour of the 120,000 sq ft building and introduced me to a few people he had been talking to, including Keep advisor Brayton Williams. I had a phenomenal time getting to know members of other teams and talking with hackers about their projects while filling them in on what Keep does. I spent most of my Saturday talking and exploring.

One of my favorite things was seeing hackers running over to the booths of sponsoring projects and getting help directly from their team members! The teams were there to help debug and offer insight on how best to use their protocols. Often with this industry, we get to witness collaboration and conversations happen online in communities and forums. However, watching real time human interaction while building projects was very enjoyable. Many projects such as Maker, 0x, Bloom, The Graph, ChainLink and others represented at ETH SF offered bounties for hackers to use their protocol in their projects.

On Sunday we arrived early to be able to review the projects that people had hacked on over the previous 36 hours. It was truly amazing what some of these teams were able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. You can see a list of all the projects that were created during the ETH SF on Devpost.com.

One of my favorites was Seed Secure, a team who used Shamir’s Secret Sharing to store your seed phrase with other users of the application on mobile phones. The users are incentivized to return their parts and the first one to return their share gets a reward to insure parties would participate. You can read more about Seed Secure at their ETH SF Devpost. Even though Seed Secure didn’t win, I am always excited to find projects working on the same core building blocks as Keep.

I am looking forward to Keep not only sponsoring these events, but participating in supporting hackers with the release of our Threshold Relay when it hits mainnet.

Epicenter (10/8–10/9)

Hope Cowan

I arrived in San Francisco late on Sunday night before Epicenter started. Once I made it to my Airbnb, I spent the evening scouting out what talks I wanted to attend over the next couple of days. I was nervous and excited to attend my first blockchain conference. The next morning I met up with Jack and we headed over to the Hilton San Francisco Union Square where the conference was taking place.

To say Epicenter was a blur is an understatement. At one point during the two days, Corbin asked me what it was like to be at my first blockchain conference and at first I could not even begin to conceptualize and describe my experience. Then I simply said: “It’s amazing to be fully surrounded by others working in this space.”

All day, for both days of Epicenter, there were talks on six stages in ballrooms and conference rooms throughout the Hilton. The Keep team made a strong showing these two days with myself, Corbin, Jack, Antonio, Raghav, Piotr, Philip, and Markus all in attendance.

One of our developers, Piotr Dyraga, even had the opportunity on Tuesday to give a talk on Threshold ECDSA. Piotr opened the talk with a brief description of who we are here at Keep and then got right into explaining the difference between multi-signature (on both Bitcoin and Ethereum) and threshold signatures. He then followed this up with the math behind threshold signature generation and signing to show how they work. Most of us were able to keep up until he got into the really heavy math…and I’m sure 90% of the audience was in a similar boat.

The Privacy Hype! panel moderated by Anna Rose (Zero Knowledge Podcast) with Howard Wu (Dekrypt Capital), Haseeb Qureshi (Metastable), Karthik Raju (Polychain), Alexander Zaidelson (Beam)

I was also able to attend some interesting and valuable panel discussions on topics including privacy, community management, consumer adoption of blockchain, and investment.

One of my favorite talks was “The Privacy Hype!”, a panel discussion on privacy moderated by Anna Rose (Zero Knowledge Podcast) and featuring Howard Wu (Dekrypt Capital), Haseeb Qureshi (Metastable), Karthik Raju (Polychain), and Alexander Zaidelson (Beam Privacy).

The most memorable quote that stuck with me from this discussion was simple and straightforward:

“I believe that privacy is a fundamental human right.” — Howard Wu

Howard’s statement and this discussion as a whole reminded me of one of the core reasons that I joined Keep — I too believe that privacy is a fundamental human right and is why I was so keen to work on a privacy project.

Overall, the most noticeable thing for me throughout these two days was the humility and passion of the people in this space. As noted earlier, this is a new space for me and was my first blockchain conference — and I was excited to see how open everyone was to asking and answering questions and how frequently people were willing to admit that we do not have all of the answers.

This sentiment was perfectly captured for me in something that Min Ho Kim, founder of ICON said in a talk titled “Consumer Adoption — what’s holding us back?”

“…We are learning as we go. You don’t have to have all the answers to start something….just get started.” — Min Ho Kim

It was inspiring and encouraging to hear someone experienced in the space say this — we are all learning, we do not have all of the answers, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get started and keep going.

Crypto Economics and Security Conference (CESC)(10/10–10/11)

Hope Cowan

The final two days of San Francisco Blockchain Week were the Crypto Economics and Security Conference (CESC) which also took place at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square.

These days were a bit less busy for us conference-wise, but the entire team present for the conference showed up to hear Steven Goldfeder’s talk “Fast Multiparty Threshold ECDSA with Fast Trustless Setup” and got a chance to catch up with Steven afterward. We greatly enjoyed the chance to chat with Steven and discuss his paper and where Keep will bring value in the broader ecosystem.

During these two days, we also got some more unstructured time to co-work in our San Francisco office. This is valuable because, as a remote-first team, we aren’t often in the same place at the same time.

Philip, Ragav, and Piotr hard at work

What’s Next

Leaving is always the hardest part of any event for our team. Returning to our own cities and workspaces after a week side-by-side can be an adjustment.

However, each of us walked from the talks and events of the week with more knowledge and having made many new connections. We left inspired and ready to keep working to bring privacy to the blockchain.

This piece is a collaboration between Community Manager Jack Knutson and Content Manager Hope Cowan