Early this week, a few of us at Chronicled were lucky enough to attend CoinDesk’s Construct. Their first developer summit focused exclusively on technical discussions and innovations and featured talks from core developers of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger, Zcash, Interledger, ChainOS, Corda, and IPFS, as well as protocol dives on the most promising projects in the ecosystem and open-source developments.

The summit kicked-off with talks on public blockchains and the decentralized web from Hudson Jameson (Ethereum Foundation), Cory Fields (Bitcoin Core Developer), Zooko Wilcox (Zcash), and Juan Benet (IPFS) and Muneeb Ali (Blockstack). Since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, progress towards a public decentralized web and cryptocurrencies have continued with the developments of Ethereum, Zcash, and IPFS. The speakers covered the state of the blockchains, as well as roadmaps for privacy, scalability, and security.

Enterprise blockchains and public blockchains for enterprises were covered on both days of Construct: on day one, Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf, Chain Co-founder Ryan Smith, and Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas discussed how enterprises are stress-testing blockchain technology. Day two’s enterprise discussion was focused on how the public Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains can be leveraged for enterprise use cases with talks from Gregory Maxwell and Joseph Lubin.

Day one continued with a panel discussion on smart contracts and their real-world enforceability and auditability, as well as oracles. Complexity creep and segregated witness (SegWit) were also discussed, with Jeff Garzik, Matthieu Riou and Catheryne Nicholson of BlockCypher, Zaki Manian, and Justin Newton discussing the former and a talk from Eric Lomborzo on SegWit. SegWit is instrumental to the evolution of the Bitcoin protocol and was referenced several times later in the day, including in Joseph Poon’s talk on Lightning. Later in the day, Jae Kwon presented Cosmos, a solution for blockchain interoperability, and demoed a cross-blockchain packet transfer.

Alex van de Sande presented Ethereum’s roadmap for the future and the Mist browser, whereas Vlad Zamfir presented his roadmap and thinking around Casper, the proof-of-stake consensus protocol for Ethereum. The day concluded with a talk on state channels, a method to address blockchain scalability by securely handling transactions off the blockchain, by Ameen Soleimani and a talk on IPFS, ‘a content-addressable, peer-to-peer hypermedia distribution protocol,’ from founder Juan Benet.

How to build decentralized apps, according to Alex van de Sande.

The second day also kicked off with discussions about blockchain and enterprise and continued with presentations on Ethereum decentralized applications and tools for DApps, including a talk on MetaMask from Frankie Pangilinan. The conference included workshops for attendees on Ethereum, Hyperledger, and Bitcoin. Elaine Ou of Ethereum Classic discussed the roadmap for ETC. The day concluded with several discussions and recaps, with a highlight being discussion of interoperability challenges.