In this post I’m going to try to summarise some of the most interesting talks at from DevCon 2022. Here’s a video summary about the key takeaways from the conference.
The main topics for this years event were:
- 🎡 Zero Knowledge ZK Technology – Definitely the hot topic which came up again and again. Vitalik said at one point that he expects zero knowledge encryption to be a more important technology than blockchain.
- 💰 Smart Wallets – solving issues with self-custody
- 🎓 Web2 > Web3 Developers – I met a lot of developers who were web devs but web3 curious and either just getting into blockchain tech or looking to do more.
- 🎁 Post-Merge Tech – with the merge going through smoothly there was a lot of discussion about validator and execution clients.
- 🚀 Staking – much discussion about liquid staking tokens and running a node from home.
- ⚡ MEV – still a hot topic that polarizes people.
One of the best things about the event is that it’s professionally recorded so if you can’t make it to the event or can’t get into a packed workshop you can watch it online. Here are some of the talks that I found most interesting.
DeFi product development roadmap
Really agree with what Alim Khamisa says about focusing on research and experimentation when building on DeFi.
Justin Drake on the economics of ETH
Justin is an Ethereum researcher and presented this brilliant key note on Ether the asset and how the long-term economics may play out.
Client technology with Adrian Sutton
How validator and execution clients are being brought together to play nicely with each other.
ELI5 Zero Knowledge
Wanseob Lim uses an immigration officer analogy (I will no doubt steal in the future) to explain how zero knowledge cryptography works.
ZK Application Design
Very well presented talk on different categories of ZK applications by Lakshman Sankar and Yi Sun.
Liquid staking tokens with Darren Langley of Rocketpool
Talks about the difficulties in decentralizing liquid staking protocol.
Nader Dabit on Foundry with demo of deploying from scripts
Foundry seems to be gaining more and more traction as it gets built out with more tools. This year they released scripts which can be used for deployments. Here’s a live demo from Nader Dabit at the ethGlobal hackathon.
Thanks to the Ethereum Foundation, volunteers and everyone else that was involved in putting the event together.
