The Cryptonomist attended the Devconnect conference in Amsterdam, which was held in the capital of the Netherlands from 18 to 25 April. Here is our report.
Summary
The Cryptonomist in Amsterdam for Devconnect
After two full years of pandemic, online events and conferences, 2022 is finally looking like a year of recovery. The calendar of events organized by the Ethereum Foundation, and not only, extends throughout the calendar year and seems to reserve great and exciting opportunities for networking and team building.
Conferences continue to be extremely important because they not only achieve their main purpose, i.e. to educate and spread the exciting potential of Web 3.0, but also give experts the opportunity to meet and discuss the hottest issues in the field.
It is a social and productive moment that brings together all those who believe in and work daily to make this financial and technological revolution increasingly tangible.
The last conference organized directly by the Ethereum Foundation was the Devconnect conference in Amsterdam.
The most important topics discussed at Devconnect weekÂ
Devconnect week in Amsterdam was one of the most important conferences of this year and our team had to be there.
The topics discussed were some of the most relevant and hot topics of the moment: the scalability of Ethereum L2, ETH Staking, DAOs and their coordination.
An entire day was dedicated to the MEV, which was also attended by the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin.
Familiar faces such as Dankrad Feist of the Ethereum Foundation, Bartek Kiepuszewski of L2BEAT, Ohad Barta of StarkWare, Ed Felten of Offchain Labs, Alan Chiu of Boba Network, Ben Jones of Optimism and many others spoke at the L2 Ethereum conference.
As with every conference, there was also the eagerly awaited hackathon, the coding challenge that is designed to highlight and reward teams that manage to develop brilliant and innovative ideas.
Among the projects that won the hackathon at ETHamsterdam were:
- Tempra
Messages are temporary, but connections are forever.Â
Tempra is your all-in-one on-chain instant messaging platform. It takes inspiration from Snapchat and allows uploading photos and videos or sending private messages to friends.Â
Tempra combines the uniqueness of burnable and exclusive content with the convenience of composable identities on Lens Protocol. The Tempra team combined Lens Protocol with Lit Protocol and Livepeer and deployed everything on Polygon Mumbai.
- FLOANÂ
Floan helps Mainnet users who wish to migrate their debt positions (collateral + debt) to enjoy cheaper loan rates on a faster chain.Â
Nowadays, more users wish to avoid operating on the Mainnet due to high gas rates. Floan therefore allows the user to bypass the complicated process by offering a 1-click radius of their debt position to the desired chain.
- Democrazy
Democrazy enables off-chain governance voting while respecting privacy. Individual votes are encrypted and only the total result is revealed. An authentic snapshot yet anonymous.Â
- Hexagons Protocol
A protocol and framework for building smart contracts based on social media.
After linking a social media account (e.g. Twitter, Lens, Discord, etc) to an Ethereum address, using the Hexagons protocol it is possible to create apps to make specially crafted posts trigger actions in a smart contract. This opens up new possibilities for NFTs, games, governance and much more, all while lowering the barrier to entry to the world wide web3.
Not only cryptography but also art and NFTs
The Devconnect conference in Amsterdam was not only about development, but also about art and NFTs. A fantastic exhibition of digital art was set up in the city centre.
The installation was intimate and restrained but very impressive. Works by Joan Heemskerk, Manuel Rossner, Rafael Roozendaal, Harm Van Den Dorpel and Jan Robert Leegte and many others were on display.
Some of the most interesting works were:
- The Red Telephone by Jonas LudÂ
With The Red Telephone, artist Jonas Lund is just one phone call away. Visitors to the exhibition can simply pick up the phone and Jonas Lund’s number will be dialled automatically, allowing the visitor to talk to the artist! \
As with many of Lund’s other performance pieces, the availability of the artist, although not present in the physical space, is at the heart of the piece. For the piece to reach its full meaning, the viewer must participate in the performance and conduct the activity that the artist invites us to do.
- Good Samaritan by Jonas Lund
Smart Contracts are a series of contractual agreements that the owner makes when purchasing NFTs. If the terms written on the piece are not respected, the artist will burn the NFT and then destroy and remove it from the owner’s wallet.
In this case, the piece states that the owner of the NFT must commit an act of kindness once a week for one year and provide proof of this act of kindness to ensure that the Non-Fungible Token is not burned by the artist.
The series requires different kinds of commitments, for example it asks the owner to go on holiday for a fortnight once a year in perpetuity, and also to invest in Lund once a year in perpetuity as well as other tasks.
A brilliant idea from the artist that unleashes a new vision of art that harnesses the potential of blockchain to make the world not only a more beautiful place but a better place.
