Weekly General Discussion - July 17, 2023 <-> July 23, 2023

(oof, nearly went to bed forgetting my crosspost from reddit)

Just got back from the ether.fi x obol x ethstaker x dappnode x avado side event at EthCC, so bear with me as I'm slightly drunk.

Met the one and only u/nixorokish and some other nice poap-wielding folks, we had a great time at Café de la Presse near Bastille.

Sooo, time for the holdrcon ethcc day 3 recap!

There were quite a few notable talks I want to share, thanks to the great recording crew they are all on youtube already:

"Ethereumverse... loading. Or: Why we NEED horizontal scaling"

Friederike Ernst of Gnosis (forgot which sub-company) made a case for scaling with l2-native dapps and assets that are not bridged from l1. I am impressed with what they are doing, a week ago I still held the narrative that Gnosis Chain is just an Ethereum testnet and suddenly they have a real world payment solution with visa and bank partnerships and more in the pipeline (e.g. the "hashi" cross-chain-communication protocol).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HDdLXY_pT0

"A Token Decentralization Journey Under Fraud, Rug Pulls and Scam Attacks: The OCEAN Story"

As part of the token engineering track, Trent Mcconaghy of Ocean Protocol gave an interesting insight on the evolution of the OCEAN token. Through several rounds of community feedback, emergency rugpull reactions and simulations using the self-developed "tokenSPICE" tool (analog circuit design anyone?) they arrived at a point where the protocol is close to fully decentralized and they can focus on pushing adoption. He also referenced a bunch of blog posts that might be an interesting read if you are designing a token model yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQEqlPe8MJw

"zkEVMs - One year in"

Lea Schmitt of Scroll gave a good overview over the development of evm-compatible l2s since EthCC5. To me however, Scroll is still a mystery: who are they? do they have a community?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maddK7ch0v0

"Reth: A new Rust Ethereum Client"

Georgios Konstantopoulos delivered a very confident pitch for the latest contender in the execution client playfield. After overcoming some challenges like incomplete API specs they now have an alpha version that can run mainnet and offers vastly improved performance over geth and nethermind and is designed as a moddable base for further development. Nice! Also, they seem to have really cool, focused team and look for contributors with a mentorship program to help onboarding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zntRpCKHyDc

"Next Gen Cross-Chain Bridges & How All Bridges Still Suck"

Today was a lot about l2s and bridges, but Daniel Lumi's talk was all you need for an overview over the different types of bridges and their weaknesses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAkOHyWPI4o

Random observations:

• the sponsor stalls in the "B" venue were swapped for a whole new groups of projects. This means new swag, and I loved to meet the POAP team, (ex. Gnosis) Safe and Gnosis pay. Not too thrilled about seeing "Neon EVM" (an evm compatible runtime on Solana) but whatever.
• four days of EthCC is a lot, I'm actually considering bailing out tomorrow and visiting one of the side conferences (Impact Blockchain) for a change
• traffic in Paris is surprisingly chill: only cars seem to follow rules while cyclists/pedestrians/rollerskaters/... do whatever they like. Still everybody seems to get along well, I wish it was the same back home...