Top 10 talks to attend during EthCC 2019
By: Amira Bouguera
Tags: Security, Privacy, Scalability, Ethereum, Ethcc

EthCC 2019 is almost here, are you excited to go? Have you prepared your top 10 list of talks to attend yet? Well if you haven’t done that already and you are interested in privacy, scalability or security, then my list will be very useful to you.

I am very excited about several talks and workshops that will happen this year. If you are curious to read more about the talks I found most interesting last year at EthCC 2018, check my previous article “Looking back at EthCC — Paris — March 2018.”

This year, tracks include the following topics:

Scalability, Privacy, UX/UI, DApps, Ecosystem, Gaming, Crypto Economics, Core Ethereum, Web 3.0, Decentralized Finance, Browser and Files, Zero to Hero, Security, DAO Governance and Dev Tools.

Ethereum 2019 Hot topics

The big promise of Ethereum and Web3 for a safe, easy to use decentralized Internet, adopted by billions of people all over the globe is still under construction.

2018 was the year of infrastructure for Ethereum, different technologies where built around Ethereum scalability, privacy and security to solve some of the most urgent challenges facing it. So many things happened since 2018, very recently the Ethereum blockchain forked and activated the Constantinople upgrade, which will improve Ethereum’s scalability, network efficiency and fee structure by removing significant technical blockers.

Challenges facing Ethereum

Scalability: Ethereum suffers from several challenges, from which scalability is still the most commonly discussed one. Currently, Ethereum transaction throughput is very low as it can process roughly 15 transactions per second, which is very low if we compare it to Visa transaction throughput which is capable of processing 56,000 transaction messages per second. This is due to the fact that every transaction must be processed by every single node in the Ethereum network, validate it and store a copy of the entire state. The number of transactions Ethereum can process cannot exceed that of a single node.

There have been several proposed solutions to the problem, some implement a base-level solution or as we call it Layer 1 and Sharding is an example of it. Others implement new protocols above the Ethereum base-level instead like Plasma (Layer 2 solutions). Privacy: This is not the only big challenge facing this technology, privacy has became a hot topic as well, especially after the new GDPR regulation that came into enforcement on 25 May 2018. DApp developers now have to think about new ways to provide their services while protecting users’ privacy, which is currently difficult since information is published unencrypted to the Ethereum public ledger, and does not have any restrictions on access permission since everyone is able to read and process it. Ongoing research is done regarding privacy issues and is relying on advanced zero knowledge verifiable computing techniques like Bulletproofs, ZKSnarks, ZKStarks and ring signatures. These techniques allow a user to construct a mathematical proof that a given program, when executed, has a particular output (result) without revealing any other information about the input. Confidential transactions and private voting are use case examples that need such techniques.

However, both the implementation of these cryptographic methods and optimizing their computation complexity is still a bottleneck for developers, due to the high gas costs and the block gas limit which makes them expensive and unpractical. Security: Security was probably one of the first challenges that appeared in the Ethereum ecosystem after the DAO hack in 2016 where $50 million worth of Ether was lost, which at the time represented 15% of all the network Ether. The DAO was supposed to be a revolutionary dApp which was going to change Ethereum forever. However, because of a simple re-entrancy flaw in the smart contract code, money was lost and the project was shut down. Since then, researchers have started developing different tools to achieve smart contract safety, ranging from better development environments, to better programming languages, to formal verification and symbolic execution. “Progress in smart contract safety is necessarily going to be layered, incremental, and necessarily dependent on defense-in-depth,” Vitalik Buterin.

Security is not a one time process, there will be further bugs in the future, and new tools need to be developed. It’s a long term process and as Manuel Araoz, the ZeppelinCTO said “Smart contract development is still in its early days. We’re all still trying to figure out what it will look like and how to polish the developer experience.”

Development platforms like ZeppelinOS have opened a door filled with new possibilities for DApps developers to build some incredible applications on Ethereum 2.0 and meet their consumers’ expectations. This became possible with the upgradeability functionality which allows developers to fix bugs, upgrade their code and reuse community-vouched EVM Packages.

My top 10 recommendation list of talks and workshops to attend at EthCC 2019 is:

Scalability:

Justin Drake: “Ethereum 2.0 — the phase 0 spec.”

Vlad Zamfir: “Blockchain Scaling.”

Alex Gluchowski: “Solving scalability with Zero-Knowledge Proofs.”

Remco Bloemen: “Scaling DApps and DEXs using zero knowledge proofs.”

Privacy:

Sajida Zouarhi: “Opportunities and challenges of Blind and Off-chain Computation: A step towards more privacy for your Web3.0 Doppelgänger.”

Zachary Williamson: “Publicly verifiable private transactions — a deep dive into the AZTEC protocol.”

WORKSHOP MacLane Wilkison: “Building end-to- end encrypted decentralized applications with NuCypher.”

Security:

Dennison Bertram: “Upgrade Driven Development with ZeppelinOS: Building modular, secure, upgradeable smart contract applications.”

WORKSHOP Thomas Hodges: “How to Securely Connect Your Smart Contracts to Off-chain Data Sources.”

For more information, check the full agenda of this year’s event here.

Are you ready to hear about the biggest announcement?

Capture the Flag Challenges

Capture The Flag challenges or CTFs are online security competitions where several teams of hackers compete for the winner’s spot, by completing different challenges from a broad range of categories in order to earn points from solving those challenges and recovering their flags, or attacking each other depending on the type of the CTF.

EthCTF Competition

The EthCTF competition will be launched at the same time as EthCC kicks off. We at HellHound, have been organizing this competition in collaboration with some of the best security companies in the Ethereum space including Diligence, Trail of Bits and also Kleros and Ledger, without forgetting the very talented security hacker Korantin Auguste @palkeo.

Winner announcement:

The last day of the conference, we will announce the top 3 teams. Each of those teams will win prizes offered by Diligence, Kleros and Ledger.

Tracks:

EVM Exploit

EVM Reverse Engineering

Cryptography Vulnerabilities

If you are a hacker and you are up for the challenge to improve your cybersecurity skills, join us!

For more information follow me on Twitter @amiraenrique