Thousands of attendees recently gathered at Denver’s National Western Complex for ETHDenver 2023 to learn about the current and future cryptocurrency ecosystem.
John Paller, founder and CEO of ETHDenver, told Cointelegraph that 15,000 ticket holders attended the ETHDenver main event.
While ETHDenver drew a diverse crowd, many students from leading universities attended the event, showcasing new solutions to advance the crypto and Web3 industry.
Developers focus on UX, security and privacy
Gil Rosen, president of the Stanford Blockchain Accelerator, a program that connects Stanford University students and founding alumni in the blockchain space, told Cointelegraph that he believes current Web3 technology platforms are generally low-income. performance. “These platforms often lack privacy preservation, are extremely difficult to develop (especially complex apps) and are even more complex to use,” he said.
Given this, Rosen mentioned that the students who attended ETHDenver 2023 seemed to be focused on creating developer tools and solutions to simplify the user experience and privacy. “These features will allow future applications to be easily built and fully capable. This is what the teams that are part of the Stanford Blockchain Accelerator are primarily focused on this year,” she said.
For example, Rosen noted that Stanford’s “0xPass” team was on hand at ETHDenver 2023 to demonstrate how account abstraction could be used in the future to allow Web3 wallets to be controlled externally using smart contract code. Such a feature would mean that wallet owners would no longer have to sign every transaction. The release of the new ERC-4337 standard is set to enable use cases like account abstraction.
Kun Peng, an advisor to 0xPass and a Stanford professor of Web3 entrepreneurship, told Cointelegraph that while various projects demonstrated how the ERC-4337 standard could be used for account abstraction, 0xPass is unique in that it has created a software development kit (SDK) to simplify implementation of account abstraction. He elaborated:
“This SDK will provide decentralized apps with a significantly better onboarding and authentication experience. As a result, the Web3 market will expand to ‘normals’ who do not want to use wallets with private keys. Such a feature will enable the use of social logins for authentication, the same login for multiple wallets, password recovery, and more.”
While enabling better wallet experiences has become critical, zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) were also heavily discussed at ETHDenver 2023. For example, the team at Modulus Labs Stanford spoke at zkDAY Denver, a testing-focused side event. ZK, About zero-knowledge approaches to verify artificial intelligence (AI) models. As AI becomes more widely used, verification of accurate information using cryptography will be crucial.
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Ryan Cao, CTO at Modulus Labs, told Cointelegraph that apps built on the existing smart contract ecosystem have limited capabilities. He explained that Modulus Labs had created a workaround to allow offline computation to be verified for conformance to certain AI traits.
For example, Cao explained that Modulus had created a proof-of-concept that is a fully autonomous AI-powered on-chain trading bot that can make predictions about the price of Ether (ETH). According to Cao, this could enable cryptographically fair AI decision-making. He said:
“At zkDAY we demonstrated an AI chain game called ‘Leela vs. the World’, where players place bets to compete against a hyper-intelligent AI chess robot. The game is completely on-chain and the AI bot’s decisions are carefully verified using cryptography. In other words, players can bet for or against the game knowing that no one can secretly change the outcome in their favor.
In addition to privacy apps using ZK tests, the participants demonstrated a number of security solutions. Tianzuo Zhang, a master’s student at Tsinghua University in China and a student ambassador for the Algorand Foundation university program, told Cointelegraph that he is building a security defense app to mitigate the harm that decentralized applications (DApps) could. face due to various security threats.
Known as “HoneyDApp,” Zhang shared that the project was one of the winners of the “OpenZeppelin Bounty” competition, which was held during ETHDenver’s BUIDLWeek.
According to Zhang, HoneyDApp uses Defender OpenZeppelin, a secure trading platform for smart contracts, to detect and identify attacks against DApps. In addition, Zhang noted that the “honeypot” protocol could catch attackers before they can do significant damage.
Such a solution can be critical, as Zhang explained that the risks of cyberattacks and vulnerabilities are becoming more common with the rise of Web3 DApps. “HoneyDApp becomes important as it provides a proactive security solution that can detect, respond to, and defend against attacks. It limits the damage and reduces the risk of the project,” he said.
Web3 Focused Students
While many students demonstrated solutions at ETHDenver this year, university programs focused on advancing Web3 will likely drive innovation.
For example, Polkadot, a Web3-focused blockchain project, will launch its third version of the “Polkadot Blockchain Academy” (PBA) with the University of California, Berkeley, from July 10 to August 10, 2023.
Pauline Cohen Vorms, head of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy, told Cointelegraph that PBA has previously taught courses at the University of Cambridge and the University of Buenos Aires. She noted that this is the first time that PBA courses will be taught at a university in the United States.
According to Cohen Vorms, PBA aims to educate and support the next generation of blockchain engineers and developers. He added that the PBA curriculum is led by Gavin Wood, founder of Polkadot and co-founder of Ethereum. “PBA doesn’t just focus on the Polkadot ecosystem. Our intention is to provide a solid foundation of blockchain and Web3 that can be applied to different projects.”
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While it is difficult to predict what students will focus on in the PBA construction at Berkeley, Cohen Vorms shared that the courses will focus on the fundamentals of cryptography, governance options, interoperability between blockchain networks, and tools available to help developers build their own blockchains and parachains.
Rosen added that Stanford students primarily focus on building infrastructure, development tools, and analytics and security mitigation tools for enterprise and institutional use cases, while focusing on simplifying the user experience. She added:
“Most developers today are building for the 90% of current Web3 users and developers whose use cases were often exchanges, decentralized finance, and non-fungible social tokens. But these will probably represent 10% of future users. So I think development students need to focus on the broader use cases now and not be so focused on the current user base that was drawn in by the last bull market.”
