InsurAce went to DevCon in Bogota last week with 7000 other developers and web3 folk to join in with the festivities, events, talks, announcements, and networking, here’s a brief summary of what we got up to during this huge week for crypto.
For those who haven’t been before, DevCon is an annual gathering of developers and industry titans to discuss ideas, contribute, hack, develop and get to know one another as part of the Ethereum network and wider web3 space. This was the sixth iteration of DevCon, which is usually held in emerging locations to help encourage local talent to begin their own journeys into space.
However, DevCon is not just one event, it is instead a combination of multiple events which this year included the DAOist, ETH Bogota Hackathon, ETH LATAM, Schelling Point, DeFi Bogota, Polygon Connect, Consensys Connect, the Web3 Retreat, as well as the main Devcon event space, many side events, hackathons, and Hacker Houses. It is truly one of the largest events of the year in web3 and definitely one of the most impressive. Each event was filled with incredible builders and interesting people from across web3, creating innovative solutions, projects, DAOs and investing into the future.
Our CMO, Dan Thomson, and our Social Media Manager, Andrea, were on site for the whole 10 day extravaganza, meeting with new and existing partners, community members, speakers, sponsors, and local web3 enthusiasts to help benefit InsurAce and spread the word of our project.
It was great to see the recognition we have achieved in the industry.
This year, DevCon revolved around some key areas, from The Merge, to Staking, L2s, Censorship, DankSharding, PBS, and AccountAbstraction, with DAOs a hot point of contention across the week.
Highlights & Hot Topics
Regarding the Merge: After 3 years, @skylar_eth kicked off #DevConBogota. Tim Beiko shared their story of the #Merge behind the scenes. @AyaMiyagotchi Introduced “Subtraction” in Ethereum to boost the ecosystem. In one of many talks and panels across the week, Vitalik Buterin elaborated what’s new at #Ethereum.
There were a bunch of talks/panels are around liquid staking and solo staking for decentralization. Popular staking protocols like Lido, Obol, Rocket Pool, and SSV Network shared post-merge plans.
A highlight of the week was the huge amount of information about Ethereum adopting a rollup-centric scaling approach. Optimistic and #ZK rollups are presenting their progress. Regarding #optimistic rollups, Optimism is actively working on #bedrock to enable fraud proofs and Arbitrum just released #Nitro to improve performance.
And @fuellabs_brings UTXO-based parallel transaction execution as non-EVM rollups, whilst Alt Layer introduces elastic app-specific rollups with both EVM/WASM compatibility.
For #ZK-EVMs, there’s impressive progress… Polygon launched a testnet to support #solidity apps and announced a pre-alpha testnet. Even Consensys also brought a ZK-EVM testnet to the market.
A hot topic in DevCon was flashbot/mev and censorship. After the merge, over 50% of validators are equipped with mev-boost to capture the extractable values. An extensive discussion happened around how to mitigate the censorship and build a neutral Ethereum.
There were 10+ talks about #MEV throughout the week, all saw nearly every seat full. It’s going to be an interesting few months.
In new products, Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) is a new approach in Ethereum to mitigate blockchain censorship and #MEV issues, by assigning block construction/building and block proposing to different roles in the network.
What’s Next?
After the merge, what’s next? With new tech like #danksharding, #EIP-4484, Ethereum is further enhanced as a cost-saving DA layer for rollup-centric scaling.
No one wants to click pop-ups for every action in a game. Account Abstraction is crucial in a lot of use cases like session keys, multicall, etc. As a vital feature, Trustless State brought progress to DevCon.
Future Plans
DevCon was a roaring success. It abated any fears of Colombia and replaced them with memories of great talks, education, networking, parties, and of course the local delights of music, food and culture. We’re excited to see where DevCon will be held next year and cannot wait to be a part of it.
