dAppCon Berlin 2019: Year of the DAO’s and takeover of the Meta transaction
Agree ? cryptic message written on the wall of Berlin Technical University toilet’s 😀
We’ve been to more than our fair share of crypto conferences all around the globe at this point – mostly during 2018 and during our technical partnership with Aerum Technology and ASR Crypto Technology which saw us visiting and speaking at crypto conferences in San Francisco, Singapore, South Korea, Germany, Thailand, Latvia and more.
One of the conference’s we attended during our roadshow back in 2018 was the first inception of dApp Con, back when we were in our pre-ICO days with Aerum.
One thing that sets this conference apart from all the other Blockchain related ones is the fact that it is aimed solely towards developers and infrastructure nerds whereas most of the other conferences I attended back when I was heavily involved in the Crypto scene are aimed more towards trying to find seed funding and investors.
Various vendors in the main concourse area like Kyber network, Shapeshift etc
Sidechain Stage
Developer Conference for Ethereum Dapp’s & Infrastructure
dApp Con 2018 seemed to be a bigger affair than this year.
It was held at a venue called Postbahnhof just a stones throw from “Berlin Ostbahnhof” and the even more infamous “Berghain” club.
2018s venue, Postbahnhof, was massive and had tons of talks going on at once, a cool beer garden, non stop workshops in the BUIDL room and food trucks out the back.
It was going to be tough to beat it.
Berlin Blockchain Week 2019
Fast forward to 2019 and of course we made the trip to what is practically our second home, Berlin, to visit our favourite Blockchain conference for its second inception as well as check out the scene during Berlin Blockchain Week.
This year the venue was aptly the Technische Universität Berlin (Berlin Institute of Technology) and upon entering the venue I got the distinct feeling a lot of folks had dropped off the Blockchain buzz from the previous year which in my humble opinion was not such a bad thing at all.
In 2018 everyone wanted to try this new Blockchain get rich quick scheme/buzz-word, but the days of the easy ICO ended for the most part in 2017.
In my eyes the people at dApp con this year were genuinely interested in the technology and how to advance it.
Sidechain: The secondary stage at dApp Con where I spent most of my time
Good design hides complexity
The talks themselves were great.
Everyone I saw delivered each subject exceptionally well.
Even for someone such as myself it is very easy to die of boredom when people are talking about cryptographic primitives, ZkSnarks/privacy, decentralisation and even Blockchain in general, but not here; each talk was succinct, in depth but easily memorable so kudos to the organisers again this year.
Alex Van de Sande (UX Designer at Ethereum Foundation) who really kept the crowd alert with his 80’s themed slides and subject “Can Meta-transactions solve your problems?” which went through of course Meta-transactions but also how universal login can be better implemented using decentralised solutions (video below).
META-TRANSACTIONS
Day 3 was solely for workshops
Keeping in line with the theme of Meta-transactions I dropped by Developer Advocate at Open Zeppelin Dennison Bertram, who was delivering a hands on workshop called “Building MetaTransaction powered (d)applications with OpenZeppelin and Starter Kit”.
I had to leave towards to the end to catch my train back to Prague but it was very informative
At the start of the workshop when Dennison had everyone visit a voting website. He asked everyone to pick their answer on the polling application
Afterwards he informed us that what we had just done was use a dApp where the interaction with blockchain i.e the transaction that cast our vote was all handled behind the scenes by meta transactions i.e No METAMASK if you are familiar with building Blockchain solutions you will understand that this is very cool and it is precisely the kind of smart solutions we like to integrate here at REPTILEHAUS.
Stay tuned, we will for sure be using meta transactions on some upcoming projects in 2020.
Simultaneously another talk that was going on which I would like to have caught by Alexey Akhunov
It was titled: How to become an Ethereum Core Developer
I was lucky enough to have met him the previous year and even got to pick his brain on how to Turbo Charge Geth (he does quite a lot of research on Geth optimisation) but having spent almost a year working as an (un)offical Ethereum core developer at ASR Crypto Technology (and Aerum) researching, testing, implementing consensus algorithms, reworking Ethereum core to optimise it for high throughput transactions and reliability I decided that I wanted to learn more about Metatransactions.
ZkSnarks a holistic approach to privacy talk by Harry Halpin from Nym
Jared Hope giving us a run down of Embark.js as well as the new features since last year, check out Cockpit
Other notable talks were related to Embark and its complete framework for developing blockchain based applications as well as a deep dive into some new cool features like Embark Cockpit. ZKsnarks was also another hot topic as well as implementing it using Zokrates, also tons of DAO related talks, Designing staking/rewards systems etc and lots more
For those that are interested the schedule for dAppCon 2019 is here ere and also some resources for its first inception in 2018 are here
