ETH Seoul 2022. the largest annual Ethereum event in South Korea, kicked off with an in-person event in Seoul on August 6-7, covering pertinent topics on the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond.
August 6, 2022
Yap Global
🌟 The first day of ETH Seoul 2022 was a day of exploration, discovery and conversation on some pressing issues of our time with some of the brightest minds and builders in the industry: ‘What are some of the ideas worth building on, and real-life use cases or applications worth exploring? How can we protect our privacy and security, while advancing blockchain technology?’
Vitalik Buterin, Founder and Creator of Ethereum, kicked off the day exploring improvements on ideas and applications of blockchain technology; citing the tremendous potential of zk technology and Soulbound tokens to preserve privacy, better security and real-world use cases.
“With zkproofs, you are able to prove you are a human without actually revealing it … you are also able to have reputation systems where you can prove you have done or did not do something,” said Vitalik. “With Soulbound tokens which are non-transferable you can prevent dumping and unequal allocations, leading to better governance and fairer token distributions”.
He also expressed the hope and potential for NFTs as better fundraising tools, especially for quadratic funding and public goods.
Rahat Chowdbury, Developer Relations Engineer at Polygon, introduced scaling solutions for Polygon tooling and emphasized the importance of security and UX for achieving mass adoption.
“People who are in the space understand gas fees and why we need them, but those who aren’t native to Web3 don’t get it and don’t want to,” Rahat said. “We need to make apps more inviting to people that aren’t native to Web3 if we are to achieve mass adoption.”
Longfei Wang, Developer Advocate at Filecoin and Protocol Labs reiterated the need for p2p storage systems like Filecoin that are safe and secure for Web3, introducing the numerous use cases such as NFT Marketplaces, Metaverse and Web3 gaming, and real-world applications such as environmental sustainability
Adrian Brink, Founder of Anoma covered the evolution of protocols from 1st generation (Scriptable settlement), 2nd generation (programmable settlements) to 3rd generation ( full stack decentralized applications). He also highlighted the usefulness and importance of intent(code) centricity where people can express what they want, not how to get it,
Alex Pruden, COO of Aleo shared the definition of zkEVMs and the underlying design and model of Aleo, emphasizing the importance of security and protecting the privacy of users.
Nik Kunkel (Oracle Core Unit Facilitator, MakerDAO) surmised the problems and concerns brought about by the lack of transparency and actions of centralised institutions such as Celsius, BlockFi and Voyager and introduced the concept of community consortiums.
“Essentially you want to onboard everybody in the community, every stakeholder to get consensus… where you are essentially betting that the entire community isn’t going to murder itself,” said Nik.
He introduced the current MakerDAO community consortium but reiterated strongly that the current members aren’t enough, expressing the notion that if enough established reputable stakeholders are involved, it would be impossible to corrupt or get the ecosystem to turn on itself.
Norswap, research and development at Optimism introduced how optimism rollups work together with the underlying important assumptions while Graeme Boy, CTO of Mirror.xyz introduced Mirror and the Optimism Collective. Graeme also shared the interesting notion of ownership and collectible value in Web3 as opposed to the restriction and paywalls that are prevalent in Web2 – expressing the potential value and effectiveness of such applications in fundraising, especially for writers and creatives.
Vivian Jeng, Developer at Privacy & Scaling Explorations team at the Ethereum Foundation, introduced UniRep, showcasing ways to protect privacy while preserving reputation and legitimacy for participating in social actions.
The entire ETH Seoul was live streamed on the KryptoSeoul Channel (turn up your volume!)