Ethereum developer conference, ÐΞVCON1, is fast approaching

The first Ethereum Developer Conference ÐΞVCON0, in November 2014, was aimed at showcasing the strength of interest in the Ethereum platform, while still in early development. Nearly a year later, the Ethereum Foundation and ΞTHÐΞV have organized ÐΞVCON1, spread over 5 days on November 9th-13th, 2015, right in hearth of the “City” of London, UK.

The project has leaped forward since the inaugural conference, with the launch of its first release “Frontier,” a command-line interface tailored specifically for developers together with AlethOne, the C++ “hardcore” client, and the Mist GUI Wallet beta.

The time has come to show the world what Ethereum has achieved so far, and to set the pace for future releases. ÐΞVCON1 will be packed with discussions, technical talks, workshops, and related events, as well as featuring well know speakers and projects.

“I think that this event is going to be a watershed moment for Ethereum’s development; it’s going to very clearly show the sheer size of the ecosystem that the Ethereum project has brought together particularly over the last few months, including projects like Augur and Maker, the dozens of ÐApps developed by ConsenSys, as well as many of the concrete results that have been starting to come out of the institutionally driven Ethereum-based projects such as UBS’s smart bond platform.”
— – Vitalik Buterin, Director, Co-creator and Original Inventor of Ethereum

The main topic categories for ÐΞVCON1 will be organized into three categories:

**Research & Core Protocols.**Including proof of stake, scalability, networking protocols, privacy and zero-knowledge proofs, decentralized protocols, prediction markets, mining, and reputation systems.

**ÐApp Development.**Focusing on practical challenges developing applications on top of the ethereum platform and effective design patterns to optimize security, efficiency, developer time and the user experience.

**Industry & Social Implications.**Dissecting the implications for IoT, finance, government, supply chain tracking, notarization, creative registries, identity and reputation, markets and exchanges, and related topics for policymakers and investors.

Although the conference schedule is still subject to change, Ethereum related talks and events will be the main focus of the week. However, they will be complemented by numerous other guest speakers from various projects and backgrounds.

The first half of the week will focus on research and ÐApp development, the second half on industry and social implications, with 50+ talks and over 400 attendees at the time of writing.

Attendees to the event will have the opportunity to interact with many of the Ethereum team members, as well as other figures and experts in the space, during the numerous discussions, hands-on workshops, and presentations.

Vitalik Buterin will host several talks and panels over the course of the conference. Buterin is the Director, Co-creator and Original Inventor of Ethereum is a long-time advocate and developer of cryptocurrency technologies. His first involvement in the space was as the cofounder and head writer of Bitcoin Magazine, and he has also written a number of software libraries to make cryptocurrency easy to use. Vitalik’s current focus is on the Ethereum project, the generalized blockchain platform he invented in November 2013, and for which he is now a core developer.

“We have so many interesting dapps under development that we have had to expand our original plan for the conference of fitting them all into a single day; I am looking forward to seeing each one of them. Another major focus is likely to be second-layer applications built on top of Ethereum, including projects like the btcrelay half-sidechain, at least two lightning networks, oracles and reputation systems; once these are in place it’s going to be possible to build quite powerful applications.”
— – Vitalik Buterin

Dr. Gavin Wood will be part of several panels and host a few talks, including a discussion on Ethereum’s core development as well as “Whisper” and “Ethereum for Dummies.” Wood is CTO for Ethereum, led the implementation of the Ethereum C++ client, GUI and IDE, and authored much of the vision for the project around decentralisation and Web 3. He is also the author of the first formal specification of any blockchain protocol, the Ethereum Yellow Paper, one of the key ways Ethereum separates itself from other blockchain-based systems.

“The notion of a decentralised web has from the start been about a web without central servers, one not dependent on any specific for-profit corporations. I think ÐΞVCON represents an open door for the entire ecosystem, and especially an opportunity for new projects to get involved in a truly disruptive technology that could facilitate radical changes in our society.”
— – Dr. Gavin Wood

William Mougayar will take part on various panels and will host a talk on “Communicating the Ethereum Narrative.” Mougayar is Board Advisor for the Ethereum Foundation, and a Founder of Startup Management. Mentor, Investor, Entrepreneur. Ex-CEO Eqentia & Engagio (sold to Influitive). Author, advisor, speaker, exec, angel investor and thought leader in the blockchain space.

“Communicating the Ethereum narrative will be an important session because the visionary thought leadership of the Ethereum project has been spilling over to the whole crypto-tech space. I know what it takes to build large-scale decentralized applications and protocols given my additional involvement with OpenBazaar (investor + on their BOD), and what I’m seeing coming out of the Ethereum stack will facilitate even further the deployment of such projects.”
— – William Mougayar

Nick Szabo will be a keynote speaker at ÐΞVCON1. Szabo is a Computer Scientist, Legal Scholar and Cryptographer, and known for his research in digital contracts and digital currency. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1989 with a degree in Computer Science. The phrase and concept of "smart contracts" was developed by Szabo with the goal of bringing what he calls the "highly evolved" practices of contract law and practice to the design of electronic commerce protocols between strangers on the Internet. Smart contracts are a major feature of cryptocurrencies and the E programming language. Szabo influentially argued that a minimum granularity of micropayments is set by mental transaction costs.

“Yes, eventually more so, since Ethereum’s more flexible and general language can facilitate a much wider variety of commercial and other formal applications."
— – Nick Szabo

Lucius Greg Meredith will be hosting a presentation on “Monadic design patterns for the blockchain,” and has been collaborating with Vlad Zamfir of Ethereum on Casper, Ethereum’s “proof-of-stake” blockchain architecture. Meredith is the CTO for Synereo, and was the principal architect of Microsoft’s BizTalk’s Process Orchestration, sparking several industry standards including WSDL (of which Greg is a co-author). Greg holds many patents and has published many papers, including seminal papers on reflective higher-order calculi. Supports his math habit by working in computing, he’s also known as “The Mathemagician.”

“Look around you and ask yourself: how does Great Nature manage scale? Every child can see the tree in the leaf and the leaf in the tree. The part reflects the whole, the whole the part. For any decentralized, distributed system to scale, it needs to follow this principle, or ultimately break down. The principle is composition, and the monadic design patterns represent our best understanding, to date, of what is meant by composition. We illustrate composable blockchains as monadic design patterns and look at their scaling characteristics.”
—  – Lucius Greg Meredith

Jack Peterson will be presenting Augur, a fully-decentralized, open-source prediction market platform for any and all predictive markets, intended to revolutionize forecasting, decision making, and the manner in which information is collected and aggregated. The project recently closed a crowdfunding for over USD 5 Million. Peterson is a Core Developer for Augur, a physicist, entrepreneur, and software developer. He became fascinated by distributed networks and cryptocurrency while finishing his PhD at UCSF. He has delved into scientific computing, blockchain programming, computer vision, neural networks, peer-to-peer networking, GIS, and web development. He was a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow, and has published several peer-reviewed articles on complex networks and information theory.

“Developing on Ethereum has been chaotic, in the best sense of the word. We broke ground on Augur in December last year, when Ethereum was still in its proof-of-concept stage, with the framework we’re building on being constructed underneath us as we go. This sounds like a recipe for a Bad Experience, but Vitalik, Jeff, and the go-ethereum team have been fantastic about responding to issues, adding new features as we need them, and just generally being very accomodating. The result has been exhilarating. I’ve never been part of a project with this kind of raw velocity before!”
— – Jack Peterson

The event keynote will be hosted by Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Jeff Wilcke, and Nick Szabo, on Monday the 9th November, there are many presentations already planned and more to be defined. According to the organizers, these are fit for everyone’s interests and backgrounds, from core developers to people curious about decentralised apps, as well as financial institutions, fintech startups, individuals or students wanting to learn more: there is a talk for that.

Joseph Lubin will present ConsenSys, a blockchain venture production studio building decentralized applications and foundational tools based on Ethereum. Juan Batiz-Benet will also be introducing IPFS and a “new peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol.”

Guests will be able to attend three “Building a ÐApp from scratch” hands-on workshops and one on “Truffle”, a development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for Ethereum.

“In my times as a core dev for Ethereum I’ve tried hard to work out what it really is that we’ve been busy creating. For me, "Turing-complete blockhain" doesn’t get close to the real meaning.  I’ll be exploring what Ethereum really is from the point of view of the very people who need to understand it best: developers.”
—  – Gavin Wood

Building decentralized applications on Ethereum is the essence of the platform, and seeing what developers are working on could be of inspiration for more ÐApps to be built. The team has yet to finalize the agenda and told Brave New Coin to expect some surprises and more guests.

Tickets are available for purchase on the event website with payment accepted in Ether/Bitcoin or Fiat. A one day pass is GBP 250 online or at the door GBP 300 while a 5 day pass is GBP 750 online or GBP 900 at the door. Refreshments and lunch for each day will be provided and included in the cost of the ticket. Students and Developers can apply for a limited amount of passes here.

There are a few speakers slots available, If you’d like to present at ÐΞVCON1 send your presentation topic and credentials here.

“This conference will be a living display of the Ethereum global ecosystem, made-up of core and external developers, advocates, extended contributors, startups, institutional users, investors and economic players. Two new groups with particular highlights are Ethereum-based startups (hence interest by investors), and large tech and consultancy services companies who are building Ethereum delivery capabilities or adjunct products. And they will be participating, with some surprise announcements.”
— – William Mougayar

Over a dozen of the top ÐApps currently in development will be represented at the conference, and Brave New Coin will be attending and reporting on the events as they unfold.