ETHDenver2023 kicked off on February 24th in Denver, Colorado, USA! The core activities of the conference will take place from March 3rd to March 5th (Beijing time), including keynote speeches, group discussions, and exhibitions. The following activity times are all in Beijing time (UTC+8).
March 1st
04:30 - 05:00
"Why and How to Build Secure, Low-Cost, Global dapps with L2 or L2 Extension on Ethereum for Global Adoption"
Synopsis: This session will share Coinbase's framework and process for considering L2 and demonstrate how to deploy a developer's first dapp on L2.
Guest Speaker: Jesse Pollak, Senior Engineering Director of Coinbase Protocol.
March 2nd
02:10 - 08:00
"Real-World Cryptocurrency Usage Demonstration"
Synopsis: Each attendee will receive $5 USDC to purchase goods and services exhibited at the conference. Come and experience how cryptocurrency is connected to the real world.
Core Activity
March 3rd
00:20 - 00:40
"DeFi Risks: How to Protect Your Protocol with Blockchain Simulation"
Synopsis: This session will delve into the use of on-chain simulation for economic risk modeling in DeFi. Discussing different use cases for DeFi economic risks, using real-life and recent examples from mature DeFi protocols to understand the importance of risk modeling for web3. Then introducing agent-based Monte Carlo simulations used in TradFi and explaining how Chaos Labs adopts this approach to run high-fidelity blockchain simulations.
Guest Speaker: Omer Goldberg, Founder of Chaos Labs.
02:30 - 03:00
"Decentralization and Regulatory Challenges: Decentralized Finance, Securities Law, etc."
Synopsis: From decentralized exchanges to mixers, regulatory issues include combating illegal finance, financial supervision systems, and potential applications of securities and commodity laws. How can we preserve the unique aspects of decentralization - no permission, pseudonymity, accessibility, privacy, inclusivity, immutability, transparency, interoperability, efficiency, etc. - while addressing regulatory concerns for consumer protection, national security, and other risks? When and where does the review system make sense? What are the responsibilities of different participants at different layers of the stack - validators, front-end operators, and others? How will new technologies like ZK impact this analysis?
Guest Speaker: Tuongvy Le, Bain Capital Partner and Head of Regulation and Policy.
04:30 - 05:00
"The Role of Market Makers in the Ecosystem"
Synopsis: The current market conditions have led to a significant depletion of liquidity in the ecosystem - to the disadvantage of all participants. Can protocols still guide operations in a free market or can DEXs continue to offer low slippage rates? What role can market makers play in ensuring the continuity of the defi ecosystem?
Guest Speaker: John Gu, CEO of Alpha Capital.
05:10 - 05:30
"Web3 Meets the Iranian Revolution"
Synopsis: Women, life, freedom. Iran is undergoing a cultural revolution. We will explore how Ethereum and Web3 tools are helping (and have already helped) Iranians fight for freedom against censorship, surveillance, and oppression. We will also discuss how overcompliance with sanctions is preventing legal aid from reaching Iran and introduce our newly formed non-governmental organization, IranUnchained, as a potential solution built on Moloch v3.
Guest Speaker: TBA (To Be Announced)
05:30 - 05:50
"The Rise of Citizen Journalism, Traditional Media, and On-Chain Analysis"
Synopsis: During the FTX and Alameda crashes, the emerging citizen journalism movement took center stage and led the reporting as blockchain detectives identified and analyzed significant updates before traditional and even crypto media. Mainstream media outlets are rising and becoming increasingly willing and able to report on on-chain events, such as stablecoin burnings, centralized forex reserves, and connections between blockchain addresses. Meanwhile, these trends indicate that on-chain literacy is irreversibly on the rise, which may have significant implications for privacy protection on public blockchains.
How will funds and other entities respond to this growing "investigatoooor" movement? What does this mean for the future of blockchain research and analysis? How can investors stay ahead of the curve?
Guest Speaker: Andrew Thurman, Head of Content at Nansen.
06:20 - 06:40
"On-chain Governance: How do we Map Political Science onto Blockchain? "
Synopsis: A Blockdaemon protocol expert will provide an overview of on-chain governance as a form of "off-chain consensus" with both quantitative and qualitative impacts. Specifically, by examining recent governance disputes, precedents, and comparing them with historical social achievements, we will attempt to unravel the truth. How can we map political science onto blockchain?
Guest Speaker: Blockdaemon Protocol Expert Drew Roberson
08:20 - 08:40
"Inflation and Cryptocurrencies: An Old Enemy Meets a Very Young Asset"
Synopsis: Cryptocurrencies have been exploring uncharted territories, but they have never faced global inflation pressure. Today's investors have no experience with this situation since the last time it happened was in the 1970s. As history repeats itself on the brave frontier of the future, what can we expect?
Guest Speaker: Market commentator Boaz Shoshan
08:40 - 09:00
"Overview of On-Chain Liquidity Provision"
Synopsis: AMMs and their LPs are a new financial primitive. In terms of market structure, there are a lot of comparisons to be made between AMMs and more traditional forms like CLOB and RFQ. In terms of liquidity provision, there have been many innovative forms of liquidity provision, such as Automated Liquidity Managers and even more advanced types like JIT (Just-In-Time) liquidity. It is a cross-section of traditional finance, information security, game theory, and more. Uniswap is undertaking a project to dive deeper into these innovations and carefully consider their impact on protocol development, smart contract engineering, and market structure design.
Guest Speaker: Xin Wan, Research Scientist at Uniswap Labs.
March 4th
01:00 - 01:20
"Crypto Insurance as an Asset Class"
Synopsis: Insurance in the crypto industry is severely lacking with only 1% of crypto assets being insured. By creating an on-chain insurance market, there can be a widespread adoption of both crypto and insurance coverage, providing real-world, sustainable crypto returns independent of the market. In this talk, we will discuss the current state of crypto insurance, whether custodians should be insured or individuals, why crypto needs insurance, how to get real-world sustainable returns, and why traditional insurance needs blockchain technology to become more transparent, trustworthy, and efficient, and predictions for the future of crypto insurance as an asset class.
Guest Speaker: Danielle Wall, Chief Operating Officer of Nayms.
01:20 - 01:40
"Blockchain Games: How We'll Build Them and Why They'll Change the Rules of Play"
Synopsis Summary: The first part completely ignites blockchain games and explains their potential: from unlicensed combinations of game assets and even game elements, to creating player-driven (and player-owned) ecosystem game modules, touching on the social impact of games in a universe where assets can be freely combined. The second part explains how we can onboard gamers (especially non-blockchain-native gamers) to these games and how we can improve their user experience. We will describe some technologies such as using session keys to avoid too many wallet interactions, limited off-chain experimentation, application chains, and caching and indexing architectures and frameworks.
Guest Speaker: Nicolas Laurent, Founder of Infinite Factory.
01:40 - 02:00
"Decentralized Market Making - How it Works, what it is, and why We Need it"
Synopsis: With the recent crisis involving Luna, 3AC, FTX, and Alameda Research, it's clear that existing market makers need to be disrupted. Market making should be transparent, non-custodial, and permissionless. In this talk, I'll explore the challenges of existing market making and how to do market making on UniswapV3. I'll explain that market making strategies that have been in existence for over 20 years can actually be executed and applied to UniswapV3 LPing.
Guest Speaker: Ari Rodriguez, Chief Technology Officer of Arrakis Finance.
06:40 - 07:00
"Token Governance - Rethinking the veToken Model"
Synopsis: This talk will discuss the veToken model and how using an exponential decay curve instead of a linear one can reduce code complexity, save gas costs, and make it easier to add new features such as delegated voting.
Guest Speaker: Joshua Fraser, founder of Origin Protocol.
08:30 - 09:00
"Catalyzing the Development of LSD with DVT"
Synopsis: As Shanghai upgrade approaches, the ETH staking space will unlock one of its most significant milestones yet - the ability to extract and reinvest your Ethereum rewards. With a few players dominating the field, how can existing stakers, newcomers, and developers provide competitive and alternative Liquid Staking solutions in this space? DVT is the staking infrastructure needed to bridge the gap between Defi and staking.
Guest Speaker: Ariel Zimroni, Product Manager of ssv.network.
March 5th
00:00 - 00:15
"Challenges of Enabling EVM Functionality on the Solana Blockchain"
Synopsis: The blockchain systems of Ethereum and Solana are vastly different. They differ in architecture and technological implementations. For example, on Solana, transactions can be executed in parallel but with limits on the number of instructions in a single transaction - whereas on Ethereum, this is not the case. The team at Neon Labs has overcome many technical barriers and discovered many technical tricks to bridge the worlds of Ethereum and Solana. Marina Guryeva, Co-founder and Director of Neon Labs, will share the results of their work and some of the technical solutions currently being implemented.
Speaker: Marina Guryeva, founder of Neon Labs.
04:00 - 04:20
"Zero-Knowledge Cryptography Enables Future Publicly Verifiable Elections"
Synopsis: The integrity of elections and the misinformation surrounding their validity continues to be a threat to democratic countries worldwide. At the same time, blockchain technology provides the transparency and anonymity necessary to solve this dilemma, leaving onlookers wondering "how will blockchain help in the struggle for democracy globally?"
While technology may not be able to solve all of these problems at once, election verification is a good starting point. Zero-knowledge cryptography is becoming a viable solution to address election uncertainty and protect democratic credibility. This is because zero-knowledge can verify the authenticity of people and information without revealing personal information. In other words, it is perfect for publicly verifying unique, genuine ballots while maintaining voter privacy. In this presentation, Howard Wu, founder of Aleo, will discuss how to apply zero-knowledge to the election system to provide transparency and privacy for voters and governments during the election cycle.
Guest Speaker: Howard Wu, founder of Aleo.
05:30 - 06:00
"Blockchain is Driving Financial Inclusion for Marginalized Communities in Africa"
Synopsis: This talk will explore the role of decentralized finance (DeFi) in Africa and how it is shaping the future and helping millions of people escape poverty. The speaker believes that DeFi has the ability to create a new and improved financial operating system for Africa that is both convenient and affordable for the 400 million people who don't have bank accounts. In turn, this provides more opportunities for Africans to access personal and business loans, which can drive economic growth and ignite innovation at the grassroots level like never before. The talk will explore the current and future path of DeFi in Africa and provide concrete examples to help turn this vision into a reality.
Guest Speaker: Adero Okudo, Co-founder of Azima
08:40 - 09:00
"How Zero-Knowledge Technology Will Completely Change Web3"
Synopsis: In 2015, the Ethereum protocol proposed a vision of a decentralized world computer that could rebuild a free and open internet—free from the fickleness and restrictions of centralized entities. While Ethereum has become the foundation of Web3, the upgrades needed to fully realize its potential have highlighted its growth.
As a result, Layer 2 has become a clear frontrunner in the race to scale for mass adoption. Solutions using zero-knowledge (ZK) technology are among the most promising solutions—their potential goes beyond just scaling.
ZK-powered technologies have the potential to completely transform countless fields from gaming to payments, digital identity to enterprise solutions. Looking ahead, 2023 is poised to be the year when ZK technology truly begins to soar.
This talk will outline how ZK technology works, its current implementation, and what this means for the internet in 2023 and beyond.
Guest Speaker: Mihailo Bjelic, Co-founder of Polygon
Miyuki
Cheng Yuan
Sanya
Hui Xin
Catherine
Others
TheBlock
Beincrypto
Cointelegraph