Ξthereum Devcon3 Summary - Day 2

“This is Cryptoland. It’s like Australia, where anything with a heartbeat is trying to kill you”
“This is Disneyland for hackers”
Martin discusses several aspects of security in the Ethereum space. He focused on minor differences between EVM implementations that can potentially cause consensus failure and potentially be used as an attack vector to the network.

Viktor Tron, Louis Holbrook, Daniel Nagy, Aron Fischer — Swarm Development Update

SWARM is an asynchronous distributed content storage and delivery system that provides a byte count credit limit, enables micropayment, and blacklisting of nodes who have exceeded their credit limit but not paid.
Several presenters discuss aspects of SWARM — essentially a distributed content storage and delivery system.

Daniel Nagy — Scalable Responsive DApps with SWARM and ENS

There’s an inherent tradeoff between responsiveness/performance and consistency in systems. In blockchain systems, they sacrifice performance for unparalleled consistency. This presents special challenges to developers trying to build high performance blockchain DApps.

Jordi Baylina — The Future of Token Contracts: MiniMe, Governance, LiquidPledging & ERC223

Giveth created and uses token contracts: MiniME, Yoga token, LiquidPledging contract. Jordi proposed the Yoga Token (MiniMe + ERC223) as new standard token for Ethereum.
Jordi discussed several extensions to the standard ERC20 token.

Jorge Izquierdo —Designing Future-proof Smart Contract Systems

Jorge argues it’s desirable for contracts to be upgradeable. Contracts should be cheap, upgradeable, and very simple. Jorge includes multiple patterns for this including proxy contracts, delegates and isolated business logic.

Matthew Tan & Wee Chan — Exploring the Ethereum Blockchain

Matthen and Wee discuss the specific challenges of running high-volume API based service Etherscan.io
Takeaway: Etherscan users are 92% male, and main countries are: US (20%), China (9%), Russia (6%), South Korea (5%). Matt highlighted the support needs of Ethereum users — the users are looking for more than just transactions, they’re looking for support, education, and onboarding.

Panel: USCC – The Underhanded Solidity Coding Contest

Panel: Formal Verification

Nicolas Bacca — Hardening Smart Contracts with Hardware Security

For a higher level of security, a talk on hardware-enabled security strategies given by Nicolas Bacca, CEO of Ledger hardware wallets.

Augusto Hack, Jannik Luhn, Loredana Cirstea — The Raiden Network

Raiden is a system to balance blockchain-based consistency with offline transactions.
Open a channel on the blockchain, micro payments / transactions occur quickly/freely off-chain, then ending balances are attested by sender/receiver, and channel is closed on blockchain.
Raiden nodes are not Ethereum nodes and Raiden is not embedded in your app. Raiden nodes are separate and communicate with Ethereum nodes via RPC and with your app via JSON API’s.