Ethereum Community Conference, EthCC[7], Kicks Off In Brussels

EthCC[7] the annual Ethereum Community Conference began in Brussels, Belgium. Having moved from Paris this year, the Ethereum community was out in full force to attend at an all new venue.

Here are the most newsworthy takeaways from Day One:

EthCC[7] kicked off with the opening ceremony. Jerome de Tychey, President of Ethereum France walked the audience through the history of EthCC and welcomed the community to its new location this year in Belgium.

Stani Kulechov , Founder of Lens Protocol unpacked how Web3 social and DeFi aims to bring power back into the hands of communities. “DeFi is in its nature a transparent, borderless economy so it allows you the possibility to transact no matter your background. It has grown significantly and it’s here to stay.” 🌱

Clement Bihorel , Product Lead of Safe , gave a realistic breakdown of the state of smart accounts, not skirting around the issues with this foundational tech. “Smart accounts are growing steadily… there are a lot of trade-offs currently being made in the smart wallet space such as centralization risks, smart contract risks. [Despite these risks] there is a lot of innovation coming.”

J.M. Porup , Chief Information Security Officer of Ava Labs , put the community on the back foot by pointing out how underprepared most projects are for the real threat of a hack by the North Korean government. “They are not the best hackers in the world but they are consistent,” he warned. He advised projects to invest heavily in security upfront.

Raffi Sapire , Chief Operating Officer of Uniswap Foundation highlighted two key problems researchers are struggling with: how their research fits into the broader picture and how they move from a research paper and into a production environment. “Collaboration is key for researchers to move their research forward and progress the DeFi space, and when I think of DeFi in terms of Uniswap, we are thinking about how to onboard the next million users. Research done in a collaborative, cross-chain, cross-protocol way is the best to drive the industry forward.”

Titus Capilnean , Vice President Go-To-Market of Civic took to the stage to discuss the growing threat of artificial intelligence globally and Web3. When discussing identity solutions for prevention against threats and enhancing security on-chain, Titus highlighted the approach of permissioned smart contracts.

“We like to talk about permissionless in this space and that’s great. But I think we’re getting closer to the conclusion that there needs to be some form of permissioning smart contracts for assets that are more real-world linked”, said Titus.

“It means adding the rules to the tokens themselves. For instance, if you’re dealing with assets within a regulated jurisdiction, the last thing you want to do is issue a fractionalized ownership in an apartment building that is yielding rent. That proof of ownership might end up in a sanctioned country. A person in the sanctioned country could then try to claim the reward from you and your jurisdiction. There are now ways to link the rules of that particular token to identity elements.”

Cassidy Daly , Co-founder of Centrifuge , discussed how finance today is outdated and inefficient. Blockchain is the first technology to come in and overhaul the system and make it more efficient. Importantly she touched on how inflation impacts global trade and why it is important to move currency away from nation-states. “If you control the currency of trade, you control the world”. 🌍 Much of trade is in the dollar, meaning the US has a great degree of control in the world and over other currencies that trade with the US. Stablecoins allow us to move away from this and create a wedge. 💰

Will Shannon , a core contributor to Lido explored progress in enhancing decentralization and security with new staking modules for independent node operators with Lido. Today there are 180 independent node operators on Lido. This is up 386% year to date and 520% year on year. Will went on to explain how Lido’s community staking module (CSM) is optimised to provide the best independent node operation experience in the market and is now live on the testnet.

“Lido’s community staking module (CSM) will be the most secure, the most accessible, the most scalable, and the most sustainable. It has taken all the best parts of different protocols and I’m quite confident it is going to be brilliant.”

Paul Frambot , Co-founder and CEO of Morpho Labs walked us through the aggregated approach to DeFi, explaining that the future of lending and borrowing protocols will not be monolithic or modular but aggregated. Monolithic allows vast liquidity but has the drawbacks of a one-size-fits-all risk approach and a large code base that makes upgrading risk-averse while the modular approach has better flexibility but suffers the downside of liquidity fragmentation. Aggregation takes the best of both approaches without the drawbacks.

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