ETH India: Pleasant, with a forecast of crypto
With impressively curated ideas and an eager community of hackers, the event represented the best of the field. Featuring MakerDAO, Matic, NuCypher, Connext and more.
Enter and you’d see the Maker DAO stall straight ahead. There are other stalls to the left and to the right. Gitcoin, NuCypher, Consensys, Lendroid, Dharma, Status. A 2ft x 4ft table with a cream gold table cloth in front of the standees, and two chairs wrapped in the same cloth, with a bit of red trimming, between them. You could see all the stalls clearly, all the standees, the tables and chairs and the people who manned the stalls.
And then, you couldn’t.
The rush of young enthusiasm at ETH Global’s latest iteration, ETH India, was a sight to behold. As the second most populous country in the world, India’s got a lot of people, sure, but the brazen curiosity we saw in Bangalore was just something else. It was a crypto pandemic that took all of the projects, Lendroid included, by surprise.
The Hackathon
Dessert first. The hackathon was a delight to observe and aid. Individuals or teams, the passion was palpable. Team Maketh — Deep Karman Pal Singh, Tezan Sahu and Akash Kumar used the Lendroid protocol to build a dApp that made it possible to get a crypto loan tokenizing land registration documents. For the record, it took Maketh the better part of the day to lock down on their idea and the protocol they wanted to use to bring it to life. Once they did, they worked with admirable commitment until the end of the hackathon.
Maketh, all of them from the Indian Institute of Technology — Bombay, win a $2,000 prize from Lendroid. They were representative of the quality of teams that participated in the event.
We also had the undiluted pleasure of having demonstrated the alpha of Reloanr, live! Vii ran through an entire loan cycle for the audience at ETH India. Not before a satisfying exposition on our area of work — credit, and an overview of our ambitious, quite awesome roadmap.
There’s this force that makes the financial world go around and by extension, affects everyone on the planet. At its best, it is a lifeline, a launchpad. However, it is often misunderstood and grossly underestimated. That force is credit. While conventional credit has been around for millennia, and has spawned a complex ecosystem, it has also evolved into a highly localized, centralized and opinionated phenomenon. On the blockchain, it is still nascent and we have a shot at getting it right — to make it global, decentralised and unopinionated. There are only three things that stand in the way — an empathetic user experience, on-chain efficiency, and liquidity. To fill this vacuum, it is imperative that we enable lending and lending-driven dApps on the blockchain. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what Lendroid is about. We’re a non-custodial credit engine that powers financial services on the blockchain. We aim to enable margin eventually, but along the way, will build ready-to-use components on the protocol that will enrich the ecosystem. And the first of those components, now out on Kovan, is Reloanr.
A secondary market for Dai loans, Reloanr adds a layer of utility to the stablecoin, allowing a Dai holder to lend it out for interest, and also serves as an alternative means for getting Dai for a borrower.
Apart from a flawless demo of Reloanr, Vii also took the audience through the Lendroid roadmap, hinting at future collaborations and explaining the non-linear, modular nature of the roadmap. He also took time for a hat tip for the projects we admired and have worked with in the past. Maker obviously, but also the Mumbai-based Matic, NuCypher, Connext, and Quantstamp in particular, who were of invaluable help during our Token Generation Event.
The team behind the event
Andrew Dunscomb, the head of operations for ETH Global, was having a quiet moment, until I ran into him on Day 2. Despite serious fatigue and sleep deprivation, he was polite about my 2 minutes on stage, and was all admiration for the ETH India team that put together the event. The whole thing was driven from start to finish by Shakti Goap, Tanu Jain, Dalpat Prajapati and Nishant Verma. To organise an event of this magnitude, to drum up interest in crypto in a country whose government is regressively skeptical about it, is no mean feat.
Ideas and synergies
Day one was chock-full of ideas. The sessions began late because nearly all of the speakers were mobbed with questions from the attendees. It was worth the wait. Livestreamed by Livepeer, every presenter brought something new to take the crypto conversation forward. No mean feat in a space saturated with the same keywords for the last half year. Here’s a quick sampling of the talks.
Chris Min opened for Dharma, with a lucid intro to Solidity. He demonstrated code for a simplified ballot system. Nadav Hollander, Founder of Dharma, made an energetic case for building on Dharma. He spoke of debt as a force for good, which is an emotion we wholly agree with.
We’ve got a bit of a soft spot for the good people at Maker, because, well, who doesn’t. Solid, consistent work, and documentation so good it’s candy to a coder. At ETH India, Sean Brennan took the audience along a breezy but intense walkthrough into the stablecoin system. He also brought with him a tagline that most definitely needs to be on a tee shirt — Live Free and DAI Hard. Get it?
Everything that needs to be said about encryption has been said, right? Wrong, so wrong. Former physicist and NuCypher CTO Michael Erogov, in a revelatory talk about encryption, proxy re-encryption to be precise. One of the many takeaways was, encryption isn’t the hard part. When designing the process, one must consider that the data needs to be decrypted at some point.
Considering there is a fair amount of sensitive data in the lending process, a collaboration with NuCypher to enable conditional, proxy re-encryption seems rather logical. What do you think?
Let’s stretch first and purge ourselves, said Andy Tudhope in easily one of the three most riveting talks of the day. After making the audience indulge in a bit of yoga, he proceeded to ‘decentralize’ Twitter using the exhaustive resources of Embark, with coders in the audience in tow! In the latter half of the day, he waxed philosophical, shared a reading list spanning books from the dawn of time to the present, and left us feeling wiser than we did at lunch.
An internet where the users are in control of their own data, identity and destiny. What’s not to like? Jack kept it light, skimming across the surface of serious issues that plague the web today, and some revolutionary solutions that might allow it to shift orbit.
State channels can revolutionise peer to peer transactions on the blockchain. One of the most obvious use cases for state channels are payment systems. In a talk that was as lean and fat free as he himself was, Arjun Bhuptani made a strong argument for the immediate integration of state channels. Look up Connext now.
With an adapted version of Plasma and augmented with PoS based side chains, the Matic Network can potentially accelerate the transaction speed on our protocol. A collaboration, which we’re quite looking forward to, is already under way. Stay tuned for more news.
The take-away here is not ‘which is the best blockchain?’, but ‘which is the best blockchain for me?’. In a measured talk, Aparna presented an illustrated synopsis of her recent research on a range of blockchains, making a point that consensus has a long way to go.
An elegant concept. An arbitrarily chosen cluster to produce each block, with little room for collusion. As the final talker of the day, Arthur had his hands full in a not-so-full hall. However, the Q&A he initiated became so riveting that he had to request the audience to let him continue.
In a post event interview, I’d said that @ETHGlobal had set a benchmark for crypto events, for getting the balance of idea and application just right. ETH India is a likely example for this balance. It left the speakers, hackers and pretty much everyone involved in the event, feeling hopeful and happy.
We look forward to the next one. I’m positive we’re not alone.
