A glance at the hot trends and key projects of the Ethereum Montenegro Conference

Industry trend outlook and key project inventory at the Ethereum Montenegro conference.

Written by: Fishery Isla, Biteye Core Contributor

Edit: Crush, Biteye Core Contributor

The annual EDCON (Community Ethereum Development Conference Ethereum Community Developer Conference) was held in Montenegro from May 19th to 23rd. EDCON is held in different places every year (2017 in Paris, 2018 in Toronto, 2019 in Sydney, 2020-2021 held online due to the pandemic, San Francisco in 2022).

The purpose of this time is mainly to promote communication and interaction between the global Ethereum community.

In addition to EDCON, there are Ethereum community events such as EthCC, ETHDenver, Devcon, and ETHglobal.

Every Ethereum event can attract the attention of a large number of institutions, developers, and investors. Therefore, participating in these conferences will help you get in touch with the latest Ethereum ecology and technology development direction, and it is also a good opportunity to expand your network.

This article provides an interpretation of EDCON for readers who were unable to attend the conference in person.

01 Montenegro: a European web3 bridgehead

Before we formally introduce the noteworthy projects of this conference, let's take a look at what kind of country Montenegro is.

The Republic of Montenegro is known as the European web3 bridgehead, located in southeastern Europe, adjacent to the Adriatic Sea, geographically connecting the European continent and the Middle East. Whenever we mention encryption-friendly countries/regions, we tend to think of Singapore, Malta, etc., and forget Montenegro, a country whose prime minister personally granted V God national privileges.

In addition, Do Kwon, the founder of Terra, also chose Montenegro as his escape destination. It is not without reason that two influential figures in the encryption industry favor this "small country" in the Balkan Peninsula:

(a) Legislative environment: Montenegro has a range of regulations and policies that support and regulate cryptocurrencies. The government of Montenegro has provided a good environment for the development of cryptocurrency companies by implementing flexible legislation and regulatory measures. These regulations not only protect the rights and interests of investors, but also encourage innovation and technological development.

(b) Tax Incentives: Montenegro has the most affordable tax rate in Europe, and the taxation of cryptocurrency transactions and related companies is relatively loose. This policy has attracted a large number of investors and companies to Montenegro to set up cryptocurrency companies, which has promoted the development of the country's economy.

(c) The government is active: The Prime Minister of Montenegro granted Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, a Montenegro passport in April 2022. He hopes that V God will help this southeastern European country strive to become a blockchain innovation center. The choice of hosting the EDCON conference in Montenegro is a example.

After this EDCON, the participants will have a deeper understanding of Montenegro. I believe that in the future, Montenegro will have the opportunity to enter more Web3 industries.

02 Inventory of participating high-quality projects

EthStorage Ethereum Storage Rollup (@EthStorage)

**EthStorage is the first place in this EDCON. It is a programmable dynamic storage layer-2 solution based on the availability of Ethereum data. **

Most existing L2 solutions, such as Optimism/ZK Rollup, focus on scaling Ethereum's computing power, the ability to pack more transactions per second. With the popularity of NFT/DeFi/dApps, etc., the demand for storing large amounts of data and reusing the security of the Ethereum mainnet has also increased dramatically.

The second-tier storage infrastructure is a general direction of the second-tier sector that is ignored by most people. It is the same as the traditional second-tier logic. The original intention is to use the security of the Ethereum mainnet to achieve expansion.

**The storage function of EthStorage mainly serves two businesses, one is data storage for Web3 applications, and the other is DA expansion. Either of these two main businesses is a track with very high expectations, so EthStorage is worthy of attention. **

The number of EthStorage twitter fans has just exceeded 1,000. For a public chain infrastructure project that has received funds from the Ethereum Foundation, it is very early and is worth participating in.

EAS Ethereum Authentication Service (@eas_eth)

EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service, Ethereum Attestation Service) is a public product that enables anyone to attest to anything, on-chain or off-chain. Users simply register a schema (or use an existing schema) on any topic and use that schema for attestation.

For decentralized services to go beyond currencies and assets, we also need a general ledger to make claims on Ethereum. This ledger will help build trust in more online interactions. Proofs play a vital role whenever you need to prove or verify something. By allowing anyone to create and verify proofs, EAS has the potential to change the way information is shared and verified online and advance the entire Ethereum ecosystem.

At present, EAS has been launched on the Ethereum main network, Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism, and you can try to interact with it. In addition, EAS has not officially opened user communities such as Discord, so you might as well pay more attention to them, and join early to receive OG status after opening the community.

Aspis Protocol Chain Asset Management Protocol (@AspisProtocol)

ASPIS is a no-code platform, users do not need programming knowledge, and can create custom asset management vaults through web page interaction, providing a friendly, transparent and safe passive investment alternative. Provides a set of tools for creating, raising capital and running Decentralized Autonomous Funds (DAFs), aiming to manage the relationship between vault creators/managers and investors by transferring the logic behind legal terms to smart contracts.

Currently, Aspis Protocol is recruiting testers for Beta testing of the decentralized asset management constructor.

Test users can create their own on-chain funds to help project parties improve transparency, security and efficiency in the field of asset management.

Nerif Network Automated Smart Contract Platform (@NerifNetwork)

Every transaction of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) needs to be triggered by an external wallet (EOA), and cannot be triggered automatically. Operations such as price limit pending orders and liquidation of non-performing loans need to be triggered by an external centralized server. Therefore, there is a market demand for a decentralized automatic contract platform.

Nerif is a complete automated smart contract solution that can automate dApps (smart contracts) on multiple chains based on user-defined rules, requirements and conditions.

Cross-chain automation can be applied to any conditions/events/actions/triggers inside or outside the blockchain, such as event emission, eth_call results, offline triggers, etc. Nerif can also be used to automate any other custom computations on and off the blockchain.

Nerif has integrated a wide range of blockchains, sidechains and second-layer networks. It enables developers to run expensive On-chain applications on a cheap and fast chain, and execute the final state-changing logic on an expensive chain like Ethereum on the other side.

For example, a complete cross-chain bridge application may consist of two smart contracts deployed on two or more different blockchains. One side is expensive but the business logic is simple; the other side is cheap but the operation logic of dApp is complex. In this case, Nerif can economically balance the costs at both ends and save costs.

Today, multi-chain deployment has become a common practice for many successful DeFi in expanding verticals and use cases: SushiSwap DEX spans 15 chains, Beefy Finance revenue aggregator spans 12 chains, and Aave money market spans 3 chains. This demonstrates the solid need for multi-chain narratives in the crypto space.

There are many similar automated contract products in this track, and the advantages of Nerif are:

1. Can be automatically enabled on multiple EVM and non-EVM chains at the same time

2. Completely decentralized, even if one-third of the network is down, it can still work normally

3. Flexible solution that allows execution of any function through multiple triggers and conditions

4. Easy-to-use general interface to build cross-chain Web3 applications

At the same time, the various professional transaction pending order services provided by Nerif are indeed just what some professional traders just need, but they must also beware of loopholes in the platform. There have been loopholes in Dexible, a similar professional transaction order product, and the relevant tokens authorized by users to the platform were transferred away. . Therefore, it is best not to interact with the main wallet, and revoke authorization in time after the interaction.

Cell Protocol is a large-scale Layer 3 social protocol that can be combined

Cell Protocol won the Future of Social Network's Special Award in this conference, and was the first selected project of the Wanwu Island Entrepreneurship Camp initiated by Dr. Xiao Feng.

This project provides a composable large-scale Layer 3 solution for Web3 social customization. The project description is grand, and the targets are Lens Protocol, Momoka and CryberConnect, and the technical architecture is more complex.

It includes both Layer 2 products and self-built Layer 3 infrastructure (public chain). At the same time, a composable design is added to the architecture, which can be compatible with popular infrastructure and public chains at any time, such as data availability layer and storage projects. .

From the perspective of product positioning, Cell Protocol not only focuses on the drainage of the existing Web3 stock market, but also plans many functions to seek to attract the traffic of Web2 social apps, which is the shortcoming of the current Web3 social products.

It is reported that Cell Protocol will be deeply bound to mainstream Web2 social media such as Twitter. At the same time, it will go a step further by adding Web3 exclusive solutions to Web2's mature business model with advertising as its main revenue. It keeps the bottom line that Web3 data belongs to the user itself, and solves the problem of revenue.

Whether it is from a technical point of view or a business model, there are innovations that deserve special attention.

Topia L2 Shared Data Availability Layer Protocol

Recently, there are two popular Topia, which are easy to cause confusion. One is the NFT project, Topia after NFT WWorld was renamed, and Topia, which will be introduced in this EDCON, is an L2 shared data availability layer protocol, and it is also an entrepreneurial project of Wanwudao. The first selected projects of the camp.

Compared with traditional DA projects, such as L1 DA projects such as Celestia and Polygon Avail, Topia is creating a shared DA layer for all future Ethereum L2.

Therefore, Topia will seamlessly integrate Ethereum's mature L2 and developer ecosystem.

Topia will create a dedicated L2 for this DA layer network. On this L2, Topia's storage can be seamlessly integrated and specific optimizations can be made, such as supporting concurrent transactions and allowing contracts to directly access Topia's storage, which is an important step in realizing "L2 interconnection".

All applications built on Topia storage and L2, regardless of their diversity and quantity, will share the same Topia storage.

As you can see, Topia and EthStorage described above do very similar things. And Topia is the first EVM-compatible storage layer based on optimistic rollup, with strong interoperability between its storage and smart contracts.

In order to ensure safety and efficiency, storage nodes need to submit storage proofs on the chain, and storage nodes can obtain Topia token economic incentives. According to Topia's official introduction, it is superior to competing products in terms of cost and storage limit.

This meeting conveyed a signal that Ethereum's second-tier data storage + DA will be the core narrative for a long time to come.

These two projects are worthy of attention, because there is competition and technological innovation.

DataverseOS

The term Dataverse comes from a database developed by Microsoft. Dataverse was originally a web app that allows users to share and analyze data. Microsoft uses Dataverse as the data storage center for various services of Power Platform.

The DataverseOS team added the concept of decentralization to the original Dataverse, making DataverseOS a personal computer that provides native web pages for everyone.

In the information age, everything is a file. DataverseOS adds a social file layer on top of the fragmented web. Every interaction a user has with DataverseOS dApps automatically links online data to the local file system.

At present, DataverseOS positions itself in the Web3 social/storage track, which belongs to infrastructure projects. If you think of it as a web3 personal computer according to the name, the narrative is very grand and worthy of attention.

03 Summary

From the projects displayed at this conference, it can be seen that the current hot spot has shifted from the L1 public chain to the infrastructure projects serving the L1, such as automation, storage, Web3 social networking and other topics. Such projects still have a lot of room for imagination, and more If it has practical application, if it can be developed, it will still have the same wealth-creating effect as L1.

With meaningful projects emerging, perhaps this means that the prelude to the Mass adpotion we've been waiting for has only just begun.

References

[1] Nerif white paper

[2] What is ASPIS

[3] Montenegro makes Vitalik a citizen, part of plans to promote it as a blockchain hub