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Learnings from Devcon 2024: Ethereum’s North Star

Learnings from Devcon 2024: Ethereum’s North Star - Thumbnail

What is Ethereum? Ethereum is the world’s most decentralized, valuable, and mature general purpose blockchain. Though it is first and foremost a technology, the focus of this year’s Ethereum developer conference, Devcon, was on what Ethereum is as a philosophy and the extent to which the principles and values driving Ethereum protocol development have changed over the years.

Ethereum’s No Good, Very Bad Year

2024 has been a particularly challenging year from the perspective of ETH price and market sentiment.

ETH/BTC - Chart

Many critics of Ethereum argue that the community’s cypherpunk values of decentralization, credible neutrality, and censorship resistance have weakened over time, or even been abandoned altogether. Even within the Ethereum community, disagreements over values have fueled contention in the decision-making process for the Pectra upgrade and heated arguments on X over topics such as the blob fee market and issuance.

Despite the high number of technical innovations and announcements presented at Devcon 7, none were able to offer the community clarity about Ethereum’s long-term value and narrative. By far the most highly anticipated announcement of the week shared by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake was the unveiling of the Beam Chain, a radical proposal to overhaul Ethereum’s current consensus protocol, the Beacon Chain.

Justin Drake Devcon 2024 - Image

Caption: Keynote at Devcon 7 by Ethereum Foundation’s Justin Drake.

Source: YouTube (@EthereumFoundation)

Though Drake detailed several new technical features designed to enhance both Ethereum and Layer-2 functionality, the proposal lacked widespread community support and failed to provide a “North Star”, a forward-looking goal, for stakeholders to get excited about in a similar way to the Merge, Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake.

For several years, the Merge was Ethereum’s North Star. It was a technical upgrade that represented values rooted in environmentalism and decentralization shared by almost the entire community. Since the Merge, no technical upgrade has so clearly aligned with Ethereum’s values, which has in turn fueled confusion and discord among Ethereum stakeholders about how Ethereum as a technology should evolve.

What is Ethereum?

More than the technical announcements, the ideas presented at Devcon about how to build Ethereum and build on Ethereum in a way that promotes values of decentralization and credible neutrality inspired the minds and hearts of Devcon attendees. Though all speakers presented slightly differing philosophies about Ethereum, they all shared the underlying belief that Ethereum is the pursuit of creating permissionless, transparent, and trust-minimized systems for the betterment of humanity.

If ever there was a doubt about the cypherpunk values motivating innovation on Ethereum, the talks at Devcon 7 highlight that these values remain at the core of Ethereum as a philosophy. When asked about the tradeoffs between decentralization and performance, all four panelists on the “Ethereum Values and Ethos Alignment” panel reaffirmed the importance of decentralization over and above performance and scalability.

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Caption: Panel on Ethereum’s Values and Ethos at Devcon 7. Speakers from left to right are Ahmad Bitar, Mark Tyneway, Nixo, Peter Szilagyi, and Phil Ngo.

Source: YouTube (@EthereumFoundation)

In his keynote presentation, cofounder of Flashbots Philip Daian talked about the four characteristics of “Ethereum 3.0” that must not be compromised at any cost. They included: permissionless, distributed, geo-economically decentralized, and neutral-builder efficient. Daian pleaded with the broader community to realign focus on promoting and strengthening geographical diversity and permissionless design across all verticals of the Ethereum tech stack over and above other objectives such as mass adoption through an improved user experience.

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Caption: Keynote at Devcon 7 by Flashbot’s Philip Daian.

Source: YouTube (@EthereumFoundation)

“The problem is if you combine napkin research with UX fentanyl, that’s a pretty bad situation. I think that is how ETH goes to zero. It’s the combination of napkin research and UX fentanyl eroding the decentralization we’ve built so carefully and leaving us open to capture, the co-opting, and to rebuilding the systems we sought to evade,” said Daian during his keynote speech.

Gnosis co-founder Martin Koeppelmann introduced the idea of “native rollups” in his keynote speech, which are rollups built with Ethereum values such as decentralization and credible neutrality in mind. Practically, for Koeppelmann, this means rollups without multi-sigs that control the critical functions of the rollup, multiple implementations of the rollup proof systems, and rigorous testing of the rollup codebase (i.e. “thousands of eyes scrutinizing every line of code”), just like Ethereum.

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Caption: Keynote at Devcon 7 by Gnosis’ Martin Koppelmann.

Source: YouTube (@EthereumFoundation)

Finally, a full day of Devcon programming was dedicated to exploring the defensive acceleration or "d/acc" philosophy. In the words of its creator, Vitalik Buterin, “d/acc [is] a philosophy, set of techniques, and protocols for building technology that makes human agency its means and ends. Every technology we make should be directed towards our shared freedom and happiness.” Many Devcon attendees received a small booklet about the d/acc philosophy as part of their welcome gift to the conference, as well as a booklet on the future of the Ethereum protocol on the last day of the conference, both written by Buterin.

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Caption: Cofounder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin opening keynote for d/acc Discovery Day at Devcon 7.

Source: YouTube (@EthereumFoundation)

The booklets and programming at Devcon 7 highlighted an emphasis on a shared philosophy among Ethereum developers over and above a shared technical roadmap. More than any innovation, forthcoming upgrade, or development team in the Ethereum ecosystem, the most compelling North Star presented at the conference was a shared desire among attendees to build permissionless, transparent, and trust-minimized systems for the betterment of humanity.