The Department of Decentralization welcomes you to Protocol Berg!

We briefly run you through the concept of the event and the program highlights of the day. Furthermore, we share logistical and operational tips on how to navigate the venue, information on food and drinks, and more.

Many studies and analyses have been performed on Layer-1 protocols that measure decentralization to the point where we have an accepted set of standards. Such standards include, but are not limited to, nakamoto coefficient, validator distribution, and full node counts. This talk explores the challenges in measuring decentralization across layer-2s on Ethereum, Polkadot and Cosmos where the technology varies and creates new avenues of centralization more obscured from the view of users.

Ali will introduce CometBFT and discuss the unique features that set it apart from other blockchain protocols. You will find out why CometBFT is quickly becoming the preferred choice for decentralized applications and how it is addressing the scalability challenges in blockchain technology.

During the presentation, Ali will take a deep dive into the technical details of CometBFT. You will learn about its code and architecture, and explore the cryptographic primitives that keep it secure. This part of the presentation will be especially interesting for developers and blockchain enthusiasts who want to understand the inner workings of CometBFT.

Furthermore, Ali will discuss how CometBFT is contributing to the realization of decentralization in the blockchain industry. You will find out how CometBFT is enabling decentralized applications to thrive and empowering individuals to take control of their data and assets.

Finally, Ali will also introduce ABCI++, its features, and its potential impact on the blockchain industry. This presentation is a must-attend for anyone interested in the latest advancements in blockchain technology.

A discussion about EVM client software, why it can't deliver accurate transactional histories (hint: it's missing an index), and what it would be like if it could.

together we will speed run the definitions of the terms that you've heard but would hate for someone to ask you to define on a podcast.

In this talk I want to share about Retroactive Public Goods Funding, what we learned in running 2 rounds of RetroPGF at Optimism, and what's next on our journey to summon Ether's Phoenix 🕊️

A high-level introduction to verkle sync, a synchronization algorithm made possible by the use of verkle trees and stateless Ethereum.

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll learn how to use the Radicle stack to collaborate on a code project. We’ll run our own nodes, connect to peers, and grow a virtual garden together.

This talk introduces the concept of digital commons, outlines some parallels between the Linux and Ethereum projects, and how their collective output may become enclosed by commercial entities.

The dm3 protocol is the web3 messaging protocol focusing on encryption, decentralization, scalability, and in particular interoperability. It utilizes the essential features for a lean messaging base protocol: a registry for public keys and decentralized delivery service nodes.

In the recent months, there has been a surge in the popularity of zkVM implementations. Many of these use specialized solutions and code, sometimes even all the way down to the cryptography, which makes these zkVMs very monolithic and non-interoperable.

Powdr takes a modular approach to designing and constructing zkVMs, employing multiple compilation and optimization stages to arrive at the final prover and verifier. Users can define custom instruction sets for a VM, specify how those compile to constraints, generate sub-machines and declare how to connect them. Moreover, the flexibility of powdr enables users to select from a variety of proving backends when generating the prover and verifier components.

To validate this concept, we have successfully developed a fully functional verifier that compiles (no-std) Rust code into eSTARK and Halo2 proofs via the RISC-V architecture. Additionally, we are currently working on adapting this verifier to wasm and Valida, VMs that take very different architectural approaches than RISC-V.

In this presentation, I'll go over the state of decentralized and shared sequencers for rollups, as well as existing and potential architectures for them. Decentralizing sequencers is needed for rollups to have true decentralization and censorship resistance, and sharing sequencers between rollups opens up the possibility of cross-rollup composability.

New programable interfaces are emerging from the application space being created by specialized app-chains. In this workshop, we’ll discover what these are on Polkadot and how they’re evolving the landscape of developing multi-chain decentralized applications.

Will your crypto project be censored? Censorship is spreading, from Infura blocking IP addresses, to Github taking the Tornado Cash repo down. This talk will provide a legal anthropological analysis of the elements that might put a project at risk, so that you can take the necessary steps to protect your efforts

Post-Merge testnets are a beast to run, this workshop would give you an overview into all the tooling that exists to make this job easier. We would also setup a small testnet during this workshop to help familiarize with the tools.

Metadata privacy is critical for personal and private data access. Today, mixnet-like systems are still the only privacy option for low latency data transfer that have been proven at scale. Other techniques are not far behind though, and can allow us to get similar or stronger privacy guarantees without sacrificing latency. I've advised a funding program over the last year aimed at supporting the transition to practice of private retrieval. This talk will survey currently available systems, and our current guesses for what methods can scale to widespread adoption.

Polkadot Parachain Consensus went live in December 2021. What is it? How does it work? How does it compare to scaling solutions on Ethereum? Are parachains a rollup?

Modern decentralized app stack, ethereum dev eduction, and streaming developer UBI.

Smoldot is a JavaScript package containing a light client for the Polkadot network, that can run from within a web page. Its development, which started nearly 4 years ago, was no easy feat. This talk is a post-modern that will go over the challenges that have been encountered and how we solved them.

"If a file isn't backed up, it isn't your file" preceded "Not your keys, not your crypto", but it's important to look back to the Web1 figure of speech as it applies to Web3. If you have a multi-billion dollar protocol, it's a good idea to back it up. But where should one look to for this?

L2 Rollups are a core component of the Ethereum scaling strategy, and the security landscape is actively changing. This talk compares the different optimistic rollup proving methods, how EIP-4844 data-availability affects a proof, and how the proof itself can be designed with the latest L2 tech.

Charly and Susannah explain to you a modular framework for understanding and talking about interoperability, and try to convince you to participate in the creation of a single standard for one layer in this modular framework (hint: the corollary being TCP/IP)

One of the definite feature of Erigon is how it stores blockchain state and state history in its own database. In this talk I will talk about the details, the database choices and the path the Erigon team took to go from the Geth data model into its own.

Until now, interoperable applications using IBC could only be built by launching your own chain on Cosmos. The new Dynamic IBC (dIBC) creates new possibilities for smart contracts to create their own data packets and compose with other dApps and appchains to unlock a new battery of use cases in web3.

A workshop explaining the essential maths needed to understand zero knowledge proofs

We will explore the features and benefits of Testground, and demonstrate how it can be used to test distributed systems in a controlled and reproducible environment at scale

In addition, we will cover test planning and strategies that worked for Celestia team that other protocol teams can take home as good point to start fresh

This presentation will try to explain what the problem of historical data availability is in EVM chains, why it exists and how we can try to tackle it.

Discussing our current protocol upgradability governance practices (pausability, timelocks, emergency operational procedures) and how we can move towards more sustainable on-chain consensus-driven governance as a path to decentralized protocol governance.

The "Polkadot Ubiquitous Computer" (or just Polkadot UC), represents the public service provided by the Polkadot Network: it is a trust-free, WebAssembly-based, multicore, internet-native omnipresent virtual machine which is highly resilient to interference and corruption. The present system of allocating resources of the Polkadot Ubiquitous Computer (parachain slot auctions) is based on a model of one-core-per-parachain: this is a legacy interpretation of the Polkadot platform and is not a reflection of its present capabilities. With Polkadot's capability to adapt to its users'need, a new paradign for allocating coretime is being implemented by ecosystem teams. Coretime on the Polkadot UC is envisioned to be sold by the Polkadot System in two separate formats: Bulk Coretime and Instantaneous Coretime. When a Polkadot Core is utilized, we say it is dedicated to a "Task" rather than a "parachain". The Task to which a Core is dedicated may change at every Relay-chain block and while one predominant type of Task is to secure a Cumulus-based blockchain (i.e. a parachain), other types of Tasks are envisioned. Bulk Coretime is sold periodically on a specialised system chain known as the "Coretime-chain" and allocated in advance of its usage, whereas Instantaneous Coretime is sold on the Relay-chain immediately prior to usage on a block-by-block basis.

This talk aims to explain this paradigm change within the Polkadot community to adapt to end-user needs, provide more agility and reduce long-term design flows.

Introduction to Ephemery, a novel approach to testnets which enables a single testing infrastructure consisting of ephemeral networks with deterministic parameters.

This talk will give an introduction to the Anoma protocol architecture and its design goals, to share what we learned and elicit feedback on how we could improve both.

Anoma is a distributed operating system for intent-centric counterparty discovery and privacy-preserving, scale invariant computation on linear and non-linear state resources with heterogenous trust assumptions.

In this talk, we'll shine a light on the separation of canonical protocol syntax necessary for global interaction and local semantics, especially in regards to trust.

Unifying aspects of the protocol along specific dimensions enables us to make this line clearer and maximizes the options for semantic flexibility after deployment.

Elliptic curve cryptography underpins the trillion dollar economy of cryptocurrencies. But it's often seen as some sort of sorcery, meant only for experts. While it's true that cryptography is a minefield, and therefore you should never roll your own crypto, it's still a useful method to build an understanding of cryptocurrencies from first principles.

In this workshop, we'll cover basic algebra necessary to get a theoretical understanding of elliptic curves, and learn how they are used for signing and verifying transactions. We'll then put this theory to practice by rolling our own toy implementation of the elliptic curve used in Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Consensus poses a major scalability bottleneck in blockchain networks - hampering web-scale applications like Twitch, Twitter, Tiktok, or web3 alternatives to scale within web3. Interplanetary Consensus (IPC) is a new framework to enable on-demand horizontal scalability of Filecoin to meet web-scale application demands - unlocking an open data economy of composable subnets for scalable computation, fast data retrievals, application-specific gaming networks, and more on the Filecoin network.

Blockchains, with their primary focus on decentralization, open participation, and resilience, inherently lack efficiency, scalability, and privacy. Similar to parallel computing algorithms, the scalability of a blockchain-based system depends on the extent to which computational tasks can be moved off-chain. Zero knowledge techniques, such as recursive SNARKs, offer an effective means of shifting computation off-chain, requiring only proof verification as part of the consensus process. Mina demonstrates the use of these techniques in its consensus algorithm Ouroboros Samasika and zkApps. Privacy poses a challenge in blockchain systems due to their open public ledgers. However, zero knowledge proofs enable reduced data exposure on the public ledger and allow fine-tuning of the level of disclosure. Etonec's payment system serves as an exemplary application showcasing enhanced privacy in blockchains.

Coincidentally, the Holešky testnet is scheduled to launch during the Protocol Berg conference. Let's put it on screen and chat about testnet infrastructure.

Proposal for Whisk: a privacy-preserving protocol for electing block proposers on the Ethereum beacon chain designed by George Kadianakis

Learn how to run rollup software on a data availability sampling light node.

Web centralization and consolidation have created potential single points of failure, e.g., in areas such as content hosting, name resolution, and certification. The "Decentralized Web," led by open-source software implementations, attempts to build decentralized alternatives. The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is part of this effort and provides a fully decentralized object storage and retrieval layer. This comes with challenges, though: Decentralization can increase complexity and overhead, as well as compromise performance, scalability, and system stability. As the lead developers of IPFS, we have therefore begun to explore more hybrid approaches. In this talk, we will discuss the trade-offs, and our implemented and proposed solutions, as well as give an outlook.

Protocol researchers and developers from distant ecosystems gather to talk about their blockspace.

With a set reconciliation algorithm built on js-libp2p-gossipsub and using Patricia Merkle Tries Farcaster (and Kiwi News) are pioneering a new type of credible neutral architecture for social+decentralized apps. In this talk, @timdaub will go through the architectural basics of what makes Kiwi News‘s replication algorithm work and how it uses the Ethereum mainnet for name space management and as a public key registry.

Immutable and verifiable content plays a key role in shaping the future of knowledge sharing for the good of all. At the same time, content represented in such a way amplifies the importance of routing; hashes are hard to remember, content keeps increasing, data moves and so do peers. This begs the question: how would we find “stuff” fast, efficiently and reliably without enabling centralised snooping? Find out what the InterPlanetary Network Indexer is addressing this issue for IPFS and FileCoin network.

The public and private are not opposites, they are complementary: privacy is needed to sustain the security and integrity of people as well as infrastructure that serve the public good. This workshop will demo working code for running Libp2p traffic through the Nym mixnet, built with the Nym Rust SDK.

This workshop will be led by Federico Kunze Küllmer, who was part of the core team that developed the Inter Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC). Federico is also the co-founder of Evmos, an EVM compatible blockchain that supports interoperable dApps via IBC. Federico will dive deep into the technical aspects of the IBC protocol, exploring how it enables cross-chain communication and discussing how Evmos simplifies the development of interoperable dApps. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn from the speaker's firsthand experience in implementing the IBC protocol and gain valuable insights into developing successful interoperable dApps using Solidity.

Despite the success in various scenarios, blockchain systems, especially EVM-compatible ones that serially execute transactions, still face the significant challenge of limited throughput. Concurrent transaction execution is a promising technique to accelerate transaction processing and increase the overall throughput. Existing concurrency control algorithms, however, fail to obtain enough speedups in real-world blockchains due to the high-contention workloads.

In this talk, I will propose a novel operation-level concurrency control algorithm designed for blockchains.
The core idea behind our algorithm is that only operations depending on conflicts should be executed serially, while all other conflict-free operations can be executed concurrently. Therefore, in contrast to the traditional approaches, which block or abort the entire transaction when encountering conflicts, our algorithm introduces a redo phase to resolve conflicts at the operation level by re-executing conflicting operations only. We also develop a set of data dependency tracking mechanisms to achieve precise identification and speedy re-execution for conflicting operations. We implement a prototype named ParallelEVM based on Go Ethereum and evaluate ParallelEVM using real-world Ethereum blocks. The evaluation results show that ParallelEVM achieves an average speedup of 4.28×. If combined with state prefetching techniques, ParallelEVM can further accelerate the transaction execution by 7.11×.

EIP-4337 gave some guidelines and visibility for Account Abstraction, but this is only the start. To fully unfold the power of smart contract based accounts it requires careful considerations and good standards. In this talk we want to give an overview on the current state of modular smart contract accounts and how to fully take advantage of the flexibility that comes with them.

Contribute to a sci-fi film exploring the meaning of Authenticity in a Post-Crypto World

I will present a trustless application data snapshot architecture based on on-chain hashed lists. I will also demonstrate an implementation of that architecture that is used by HOPR mix nodes to sync data much faster and with very few on-chain reads. The proposed mechanism is an orders of magnitude improvement in indexing speed at the cost of one on-chain hash + read + write of a single storage slot. Our open source base contract can be easily integrated into other smart contracts and combined with various frontend libraries.

Eyewitness Reports from a Decade-Long Unaligned Bystander

With over 2M members Worldcoin has the largest anonymity set for its zero knowledge proof of personhood protocol.

Since 2019, we’ve been studying the novel dynamics unlocked by crypto protocols, articulating new mentals model for understanding them, such as "headless brands" and "squad wealth." Since our work on public goods and with our experience as researchers and builders, our thinking has taken a more deeply political turn as we consider the long-term impact of crypto protocols as institutional bodies.

Institutional legitimacy and accountability of actors are problems which recur time and again as critical themes in protocol development and operations. Attempts to solve these problems are very wide-ranging, drawing from notions of the state (DAO constitutionalism) to corporations (coin-voting shareholder governance). As a result, protocol work has become a byzantine maze of narratives and mismatched mental models which are often a poor fit for the technical affordances of blockchains.

In this keynote talk, we will share insights from 5 years of techno-cultural analysis in the crypto space. We'll then present several frameworks that reveal how accountability and legitimacy arise—or don't—in crypto protocols. Drawing from legal and political theory (featuring pirates), we'll share a political philosophy of crypto institutions that will help protocol stewards and core developers understand power, behavioral regulation, and even violence in the nature of the protocol.

In this session, we invite you to grab a closing drink and wrap up the day with us! Learn more about the motivation behind Protocol Berg: What led us to organize this event and why did we decide to set it up as a donation-backed, sponsorless, non-profit event that is free to attend?

We will share our thoughts on event content curation, sponsors, and ecosystem collaboration. We will create transparency over our expenditures and how this event was financed.

We will also touch on the hardships and experiences of organizing a donation-only event, purely brought to you by a group of volunteers, always keeping in mind our goal: putting the attendee experience and content quality first.

Grab a drink (choice of aperitif, beer, or lemonade on us!) and mingle with fellow attendees and speakers.