ETH Amsterdam 2022 – Key Insights

About ETH Amsterdam conference

This April 2022, the ETH Amsterdam conference gathered the Ethereum community to discuss the latest in the Ethereum ecosystem and build 165 projects submitted as part of the hackathon. This was the first in-person hackathon for ETHGlobal since ETH London 2019.

The 3-day-conference took place from April 22nd-24th and welcomed experts, professionals, hackers, and beginners in the Ethereum world to work on their projects and benefit from all the workshops, live sessions, and networking.

ETH Amsterdam 2022 had:

• 1,100 attendees from 56 countries
• 165 submitted projects
• 700 developers – 31% of them new to Web3
• ~50 workshops & talks
• 100 ecosystem mentors
• 50 partner teams
• $400,000+ in prizes to be won by winning teams   
• 13 finalists

ETH Amsterdam Speakers

A few of the top speakers that attended the ETH Amsterdam 2022 are:

•   Juan Bennet, Founder & CEO, Protocol Labs
•   Arjun Bhuptani, Founder & CEO, Connext
•   Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Foundation
•   Veronica Coutts, Head of Community, Optimism
•   Stani Kulechov, CEO, Aave
•   Hart Lambur, Co-Founder, UMA Protocol
•   Sandeep Naylwal, Polygon
•   Jack O’Holleran, Co-Founder & CEO, SKALE Network

Image credits: ETH Amsterdam

Event Agenda

The conference was divided into:

1st Day of Hackathon – time to register, learn from attending some of the 27 workshops, form teams and begin building! 

2nd Day of the Hackathon continues with 24 workshops and continued building! 

Final / Demo Day begins with the project submission deadline at 9 AM, project judging, closing ceremony & demos, followed by an afterparty! 

Hackathon Day 1

The hackathon registration opens, and hacking begins!
The day begins with 27 workshops to choose from ecosystem projects, such as Radicle, WalletConnect, Filecoin, Polygon, Wen3Auth, Aave, Lens, Optimism, and Coinbase; just to name a few…

Some of the things attendees could learn included:

• Deploy to Optimism in 0.5 seconds or your money back
• Connext 🛠 xApps with Connext
• Gnosis Safe 🛠 Starting with the Safe Core SDK
• A dive into 1inch Limit Order Protocol and API
• Plugin self-custodial social logins into your app/wallet via MPC with Web3Auth
• Building on Lens Protocol
• Aave Protocol V3

We present a summary of a couple of talks/ workshops we listened to below: 

WS: Lens 🛠 Building on Lens Protocol

David Silverman, the Product Manager at Aave Companies, gave an overview of the Lens Protocol at the ETH conference. 

David highlighted 3 main issues with Web2 social media and why it is broken. 

1. Digital Privacy: The first issue explained is centered around how these free social media platforms utilize users’ personal information by selling it, leaving no room for digital privacy. 
2. User Data Portability: The second issue revolves around the user data, which is not portable, implying that they can use the personal data however they want to, and the user’s content is locked on the platform. 
3. Centralized User Data: The third issue reflects on data being controlled by a singular large party making it sensitive to cyber-attacks. 

These issues can be fixed by visualizing social media through a new lens that allows developers to focus on user experience instead of acquisition. 

What exactly do they propose? 

Their social protocol ecosystem revolves around an NFT Infrastructure Layer. They introduced the “Profile NFT” which is minted upon creation. It allows profile owners and contains a display of publications that updates all the user’s comments, posts, and shares.

The “Follow NFT” includes built-in governance power and delegation and the “Post, Comments, and Mirrors (shares)” is referred to as a profile NFT that is permanently linked to the original creator, referring to their ability to mint derivatives which they call “collect NFTs”. 

The main goal of the project

Their main goal is to foster a broad, diverse, and evolving social ecosystem. They visualize their goal happening by allowing users to have fully composable and transferrable on-chain and social graph, so users could take their graph to the desired experience they want to engage with. Also, it would enable the focus to be on front end experience, allowing for an infinite amount of use cases and features. 

As a final promise, David explained how users won’t need to worry about indexing, querying, pre-filling contract data, or validating it. There is no massive learning curve; users just need to focus on what they want to build.

Opening Ceremony by Vitalik Buterin 

Image credits: ETHGlobal

After dinner, Vitalik Buterin and Kartik Talwar kicked off the event with an opening ceremony session. They discussed topics from the latest in the merge progress & what could prohibit it, Ethereum Improvement Protocols, collaboration with other layer 1s like bitcoin, among other things, like 85% hot green tea and 15% wine..

Vitalik discussed the multitude of the Ethereum Improvements Protocols (EIP), most of them being in the testing phase, waiting to be incorporated.

A few of the EIPs mentioned were:

1. EIP 1444: revolves around simplifying old history storage. Vitalik highlighted the importance of keeping the disk size of the Ethereum node spell to allow Ethereum implementation to be simpler. Basically, the nodes responsible for keeping the blockchain running need to be as simple as possible to facilitate user experience.
2. EIP 1337: is about account abstraction. Vitalik suggested this implementation would mean making smart contract wallets as convenient as EOA wallets, so regular users will benefit from more secure wallets. 
3. EIP 1559: this improvement is focused on decreasing the network fees meaning  miners will be updated with the latest software which will enable them to construct blocks with a new and updated set-up fee. 

The workshops and building continued until late, only to continue the next day.

Hackathon Day 2

The 2nd day of the hackathon presented yet another day to build, an opportunity to learn from 24 workshops, and brought the 1,100+ participants closer to winning $400,000 in prizes! 

Image credits: ETHGlobal

At midday, there were workshops by the CEOs of Matter Labs and Findora. After a quick lunch break, some of the leaders of the ecosystem came on stages, such as Protocol Labs, Ethereum Foundation, Worldcoin, Flashbots, Paradigm, and Marius van der Wijden Ethereum software developer.

The main objective of ETH Amsterdam has been to make the knowledge of the most brilliant minds of the Ethereum ecosystem available to everyone. Through the YouTube channel of the organizers -ETH Global- you will find all their contributions to the event. 

ETH Amsterdam, however, was not only work and seminars.

During the event, other activities were also available to allow hackers to disconnect from their projects and be able to return better than before.

 
Image credits: ETHGlobal

Hackathon Final Day

During the last day of the ETH Amsterdam 2022, once the deadline for submission arrived, 22 judges, leaders of the ecosystem, evaluated and gave valuable feedback to the various projects. 

Image credits: ETH Amsterdam

Once the scores were collected, 13 winners were announced among the 165 projects submitted.

In the Hacker Showcase you can find them all, while here below we are going to talk about who took home the prize.

Image credits: ETHGlobal

The Winners

📼 Retr0x
The Team: @jan_o_e, @konradkopp, @_orland0x, @jessicapointing, @FerAlmansa01

💡 Nimi.eth

⬢ Hexagons Protocol
The Team: @ThomasBertani, @AlleManfredi, @mauropiazza_

📜 Democrazy
The Team: @chung_jeewoo, @bbayazit16, @rpal_, @lisandroea, @andykaminker

 FLOAN
The Team: @0xtiagofneto, @BoyanBarakov, @DaigaroC, @julian_praest, @guill_om, @iafhurtado, @theedgarmoreau

🍤 Tempra
The Team: @victoriakimse, @ianmmah, @isaackcchung, @noviachao, @chyobers

🤝 pfpnative
The Team: @hotkartoffel1, @0xlrnt

🚀 Daora
The Team: @AFRISHAN, @MabelOchebiri

📈 Yieldgate

🧱 Detris
The Team: @finiam, @0xjfsgomes, @resende_666, @davelange_, @davidesilva_

🚴‍♀️ Activitydao

👀 Creatorsight
The Team: @elliefarrisi, @levychain

✊ Collective Action
The Team: @andiskim, @codeformars, @floydd34dsh0t

Final Thoughts

ETHAmsterdam hackathon was a long anticipated event by the community that had a great turnout of over 1,100 attendees from 56 countries and 165 projects submitted. 

It also presented a useful valuable learning opportunity to gain insights from ~50 workshops & talks from the ecosystem projects & key figures. 

Top speakers presented important insights meanwhile the workshops were flooded with hard work, concentration, and interest to be among the finalists. The timing of Devconnect and the large number of and diverse set of ETH Amsterdam participants also presented excellent networking opportunities. 

Overall, ETH Amsterdam was without doubt one of the most anticipated and successful events of the Ethereum ecosystem this year. It surely is one to take note of, especially, if you are a builder, VC or want to keep up with the latest in the industry.