November 30, 2023
🎞️ Recordings
📷 Pictures
🔗 Contact
This highly anticipated event brought together a diverse group of participants, including Ethereum core developers, client teams, researchers, language developers, security experts, and enthusiasts. The summit provided a platform for engaging talks, exciting panel discussions, interactive workshops, and plenty of opportunities for collaboration. The main focus of the event was to foster in-depth conversations with the shared objective of improving the EVM.
The Ipsilon Team has been planning this event since the first Devconnect in 2022, in Amsterdam, to expand the scope of discussions surrounding EVM improvement. Recognizing that many unexplored concepts and ideas surrounding the EVM had emerged from previous L1 workshop discussions, the team identified a pressing need for more comprehensive exploration of these topics.
The second Devconnect in Istanbul provided the perfect occasion to launch the event, due to its focus on hosting topic-specific, independent events and advancing progress in particular areas, as well as being one of the most significant global Ethereum events. Thanks to the tremendous support from the Devconnect team, the event organizers were able to make both speaker and attendee applications open to the public. This allowed them to accommodate a larger number of attendees and provide more speakers with the opportunity to present, making the event more inclusive and collaborative.
The high number of speaker, attendee, and volunteer applications has clearly demonstrated the widespread interest and engagement of individuals and projects within the ecosystem. This overwhelming response not only validates the significance of the topic but also highlights the immense potential and enthusiasm of the community towards the EVM.
The summit featured more than twenty engaging talks and workshops, delving into different aspects of EVM-related topics in two separate rooms. Presentations covered subjects such as identifying challenges and areas for EVM improvement, exploring related EIPs, and discussing other interesting topics on L1 and L2 scaling solutions, zkEVMs, languages, smart contracts, and security.
Throughout the day, there were also four interactive panel discussions that aimed to engage more people in important conversations about the EVM, its unique features, challenges, and areas for improvement, as well as the governance of the changes. The objective was to raise awareness and foster further discussions on these topics in the future as well. In order to make it easier to evaluate the progress being made on these panel discussions, moderators were asked to provide a brief summary of the key takeaways of the panels for conclusion and further discussions.
The first panel discussion took place in the morning on "Exploring the past, present, and future of zkEVMs" moderated by Leo Alt. The panelists included Jordi Baylina from Polygon, Eduard Sanou from the Privacy & Scaling Explorations team of the Ethereum Foundation, Ben Livshitz from Matter Labs, Haichen Shen from Scroll, Mamy André-Ratsimbazafy from Taiko, and Rami Khalil from Zeth (RISC Zero).
Key takeaways of this panel discussion included that zero-knowledge developers are moving in the direction of language and compiler-based frameworks, and hopefully abandoning handwritten circuits (except for specific performance cases) for the most part. Leo also raised a question about EVM ossification and the potential for Layer 2s to drive innovation in the EVM. To learn more, watch the recording of the panel ↗️ here.
The second panel discussion was on EVM Governance, moderated by Tim Beiko, and attended by panelists Ansgar Dietrichs from the Ethereum Foundation, Marius van der Wijden from the Geth client team, Alex Beregszaszi from the Ipsilon team, and Alex Gluchowski from Matter Labs. The panel aimed to explore how the coordination and governance of the proposed EVM changes across different layers of the system could be improved. Watch the recording of the panel ↗️here.