November 30, 2023
🎞️ Recordings
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 Amsterdam in 2022 to expand discussions around EVM improvement. During previous L1 workshop discussions, many unexplored concepts and ideas about the EVM emerged, leading the team to identify a need for more comprehensive exploration of these topics.
The second Devconnect in Istanbul offered an ideal launch opportunity, as it hosted independent events focusing on specific areas while being one of the biggest and most significant global Ethereum events of the year. With strong support from the Devconnect team, the organizers opened both speaker and attendee applications to the public, creating a more inclusive and collaborative event that could accommodate more participants.
The overwhelming number of speaker, attendee, and volunteer applications demonstrates the widespread interest and engagement from individuals and projects within the ecosystem. This strong response validates the topic's importance and showcases the community's enthusiasm for improving 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 from the powdr team. 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.