Ethereum Developer Conference Praises ‘Buidl’ vs ‘Hodl’ as Central Theme at Devcon in Prague

The whole world of Ethereum's sought to meet at the so-called Ethereum Christmas in the annual Devcon event held on October 30. However, in what seems like a reckoning there was little from the “hodl” crowd (holding crypto investments), with the event turning to be a trademark developer conference. The change of theme was an apparent move by the Ethereum community to bring sanity into their project and grow their trademark.

Change Of Fortunes

In contrast to this year, last year's Devcon attracted a sizeable gathering as the digital assets bubble was still growing. There was an apparent decline in this year's event held in Prague with most deciding to shy out due to the low performance of Ether right now.

However, Ethereum Foundation executive Aya Miyaguichi downplayed the low turnout as a deliberate move by the Ethereum community to get elite minds on board. Developers did get grants and discounted tickets in an effort that sought to attract Ethereum blockchain builders instead of investors. The official Devcon 4 website also echoed the theme with a statement, “this is a conference for builders.”

Co-founder of Validity Labs AG Sebastian Burgel expressed similar sentiments by saying:

“Last year, you could see suits and Wall Street guys everywhere. This year it’s mostly developers again.”

Apparent Upgrade

However, the change in event theme did not deter Ethereum enthusiasts as Miyaguchi establishes those attendees did double from last year with the figure indicating 3,000 people were at the Prague event. Talks through the four-day event centered on criticizing the apparent rush within the Ethereum community during the initial coin offering (ICO) boom. There was emphasis also on the need to build a stronger Ethereum for applications to run on.

Fabian Vogelsteller, the lead developer of the ERC-20 standard, was at the heart of these talks and proposed a system that would give investors their money back if they felt not satisfied with the projects. Furthermore, he expressed the need to create something better and felt responsible for much of the startups on Ethereum failing to deliver.

The Future

Despite the talks of a “new” Ethereum, Co-founder of the network, Vitalik Buterin confessed to the audience of the undergoing development within the blockchain. In his talk during the event, Buterin introduced a “Serenity” version of Ethereum that is posed to increase the network's capacity. Serenity will roll out to the Ethereum community in stages that will have the blockchain run with a Proof-of-Stake consensus model and Sharding as a model for their data storage. And according to Buterin, the improvements seek to accommodate a one-thousand-fold increase in Ethereum transactions after the impending upgrade. So far, the new Ethereum model would reduce issues of scalability facing the Ethereum blockchain.

About Devcon

Devcon is an apparent “Ethereum family reunion” with the theme of educating, empowering and networking the Ethereum community. The conference is held for builders, researchers, blockchain developers, test engineers, infrastructure operators and anyone looking to build Ethereum-based decentralized applications, tools, protocols, and culture for practical use.