Ethereum ecosystem gathers together: review of new developments of mainstream projects at Devcon

Author: Frank, PANews

Devcon is an important event hosted by the Ethereum Foundation, mainly for developers, artists, makers and other types of ecosystem builders in the Ethereum ecosystem. Since 2014, Devcon has been held for eight sessions and has become one of the largest publicity windows for the Ethereum ecosystem. Devcon 2024 will be held in Bangkok, Thailand from November 12 to November 15, 2024. During this week, many Ethereum ecosystem projects chose to announce their latest achievements or project progress during this period. PANews summarizes the progress of major projects during Devcon 2024.

Ethereum:

In the past week, many interesting updates have been released on the Ethereum mainnet. First, on November 7, the Ethereum Foundation announced the launch of a short-term test network called "Mekong" to test the upcoming Pectra upgrade. The main changes in the test include: improving the user experience of crypto wallets and account abstraction; increasing the maximum staking limit of validators from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH; updating the deposit and withdrawal mechanism, etc.

On November 12, at the Devcon conference held in Thailand, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, proposed a new consensus layer upgrade proposal "Beam Chain", which was called "Ethereum 3.0" by the community. In this proposal, the following goals are mainly achieved: 1. Faster block time. 2. Lower validator staking requirements. 3. "On-chain snarkization". 4. Improvements in quantum security. The core of Beam Chain is to introduce technologies such as zkVM to greatly improve the scalability of the Ethereum mainnet, without even relying on Layer 2 solutions. However, Justin Drake also said that this proposal may start construction in 2026. Then, it may start a thorough testing phase of at least two years from 2027 before it can be deployed on the mainnet. There are reports that this is the biggest upgrade since the Ethereum merger, but there are also some different voices in the market. José Maria Macedo, founding partner of Delphi Ventures, said, "I was excited about the vision of ETH 3.0, but Justin Drake's actual proposal was disappointing. This is basically a refactored code base that can achieve a block speed of 4 seconds and quantum resistance. These features will be realized in 2029-2030. These upgrades alone are not enough to make Ethereum Layer1 competitive, or even to make people believe that it is competitive. The Ethereum Foundation needs to have bigger dreams."

In addition, at Devcon 2024, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also attended and gave a keynote speech. He described Ethereum as a "world computer" and outlined the progress of the Ethereum network and its future vision, focusing on decentralization, scalability, and inclusiveness.

Arbitrum:

On October 7, the Arbitrum Foundation announced the "Road to Devcon" plan to increase investment in the Asian market. The plan includes hosting face-to-face events ArbiLink in Vietnam and Indonesia to connect the local fast-growing developer community. On November 13, during the Devcon event, Arbitrum announced support for the ERC-7683 standard to achieve cross-chain intentions. ERC-7683 was proposed by Uniswap Labs and Across in May 2024, aiming to improve interoperability between different blockchains by standardizing the order structure of cross-chain transactions.

Base:

During Devcon, Coinbase also launched a number of strategic initiatives in the field of on-chain payments. On November 13, Coinbase announced the acquisition of the Utopia Labs team, which focuses on stablecoin technology and on-chain payment solutions. Jesse Pollak, head of Coinbase Wallet and founder of Base, said that he "hopes to see 50 countries integrated into the Coinbase wallet by the end of 2025". On the 14th, Coinbase Wallet said it would soon launch a "tap-to-pay" crypto payment solution, and Base would achieve Layer 2 interoperability within a few months. Currently, Base is the second most popular public chain project after Solana in this round of bull market. These measures of Coinbase are expected to further enhance its leading position in the field of cryptocurrency payments.

Unichain:

As a popular Layer 2 project in recent times, the progress of Unichain is also one of the main highlights of this Devcon event. On November 10, Unichain released an access guide for early developers, detailing how to bridge Ethereum (ETH) on its network and make withdrawals. On November 12, Circle announced that its USD stablecoin USDC will soon support Unichain, the Layer 2 network launched by Uniswap Labs. However, in the face of the community's premature enthusiasm, Unichain officials also stated on the 12th that the mainnet has not yet been launched, and the specification bridge has not yet been finalized. Since it is not yet ready, the RPC accessed by developers has been disabled.

Filecoin:

During the Devcon conference, two L2 projects in the Filecoin ecosystem announced the latest developments. Akave announced the completion of $3.45 million in financing, and investors included Protocol Labs, Blockchange VC, Lightshift and Blockchain Builders Fund. Another L2 project, Storacha Network, announced the launch of its Alpha version network, focusing on high-performance hot storage, mainly for high-demand application scenarios such as games, artificial intelligence and DePIN. In addition, Filecoin also plans to carry out the "v24 Tuk Tuk upgrade" around November 20, shortening the transaction completion time from 7.5 hours to a few seconds.

BNB Chain:

During Devcon, BNB Chain announced that it would provide free taxi services to Bangkok users in conjunction with the TADA applet. During the conference on November 12, BNB Chain announced that it had received a $10 million investment in cloud service credits from Google Cloud to support the "Most Valuable Builders" (MVB) program in its ecosystem. Through this collaboration, more than 40 projects in the MVB program will be able to apply for up to $350,000 in Google Cloud credits each, mainly for project development in the fields of artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Projects in other directions also have the opportunity to receive $200,000 in credit support for two years.

AltLayer:

On November 12, AltLayer announced that it will soon launch a platform called "Autonome" to provide users with tools to create and deploy autonomous AI agents. The platform will use AltLayer's Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) technology to support users to quickly build and deploy AI agents without a deep technical background. In fact, this is not the first attempt to lower the threshold for user development. In March this year, AltLayer announced a collaboration with Sei Labs to develop a new product called "Parallel Stack", which allows users to easily deploy applications on Sei with just a few clicks of a button to improve development efficiency.

NEAR:

At the Devcon conference, Alexander Skidanov, co-founder of NEAR, was one of the speakers and shared NEAR's latest progress in blockchain technology and ecosystem development. On November 10, NEAR AI announced the launch of the Alpha version, which mainly includes customized AI smart assistants; cross-platform interaction; AI research center and other functions. In June this year, Illia Polosukhin, founder of NEAR, released the master plan for NEAR AI. So far, the progress of the plan is still as expected.

Polygon:

Although Polygon also held some events during Devcon, their main progress was basically released before the Devcon conference, mainly focusing on cross-chain interoperability and network scalability. On November 7, Polygon cooperated with blockchain startup Magic Labs to announce the launch of a new cross-chain network called "Newton". According to reports, Newton aims to make it as seamless for users to use decentralized applications (dApps) across multiple blockchains as browsing the Internet. In addition, Polygon announced that its AggLayer v0.2 version is scheduled to be launched in early December and will support connecting to any Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible chain.