Growing an Ecosystem of Ethereum’s Future Builders

Transcript

everyone welcome to my talk and today i'm really going to talk about like how eat university have been working to grow an ecosystem of ethereum's future builders so a quick quicker of myself my name is scott moses scenario i'm currently a rising engineer studying electrical engineering and computer science at uc berkeley i also help do blockchain security audits at trail of bits and currently and most importantly i am also an organizer at edu university in a previous life i'm a software engineering intern at universe shop and i've also helped build dark first a decentralized mmrps game on the atrium blockchain so what is 8th university right so like you know so essentially we are an ecosystem focused in nurturing a pipeline of blossoming young towns so if that doesn't make sense you're

essentially half premium goals the first one is to foster inches and on board university exchange secondly you want to help student cross the chasm from being a learner to actually becoming a contributor and last but not least we want to build community resources and tooling to make sure that we can boost blockchain education proliferation wherever around the globe that we might not be able to reach so why do we think there's a urgency right now for something like eat university to exist so most importantly i think um there's a strong public perception right now that that the space has crossed an inflections point over the course of this year to the point where bringing students from traditionally strong university cs and math backgrounds is now possible in a way that it wasn't before

tldr is that we think the blockchain technology is currently in the world design guys we have a lot of attention coming from like you know various stakeholders we have like a lot of attention coming from students we have a lot of attention coming from like also like teachers and lecturers in like various universities and that attention is like a precious resource that we can utilize to make sure that we capture some of the talents that currently exist in the world and like you know pipe that into the blockchain ecosystem and make sure that we're able to retain those towns and like you know foster that interest into like something that bears fruit in the in the long term and this is like why like one of our proxy programs each summer exists which have the main purpose of fostering interest and onboarding university age

talents as we've mentioned before so each summer is essentially a virtual learning month for technical undergraduates who are interested in learning and building on ethereum during the span of the program you will experiment with crypto assistance and ship a project of your choice with the help of mentors from the interim ecosystem uh so this program essentially is like a month-long program where every week students spend around 15 to 20 hours learning and building on crypto and most of these are actually unstructured and a synchronous learning time where you'll be able to dive deep into the space and kind of like allocate time independently so we don't have like a specific curriculum it's like kind of like you know make your own like you know learning experience so if you want to like you know spend more than 20 hours

then like you'll feel you're like free to do that what we do is provide you with the correct resources we provide you with the mentors and you kind of look kind of like you know uh it's essentially an all-you-can-eat program so if you want to like you know join as many of like the workshop as possible it's totally up to you but like the main point here is for you to actually craft your own learning experience if something draws your interest we want to make sure that we have provided the resources so that you can dive deep into your field of interest so the program is like one month long divided into two sections the first section which is the first two weeks is gonna be the learning period uh where students are actually just like focus and heads down and like learning new like new facets of

the blockchain ecosystem and the last two weeks is going to be focused in building a project of their choice so they're going to choose a project at the beginning of the two weeks and then they will run it through a mentor and then they'll be like you know diving deep into building the project until the end of the program and then like the mentors are there to just like make sure that they are like you know don't have any issues and make sure that they're on the right track so throughout the program we have like you know weekly workshops we have weekly office hours and we have weekly community events so we have like you know various mentors come over so for instance we have austin griffith doing it development workshops and office hours and we also have like you know like gupp sheep working on luxury

knowledge application mentoring we also have david monday's decentralized finance mentoring and so on and so forth we also bring in various guest speakers so for instance we have some team from the up from optimism come in and talk about optimistic roll-up and we also have like people like george's who from paradigm to talk about like you know like things like exercises reorgs on the blockchain uh for instance so at the end of every week we have like either lightning talk or a demo day so the lightning talk is really serve as a way for the students to really showcase what they've learned during the week and the demo days are like reserved for more of like you know for them to showcase the project what they have been working on working on um and so in during the program it's like divided to like you know various

tracks as i mentioned before so we have e-development where people can learn about like you know build either decentralized applications from scratch you also have like the track of like eat application that provides a bird's-eye view of the various daps that exist in this space we also have like you know the p2p systems track where like students can learn about one of the fundamental building blocks of a blockchain system and there's also ethereum 2.0 track where like the students get a look into the research being done for the next phase of the ethereum like you know uh like you know progress and we also have like a slightly more advanced strike such as like you know decentralized finance where like the students can build a mental model around the future of finance and then we also have the zero knowledge cryptography track where people can see like how like

zkp can be applied into like you know your ethereum applications and like how to write your circuits and so on and so forth so we've seen like a really really really large interest in like in in the program so far and like we have like you know the span of two weeks that we open our application for we have received more than 700 applications from students around the globe and let's just prove our like you know like how important it is for like these resources and like you know programs to exist because there's a huge amount of interest right now and and like from students around the globe and we just don't have enough like you know bandwidth to really kind of like accommodate all this huge interest um and so like this is like while we're also working it's kind of to work and

improving uh as well so this is a quick highlight of the things that our students have been working for like for instance right here brian is showcasing uh one of the projects that he has been working during the first week of like the program which is really amazing so he is building like some sort of like transaction visualizer here so in here you can see like in this block you can see like you know what various transaction exists and like you know we have like you know unique coloring for each transaction so for instance like like a cn color is like for openc transactions and dark blues for x infinity transaction that have been really popular recently and so on and so forth you also have a girl for instance here rhythm is working on like a like essentially a dune analytics dashboard for avi where he writes sql

crease and like show to the whole community or like how you know analytics can be used to actually gather this data and like kind of like you know visualize the data that exists on the blockchain and also here payron is also working on like a presentation on tornado cache where he kind of like you know give a run-through of like how tornado cache runs under your hood and like you know how it is becoming like one of the critical infrastructure for blockchain privacy in the interim space so right now the our students are working on their own student projects which is going to be like you know wrapped up in like the next few days so for instance we have like in a project such as the dark first dial uh which is a unique dial to play dark fresh the game um and if you're not familiar with

the dark chris it's a really amazing like you know dodgy bias here um like a unique like you know strategy game and like you know the dial is supposedly going to be interact like interoperability drop interoperable with a game and just like an interact with the game in like a unique way uh there's also zero cost patreon which is a d5 power creator subscription platform there's a link decentralized blackjack and the essential kaggle there's also like a generative nfdr project that uses some geospatial location and super fancy and there's like so many more ideas that is being built by our students right now so that's a wrap up on the each summer now we want to move on to like another project that we have been working on which is like you know eatspring.com so if you've talked me in the past on twitter for instance like you know that

i i will point you like if you're starting to learn about like blossom i'm going to point you to our resource with eatspring.com so eatspring.com is essentially our main hub of like you know knowledge or like a main like you know source of like you know like knowledge for like people interested in like learning about the atrium space so we have like various like you know resources on like you know pre-protocols we have like you know resource and protocol theory we have resources on crypto philosophy we have resources and smart contract development and so on and so forth so we just like basically gathered this in uh in like a centralized website such that anyone who wants to learn and anyone who wants like share about the knowledge you can find all this information in like a single place and we've been seeing a lot of

like you know people using this website and like we've seen like a huge increase in traffic that makes me personally super excited about this whole like you know uh this whole like blockchain education space because like it just shows us that there's like huge demand in the market for like you know this like you know education uh programs for like ethereum and like you know other decentralized uh ladies and trans platforms and like for instance like you know our interim development track and like each spring have been like widely popular and you've seen like an increased amount of interest for people who's like trying to learn about smart contracts and we feel that it's like you know very useful for you to actually have this like you know curated resources so that you don't have to like you know browse google for the various fragmented resources that

you might not be able to actually connect the dots and like you know manifest into like a useful knowledge that is actionable so what's next for us right so we are currently working on setting up the task force for students to continue working in this space so like we are setting up a content task force to work on work on itswing.com we're also setting up new task force to work on developer tooling building like you know resources like building like you know like you know like toolings to actually help onboard more people into the space and we're also like working to set up like local or regional presence in like various university campuses starting in like you know some parts of the united states such as bay area and boston and slowly expanding uh like you know to like other parts of the united states

and hopefully to like you know um do like like outside of the united states as well so yeah i think that wraps up for my talk thank you for listening if you're interested to be updated about all the university stuff feel free to follow us at twitter university.com at like at the university and if you're interested in just like keeping up to date with me or just like talking to me feel free to follow me on twitter as well my handle is at sm scenario and yeah that is all thank you