Jerome de Tychey: The Evolution of EthCC

Transcript

i'll tell you why i'm happy about this booth um one it's it's so cool i need to put you in the center of the conference as well that too like the visibility is amazing uh actually when we were thinking about doing this for the first time we wanted to do it downstairs next to the main stage and i thought no no here's the best place to put it what about we put it on the main stage so like people yeah they are having talks and so on and people are podcasts on the side you like postcasting on the side so people get out of the stage and immediately in the in a podcast booth [Music] i'm here with jerome dutcher who is the

president of ethereum france that's right and the organizer uh of this conference and so i wanted to get you in here uh for a number of reasons one to talk about this conference uh it's the third edition of hcc uh it it's like it took proportions this year that uh far uh out just out blew everything that you've done previously which is really interesting thank you um and uh you know in in this venue but also uh there's the vc track i was speaking with earlier and she was telling me about that and um also to talk about the the the ecosystem in general sure um some trends that you're seeing

and maybe we can bring it back to the french ecosystem and some of the things that you know you're involved in absolutely so um tell us tell us about this conference and a bit of the history behind it and uh how you got here pleasure so um ethereum france is a non-profit like we've been uh active since late 2015 um mainly trying to you know like organize the ethiopia ecosystem in france like back in the days it was just a couple of people some doing mining i was doing mining and some coming back from the us learning about a little bit of a smart contract some slightly involved with the protocol like just first sharing and we started after this ichim friends website

and we started to produce content translate technical uh papers and so on it already started after defcon 2 in shanghai where we met with the foundation they vitalik speak a little bit french so like it helped um i've never seen heard him speak french but he has little to no accent actually really yeah impressive why he speaks so many language though yeah why not french and and yeah so the interim friends the ethereum foundation which out to say that um um a chinese company link time wanted to organize the conference in france and they were looking for a partner there and so edcon the first edition in paris

was uh organized by uh assets yeah the former name of uh france uh so that was our first iteration at the doing a conference and uh right after this we felt like well let's do a conference every year in france because it's uh it's so cool it brings everybody in france and it's allow us to uh make the ecosystem grow put paris on the map for the blockchain world uh and we really enjoyed organizing etcon so we decided to start hcc first edition in 2017 and then 2018 2019 and now 2020. we did the conference at a school initially yeah which wasn't really uh uh proportionate for an event that big

uh with uh rooms everywhere it uh it looked a little bit bootstrapped it was which was cool yeah it it it it played to the kind of like community vibe of exactly cc yeah exactly and people showing up and uh just um hanging around um yeah unfortunately this year the the school was in uh renovation work so we couldn't have fortunately uh you know i think sunny was was telling me that he actually liked the because of this kind of very community vibe and everything yeah and it's it's next to a museum for technology and and techniques uh science uh where you can have uh where you can see the first plane that crossed the channel yeah where you can see a various uh instrument to measure uh pressure and

also scientific instruments so it felt kind of cool right yeah but we wanted to continue the growth of the event so the first edition we had roughly 800 people then 1 000 um well 1 200 and this year we were expecting 1 600. um so we wanted to keep it growing and one of the way we could keep it growing is changing the venue to something bigger yeah but we were unexpected expecting the the coroner virus obviously but yeah but i mean turnout was pretty good still like 900 people so our position at the with this conference as a non-profit is that we we take all the the the expense that we uh we think we're gonna handle and we

divide by the number of people that we expect to show and we fix the price so it's a 300 euro and you have a three days of conference uh we publish our book so you know that we are not making money or a little bit of money that we reinvest to other community conference or community events or research initiatives um and and we want to make sure that we have a conference where we are at a human level so having one force one person out of four is a is a is a speaker um it allows for people to interact very easily with all the speakers um and this year we had a roughly 250 speakers that were on the lineup uh ten percent of also

um didn't show up because of the the virus or complication to travel but we still managed to have pretty much everyone on a video conference so the people that didn't come were able to sort us and yeah and we live stream everything and we edit right away so we produce a lot of content and we wanted cc to be happening every year the first week of march so bookmark that in your agenda yeah first week of march every year um in between different def cons so we produce content and we keep the we keep keep the ball running so you mentioned that it's a non-profit like people people should uh also be aware that ecc is is run as a non-profit conference and you talked about the fact

that the you know the conference doesn't necessarily want to make money we cannot actually i mean but ethereum ethereum friends can can have revenue and then that revenue can fund you know other other conferences and things like that um you know is do you do you think that you know that maybe the conference could make a little bit of money and that money not it wouldn't be pocketed by anyone but it would be in the association and that would allow the association to do uh to organize more events and have a little bit more flexibility in this budget to clarify this what what i meant but i say it cannot make money is that we uh we cannot organize the event with a commercial uh right as a nonprofit but eventually

we have more sponsors or we have more attendees than we expect and then we have a we have a positive delta yeah uh which happened last year which happened the year before and we are transparent at what we do with the money the money goes to the the non-profit and what we use the money we have is supposed to be aligned with our status sure so our status is to promote the ecosystem and to promote the know-how of both blockchain and ethereum at large um so what we did with the money the previous years is um we we uh gave a community sponsorship to the swamp summits we give 20 sponsorship to dabcon and we also give community sponsorship to defcon so the reason why we sponsor devcon is because we have a

deal with the foundation that you know we get some tickets for our attendees for our members and uh as you may or may not know getting a ticket to defcon is super complicated because there is so much hype around this conference so people are spamming to get a ticket so it allows us to uh you know funnel volunteers to the foundation and also what we do with the money we created um two uh research awards so one of them with a psl which is the the paris uh the parisian university's initiative of research um so we created an award for uh the best paper in uh blockchain and science and we created another paper another

award with imperial college um it was uh awarded last year also with a money medic and blockchain um so we we used some of the money like this and we also have some money in the bank uh back in the days we used to sell one beer for one ether when we were started on meetups so that gave us a little bit of treasury for our events yeah uh um and uh and when you want to book such an event if it's the the first place the first time you booked the venue they asked you for a deposit so definitely this little bit of extra that we collected or the donation that we all have from our members uh allows us to uh to book the places sure this place is not cheap this is not

cheap but you know it's uh it's the right size for the venue sure for it's the right venue for certain events and uh we we we started to plan for next year and we will probably have the the same venue next year and but this time the whole week not just only three days okay so i'd like to to get your your high level uh view like where you see the ecosystem you know if we take a snapshot of what what the ethereum ecosystem looks like right now um what are the kind of high-level trends that uh that you're seeing and that you're interested in i would say we stand united like uh what does that mean that means

that everybody is looking towards each room too and making it happen and the progress that we are are seeing so far i mean the last maybe since they have come the progress has been tremendous the the specs of the hrm2 protocol is now settled and we we see all of the people that are building all of the teams that are building clients are converging towards a multi-client test net and getting ready for the next step and the the deposit for staking smart contract has been audited and is ready to be deployed at scc we had a we had a sneak peek at the sticking interface so we are united and and aiming towards

uh the delivery of ethereum too and um when it comes to the ecosystem uh at large i mean what people are doing uh what strike me is the level of maturity that we attained i remember back in the days like you have uh take thomson raiders used to host the best hackathons so hi shout out to thompson raiders for 2017 2016 academy that were super cool back in those days we were trying to deploy a smart contract it was tremendously hard it wouldn't compile or it would compile with the wrong api it was super hard to deploy deploying an interface then and using a website what tools would you use to deploy your website how would you connect your smart contract to the website oh now you need to interact with

wallets how would you connect with wallets we are really past those days and when you look at what comes out of smart off of what comes out of hackathons is just mind-blowing what the people are able to achieve in such a short amount of time yeah and it translates into like more robust more mature products for the b2c um more robust wallets i mean you've had many people on this podcast telling you about arjun for example it's a wonderful wallet it's like nosy safe is a wonderful wallet we have made a transaction with various flavors right now um and and it translated to the enterprise space as well consensus ey and microsoft announced the the baseline protocol yesterday

uh and we had many talks at cc about enterprise and blockchain i mean the cto of ledger just showed us what we can do in terms of custody for a large amount of money and custody for anyone that is getting into the custodial business actually um the pegasus team has been showing everything that they can do to help infrastruct the architecture of any large-scale enterprise project so we are definitely getting mature now and whenever whenever anyone wants to build a thing on ethereum he can do so and he can do so properly in the short time because because the infrastructure is

there the developer tools are there they're much more mature so um you know bootstrapping a project and and building out your your amazing money lego idea uh is money lego or blockchain as a middleware and baseline protocol is a an interesting initiative to say that now you can take blockchain as a layer of reconciliation a middleware between the different critical aspects of your of your business process and have those business processes um discuss with each other using the interior maintenance so that's that's really exciting because that's an interesting idea so i'm not familiar with this so

baseline protocol is a is an initiative between ey uh microsoft and consensus to build a set of tools that enterprise can use to make their erp or financial processes discuss with each other without revealing much information but using proofs that you did you record on the ether on blockchain and so you actually use the blockchain as a layer of reconciliation i mean i remember like when you when we were trying to think about what ethiom is going to be in the in the future years back in the days well like maybe each room is going to be a giant giant central clearinghouse yeah like uh being the the clearinghouse for all the

digital assets um well that's a way of using ethereum as a cleaning house just say like well you have an erp i have an erp we we have to make them discuss with each other uh let's publish some cryptographic proof on the blockchain and uh give us uh this as a reference so it kind of flips the idea of of a permission blockchain on its head yeah instead of building a permission blockchain with all these consortium members let's just leverage uh ethereum as a middleware between us yeah and and that's that's not incompatible because when you look at uh scaling solutions that we came out uh with for skating ethereum were lots of flavors of zero knowledge proofs and uh interoperability can be achieved through

zero hqs so yeah you can build your own blockchain on your side and at some point make it communicate with the public blockchain we had many talks about uh um swap between the different chains atomic swaps or how you build proper interoperability and that goes along with those kind of techniques so it's not flipping the id it's just taking the same uh the same uh going to the same place but through a different direction and with regards to to defy uh i mean one of the things that's one of the big trends at the moment um i had um i had the guys from ave in here

uh yesterday and we we had a really interesting conversation about flash loans and all the implications that that has on the space um give us a sense of where you see things going from this perspective and are there any are there any things that you're more concerned about uh what are you hopeful about and what are you more concerned about i i hope we will break things okay so uh and even host an event host is not a it's not a good person to ask about it because like i've been running around in circle of the last yeah but you're in touch you're in that you know yeah you're in touch with the with the building the

agenda i can tell you that we had 40 also uh different talks on the defy track so it was definitely the the biggest of all of our tracks um so there's an appetite for defy and there's many things happening um but like one may say well you're playing with money legos and it's difficult to envision your the your future house or your future manner or building a bridge out of small plastic bricks right uh but it shapes the way that we think about how we want to organize our money system how we want to organize our are all financial instruments that we might want to interact with i mean if we were in a scenario like uh

well i don't want to spoil a fight club but if at the end of fight clubs things go south if you want to if we were about to re-engineer all the financial system maybe the guy that i've played with money legos would be like hey maybe we should do it this way or that way or i have some ideas to share so i'm very excited to see all the all the attention that the g5 movement gets many problems to to solve many many things that are related with the continuity of the transactions the ordering of the transactions or the volume that are involved with the the defined products but that's definitely something new and something worth exploring

uh one of the thing i'm the most excited for is the definitely kong cash i mean we had uh we i ours i was chasing the guy at osaka trying to get to get some of the of the kong cash that were distributed and we were lucky enough to have him come uh yesterday okay so i i have one of these at home that i picked up in san francisco it's sitting somewhere you know in a pile of of a swag conference swag come on keep keep that under uh under the glass and and hang it in your in your apartment because why are you excited about this so one other thing that excited me the most with blockchain is that it completely redefined

the the very paradigm of ownership so instead of having uh instead of having a central authority or a state saying you own this computer it's yours like we have a you have a proof of purchase it's yours it's your computer and if someone steals you this computer we can chase the guy and get the things back so being able to own things based on the private key that you've created yourself that's something that's completely my knowing and so concash is a piece of paper that has a small chip for entropy a small chip for uh hosting a private key and another third small ship

to make the two discus and also your smartphone discussed with the paper so when conquest is initialized this papers create and store a private key uh this private key is stored inside the chip so there is no way to extract it and no way to recover the entropy that was used to create this uh this private key so what the congest team does is that they they read the public key associated to this private key and they create a smart contract that says this public key has 20 cash so you have a public key on a smart contract that says i have 20 common cash there is a time lock that says nobody can redeem this 20 coin cash until this date

and here you go you have a piece of paper with a private key that can sign an exp an xp expiration date that says after october 2022 uh you can redeem this uh private key against the 20km cache that was stored on the smart contract and you have materialized the token technically speaking yeah so i can give you this at a conference and say hey it's worth 20 count cash yeah but what am i going to do with it can i withdraw the token no but you can pass it on so you can give it to me i can give it to you and give it to another person to alice to bob to carol and so on and whoever gets the comcast in october can say yeah i want to redeem so you just burn the cam cache it's it's not in the blockchain anymore it has

been transferred to your own private key to your own private key sorry um and so looking at this and trying to explain blockchain to several people all the time suddenly you materialize everything on this sheet of paper and for cash itself it might not be like a big revolution or something uh like we we've seen bitcoin cash we've seen like network we've seen other applications so why even bother doing it on paper or you had paperwork and so on well this time if you look at this on the perspective of creating a financial instrument like subscription bonds okay maybe ap center is going to start a subscription bond so you emit a bond saying like uh

give me one thousand die and i'm gonna give you one percent per month on those one thousand die and whenever i can reimburse that's so cool now you give me this bond like sure like every month i'm gonna tap it on my on my phone and uh get those one person back uh and then if i want to get rid of this financial instrument then give it to someone else and this someone else will just tap it himself or herself and get this one person every month and if i forgot to redeem i can really meet twice that's right and at some point like we don't even need zika snacks so we don't need a little skating we just pass on this limited use paper and you can just edit it like cash so it's like bearer

assets but cryptographically proven and uh at the end and super cool so yeah i was really uh that's one of the only talks i had the the chance to see so far um i have i mean i haven't seen any talks um i think i'll spend a couple of days watching the youtube uh videos at the end of the conference i get a hard drive with all the videos and every time i travel i'm like oh wow what am i gonna watch um so i'd like to speak a little bit about the the french ecosystem um you know we're both quite well connected in the in the uh french uh crypto ecosystem and how do you feel the

french ecosystem is um is doing at the moment like are you seeing like growth um and what are the what are the things that france is sort of where france is excelling and maybe stands out um compared to others about why um so apart from being the president of iran france i had had the chance to open the consensus office in paris and i can tell you one of the reasons why consensus decided to open an office in paris is because we had access to a large pool of talents that were available and super excited about blockchain

i think if you are blocking the startup you should definitely consider france as a place to settle because the regulation is there to be permissive and supportive and also because the engineers that are available are very talented they have a strong background in mathematics you know we do prep school we have intense math that we select people at the on the basis on at the engineer at the engineering school level um so whenever those guys get into programming and they started like uh computer science and stuff like developments if you tell them like well we have some crypto and you need to you need to at least a little bit understand how uh

edsa works or our hash function works they will be like yeah sure i can deep dive and i can yeah i can ramp up they can hang yeah and and that's really something amazing i mean the the interim tour research uh at pegasus is done by a couple of guys that are at the office here the whole a lot of the things that pegasus is building on the the zero knowledge proof side is made in paris as well uh and uh because this orchestrates the the solutions to send thousands and thousands of transactions and handle it in your private blockchain is built by paris guys um so we had a tremendous amount of talents

and it also translates outside of consensus look at ledger for example is one of the future blockchain unicorns it's french technology and i guess they had a competitive advantage at the beginning because so many good people were available in france and willing to work on this type of new technology um and more more so we have a a in open source culture and we have a peer-to-peer culture as well i mean take vlc i'm pretty sure you use vlc for your for your video uh it's it's a french open source project from ecole central so like it's uh it's definitely something that uh that i like about the french ecosystem uh we have a tremendous talents and willingness to

work and and there's also like a strong a strong open source um and like open software history here as well that completely i think is carrying over into the crypto space yeah we tend to forget about this but that's definitely here and here to help and uh and also the the government has has realized that blockchain may be something very strategic for the future so they should support it and um the the law that was passed on the custody of assets on the fact that you can write a a financial asset inside the blockchain um that we are trying to define now what it is to be a a service provider on the blockchain

uh that's definitely going to help and i'm really excited to see this switch because back in 2015 1617 uh production had a very bad press yeah yeah and the industry is starting to organize too i mean you know we can talk about other associations uh and like so ladan the association for the uh development of digital assets uh founded by simon perot with whom i work um next step will be to create a syndicate so like yes yeah yeah i mean so just briefly briefly on ladan so that a lobbying association that represents uh digital asset companies in france and we work

alongside government regulators um other other industries to try to advance um develop and advance the use of digital assets in in all aspects of society and as a means to digitize uh you know finance digitize and creating like an open finance system and so um you know from that perspective i think it's like it's a really good signal to see that well one the the industry can um federate right like come around this this this idea and i think it's a good signal also that um i mean basically the entire industry is joining the association and supports the association so there's alignment there's like real

alignment on the issue it is exactly and so like the you know we were talking i was talking with bob summerwell earlier about tribalism um you know a lot of people and there's a lot like some some people in the association maybe have opposing views on certain things when it comes to technology when it comes to like design choices uh um crypto economics and things like that but there we've found uh alignment on so many other aspects like regulation and like and one of the things that that unites us and unites everybody i think in this association is the fact that we all agree that digital assets are the future um public uh blockchain digital assets crypto assets uh are the future of finance and like

that's if you know if everybody sort of lines on that uh then the entire ecosystem grows as a whole and the next question will be like how do you make sure that uh the france and europe and and the ecosystem at large has the the best regulation and the best uh the best situation to continue to grow and like uh i'd suggested to to to see mon polo to look at how it can become a syndicate because when you want to employ someone to work for your blockchain company you have to apply to this new employee a convention and right now the convention that is used by all the technical the tech companies in france is the convention for the consultants so you are a consultant

you are suntech you are the consultants so let's not go into the details but simply to if if ladan was to become a syndicate in the future it will be able to create the convention add-on the add-on convention say like okay i want to employ someone but i want to employ someone on terms that fits the industry so if you want to employ someone to be a trained driver there is a specific convention for this that covers the fact that train drivers are exposed to those risks and uh want to have for example free tickets for the train and i want to have the same opportunity as a blockchain employee be able to say like well we want to be remote first uh and i want to pay you in crypto um so that has to come with the convention and we don't have the convention yet

and i i think that could be even even greater for france because you would be able to say like well all of this tech companies they need a new convention it turns out that the blockchain guys actually they figure out how to do it and this is something that everybody can use and at some point they will look at blockchain and feel well this is the future and the convention would be on the blockchain oh of course like why not um so the french ecosystem itself is rather uh small compared to france but it's still something and it's really important uh compared to the rest of the blockchain ecosystem i think um i would say that roughly 500 to 600 people are working full-time on blockchain in france which is literally in the same time

pretty big and it has been a pleasure to see it grow and to see it attain such such level and what's really changed in the last years is of course the the lack of icos and the switch to uh the legacy funding like vcs and and specifically at hcc we have the vc truck yeah uh and and to see the vcs getting interested and giving good feedback and giving um good good consulting to to the to the entrepreneurs is really something that's gonna lead us to the to the next step where we're gonna see very successful startup come out to the ecosystem

great thank you very much joe thank you for having me and so to thank you for coming to who to hcc and i hope you had a very good time and you enjoy your boost yeah um i i want to be here at this exact place with the same booth next year okay so the buffer has already been purchased so you can it's not purchased it's rented but i think i'll tell i'll tell them to keep the plexi glass because i'll probably need it next year amazing thank you so much thanks