I had the opportunity to attend Off The Chain an event exploring state channels and off chain scaling solutions as related to different cryptocurrencies. Off the Chain was sponsored by Binary District and held at Berliner Freiheit on June 30 and July 1 in Berlin, Germany.
Off the Chain explored the impact of state channels and second layer scaling solutions and featured an impressive array of speakers representing an equally impressive list of companies, organizations and engineering teams. Some of the featured speakers included:
Christian Decker, Core Tech Engineer at Blockstream
Iddo Bentov, Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University
Gert-Jaap Glasbergen, Software Developer at MIT DCI
Ethan Heilman, Co-founder of Commonwealthcrypto
Liam Horne, Co-founder of Counterfactual
Lefteris Karapetsas, Raiden Network Developer Team Lead
Joshua Lind, PhD Researcher at Imperial College London
Ian Miers, Postdoctoral Researcher at Cornell Tech and Co-founder of Zcash
Christian Reitwiessner, Team Lead at Ethereum
Stefanie Roos, Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Waterloo
Jason Teutsch, Founder of TrueBit
Highlights from some of the sessions:
Gert-Jaap Glasbergen, Software Developer at MIT DCI spoke about private, scalable smart contracts using trusted oracle private keys.
Iddo Bentov, Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell gave some insight into P2P decentralized poker on Ethereum aka Virtue Poker. Jason Teutsch, Founder of TrueBit spoke about Doge-Ethereum and cool art projects in Vancouver.
Ethan Heilman, PhD student from Boston University’s Computer Science Department, Co-founder of Commonwealthcrypto and a member of the security research group BUSec spoke about Lightning and the 0xProject. Ethan researches novel attacks on hash functions, differential cryptanalysis, Intelligent Transit Systems and cache based side channel attacks and broke SHA3 contestant Spectral Hash.
Christian Reitwiessner, Team Lead at Ethereum had a great talk about ‘Where’s Waldo’ in resolving search problems - how to find what you’re looking for when verifying off chain computations.
Berlin - you lived up to your reputation as one of the major centres of the cryptocurrency universe with this event!