Sharding and scalability. Transactions per second. Crypto-ecosystems. The decentralized web. These are the voyages of the Starship Blockchain, on it’s five-year mission to seek out… OK, you get the drift! But as you can tell, there remain many, many issues to tease out of this burgeoning new tech world, one we will be unpacking at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin this December.
There are still a lot of issues to deal with. The current version of Ethereum can only handle a dozen transactions per second. “Sharding” or spreading the load via partitioning, should lead to a drastic increase in performance, but the question is how to do it? Ethereum 2.0 still remains a moving target. There is even a growing “Ethereum killer” community. And while all this goes on, high-minded organizations like the Web3 Foundation are trying to foster the development of a user-friendly crypto-ecosystem and decentralized web.
Who on earth would take all this on? TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, of course, and, in particular, our Extra Crunch stage.
Since we launched Extra Crunch, our premium content service for those readers who like to hold TechCrunch close and cuddle it at night, we’ve been running a premium EC stage at our TechCrunch Disrupt conferences, and this will be no less true in Berlin.
Given Berlin is a hotbed of blockchain startups and development, it would be utterly remiss of us not to cover this subject, but the Extra Crunch stage gives us some extra (oh yeah!) bandwidth to do deep-dives for attendees to get under the skin of this rapidly expanding aspect of the tech industry.
We’re excited to be joined by three amazing speakers to pore over the latest development in the blockchain world.
Justin Drake (Ethereum)
Justin studied mathematics at Cambridge University. He was a Bitcoin entrepreneur from 2014 to 2017 and is now an Ethereum 2.0 researcher.
Justin is going to cover where Ethereum 2.0 is right now as someone who has been working on sharding and scalability and supporting the Ethereum ecosystem to enable these new use cases.
With the current version of Ethereum only able to handle a dozen transactions per second, sharding will be crucial, but Ethereum 2.0 is a moving target and remains a large-scale experiment of distributed development.
If the community gets it right, Ethereum 2.0 could transform the Ethereum blockchain into a sort of “world computer” that can execute instructions across a network of servers all around the world. On the EC stage, Justin will also be talking with other blockchain experts about building a blockchain startup. If anyone knows, he knows how important it is to build a community of developers and researchers around your blockchain project.
Ash Egan (Accomplice VC)
A World Economic Forum Global Shaper and advisor at ConsenSys’ Tachyon Accelerator, Ash Egan has backed a number of headline companies in the space, including Bison Trails, Coda, CoinList, Dapper Labs, Near, Simplex and Torus. Before Accomplice, he co-launched ConsenSys’ venture arm and started his career at Converge VC in Boston.
Egan has previously highlighted the ongoing innovations within the “Ethereum killer” community and how it “expands the sandbox,” but he also believes that for mass adoption of crypto on social networks to take off, users will need to be monetized via advertisements and referrals.
Ashley Tyson (Web3 Foundation)
Ashley Tyson is the director of Partnerships and Strategic Initiatives at Web3 Foundation. She spends her time aligning diverse teams working on decentralized systems and supporting blockchain ecosystem initiatives like Ethereum Community Fund and ETHPrize.
Prior to Web3 Foundation, Ashley co-founded DEFCAD, a censorship-resistant search engine for 3D printable files. She deeply understands the need for a decentralized web, beginning her career in NYC at one of the first social media-focused agencies, where she helped multinational corporations build Web 2.0 strategies around consumer data acquisition for use in marketing initiatives.
Disrupt Berlin runs December 11 and December 12. Tickets are available here!
