Between the 4th & 6th May, Ready Layer One brought together a wide range of engineers, companies and users for the similarly named conference hosted on Hopin, a web based telecommunication service. Through the three days conference, we attended several keynote talks, presentations and had the opportunity to network with other like minded individuals.

The objective of the conference was to discuss Layer One Protocols, why they are crucial to the adoption of blockchain and how distributed technologies can approach user experience. In this post we will discuss some of the major themes covered throughout the conference.

Scaling & Evolution of Blockchains

The scalability of distributed technology was a huge theme across several keynote talks and presentations and rightly so. Until Layer One protocols can create scaling solutions that are viable to their respective networks, any Layer Two solutions built on each will always face the challenge of adoption. Some of these scaling challenges highlighted included:

• Market-fit product research is still ongoing
• Web 3.0 technologies are in early research prototype stage
• Clear picture of mass adoption still lacking i.e. performance rate of networks with 100M daily users

Several networks have taken various approaches to scaling their networks. While protocols like OmiseGo take a generic approach where base layers remain unchanged and new implementations happen on Layer Two, this doesn't address the need for the design of efficient base layers prior to decentralized applications development.

On network architectures with composability features built into their infrastructure, this scaling solution can present as a lego block approach to building applications. This innovative design can provide developers with tools to for example abstract backend and create time-interface applications built to run on specific networks or write smart contracts capable of interchain communication.

Some evolution & scaling approaches such as sharding, although suitable for some networks, is not without its challenges which might require multiple tests and review to understand infrastructure design issues like backward compatibility to old & new smart contracts, role of validators & token holders and finally pricing or fees based on new network bandwidths.

Privacy-Centric Networks

Anonymous communication has long been a staple of peer-to-peer technology evidenced by the adoption of technologies like TCP/IP, UDP and Libp2p. For engineers of Layer One protocols and/or solutions its crucial that they don't get privacy wrong. For VPNs, for example, altough traffic entry/end points are protected via randomized routing/hoping, timing and packet sizes available in metadata can be used to deanonymize traffic.

For Layer One Protocols secure enclaves like Intel, SGX and Keystone have been used to build trusted smart contract environments or untraceable sphinx mixnets. Using Elliptic Curve multiplication and randomized packet automation network developers can create solutions that anonymize user traffic. On other networks we've seen interesting approaches to building privacy preserving data sharing applications that include the use of:

• privacy preserving analytics and machine learning to curb data leakages
• confidentiality preserving smart contracts incase of untrustworthy applications, or
• scalable smart contract execution within trusted open framework architectures.

Although Layer One networks are keen on addressing issues around scaling, network security, valuation and adoption; how they address the issue of user traffic & transaction privacy as they grow their user base will continue to be closely examined.

Professional Grade DevTools

For us to truly usher in the next wave of the decentralized web, one that promises secure self publishing, secure communication, secure data storage & more, as ecosystem stakeholders its crucial that we address how professional grade developer tooling can raise the tide of protocol development.

Efficiently developed, professional devtools support design, implementation and execution of networks. At this conference we presented several such tools which would be ideal for consideration by any protocol engineer. They include:

• Truffle Suite: This suite has been designed to work for beginners, intermediates & expert developers. It also proves supports for different development environments like iOS, Windows, Linux distros & browser. It has also been designed to support multiple blockchain networks.
• Libp2p: Adopted by several networks including IPFS, 0x, ETH, Polkadot & Cosmos It provides secure communication channels with handshake implementations. It also runs gossipub extensions on pubsub and along with its Kademlia DHT improvements its an ideal developer tool.
• Filecoin: As a proof of storage solution, it provides 1 EB storage ideal for the development of solutions addressing storage & distribution of user data, hosting of large data smart contracts, storing & distributing packages, containers, CDN Contents and more.

DevTools designed to work for all developers, all operating systerms, all blockchain networks will contribute greatly to the design, development and adoption of more Layer One solutions & consequently increase decentralized applications development and adoption.

Accrued Network Valuations

Unlike centralized systems that have pre-set methods to determing network value, as decentralized systems participants we are yet to create a network valuation metric that captures the distributed nature of the systems we are building. To measure accrued network value, some of the factors that we can consider are:

For Tokenholders:

• Would a reduction of token supply increase community contribution? So far, token issuance has not retained value captured eg during the 2017 ICO boom. It can also be argued that networks with cryptoassets independent of protocol developments are also place higher than the their counterparts.

For Investors:

• Investors in decentralized networks have the unique opportunity to determine a protocol's value from early/seed stage to latter investments stages. With access to development milestones & targets, they can determine whether incremental development equals higher network valuations.

Validators/Developers:

• As the backbone of any distributed system, we're yet to determine how much the democratic nature of running nodes, the total number of validators and developers contributes to a networks accrued value.

Other factors that were mentioned as critical to determine the real value of a network include smart contract execution, the class of applications that can work within that system, network security, network performance and other abstraction layers. It seems then, it will take more time until an industry standard has been tested, implemented and agreed on by consensus.

Conclusion

Due to the ongoing global health crisis and its disruption of services like the organization of conferences, seminars and workshops I was skeptical about the success of such an ambitious taking by Ready Layer One. Fortunately, it became abundatly clear that the organizers hit a jackpot as I and hundreds more joined the platform for the first session.

The interactive chat feature in every session was a personal favorite. I'm certain it contributed to the the user experience and overall success of the event. Since we could only attend one session at a time, I'll be writing a follow-up piece once I've had the opportunityto watch the remaining sessions.

Did you attend RL1? Let me know your favourite session and theme.