Laconic’s Devcon VI Recap

As the first Devcon held in 3 years, and right after the historic Merge, Devcon VI drew thousands of attendees from around the world and our team was fortunate to be a part of it.

So what were the hot topics at this year’s Devcon VI in Bogota?

1. Maximum Extractable Value (MEV)

One of the most pervasive topics at Devcon was MEV. Flashbots co-founder Phil Daian announced the launch of SUAVE, Single Unifying Auction for Value Expression, to combat MEV centralization and censorship.

SUAVE will be an MEV-aware encrypted mempool that maximizes profits for users. 

2. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)

Post Merge, OFAC compliant MEV boost relays have been enabled across a broader array of block proposers resulting in a censorship of 51% of Ethereum blocks. The implication is that if block producers can censor tx’s due to OFAC compliance, what other types of transactions could they censor?

3. Regulation: Digital Commodity Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA) 

Regulation isn’t keeping up with the speed of innovation. This is obvious for instance in Europe’s current attempt to to regulate dollar-pegged stablecoins, capping volumes and potentially banning algo-stablecoin use. Stablecoin volume has increased dramatically over the last several years and a cap or ban could significantly hurt the crypto ecosystem overall.

The Digital Commodity Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA) could have a significant impact on DeFi in the US as well. The general consensus is that the crypto community as a whole has to advocate for positive outcomes, and resource groups like Coin Center that are actively fighting for regulatory guidance. 

5. Layer 2

Unsurprisingly, the increasingly crowded and competitive L2 landscape was on display.–The Arbitrum and Optimism booths  angled for attention side by side at the conference, an example of the escalating war for dominance between the major Layer 2 solutions. There was discussion around the security tradeoffs between side chains like Polygon and rollups like Arbitrum & Optimism, along with concerns that rollups are currently too centralized and lacking fraud proofs. Laconic knows a thing or two about proofs…

6. Data Scaling

Data indexing and scaling continues to be a fundamental challenge for Web3 development. You’re either running a full node yourself or forced to make compromises while using one of a handful of existing centralized indexing solutions.
Enter Laconic, the first multichain verifiable data indexer. Laconic enables developers to build internet-scale Web3 applications and light clients at a fraction of the speed and the cost of current tools.

*Side note, the conference wifi pw was “runfafullnode” but we’re here to do that for you…IYKYK.

Interestingly, the decision to host the conference in South America was prescient as the economic crises in Venezuela and Argentina highlight the use cases of crypto as a hedge against inflation and more generally as a means for financial sovereignty. We spoke with a number of Argentinians and Venezuelans about the growing usage of crypto payments in their countries.

The need to enable developers to build applications with access to faster and more reliable data has never been greater.