Devcon 8 preview: AI, formal verification and open commons take centre stage in Mumbai

Devcon 8 opens in Mumbai on 2 November 2026 with a programme heavy on artificial intelligence, security tooling and the social infrastructure of open source ↗1. Speakers who have been shaping these conversations this year will bring their latest arguments to the stage.

Austin Griffith, who leads a workshop on AI and Ethereum at the conference ↗1, has argued that AI is fundamentally changing how developers build. In a talk at ETHOnline 2026 he said that “AI is pretty good at writing smart contracts, and it will get better and better” and that the main skill developers now need is conceptual understanding, because AI can handle much of the coding and even auditing 14. His Speed Run Ethereum project, he noted, now lets learners give challenges to an AI tutor 1.

Mooly Sagiv, a panellist on a community-led session about securing Ethereum in the age of AI ↗1, has been pushing for formal verification to become mainstream. At ETHConf he argued that the real bottleneck is writing formal specifications, and that LLMs can bridge the gap between informal intent and formal invariants. “We want to make formal verification as easy as testing,” he said, and warned that as AI models improve, “a new threat appears” and “hackers win” 2.

Mario Behling, hosting a session on building developer communities beyond hackathons ↗1, drew on 17 years of running FOSSASIA to argue that open projects need more than code. “Events create the commons,” he said, describing how gatherings build trust and lead to long-lived projects such as the Cryptostick and the Suzy AI question-answering system 3. He cautioned that without durable community structures, even successful projects can fade.

Other highlights on the schedule include sessions on validator consolidations, fast finality, FOCIL and censorship resistance, private L1, and a workshop on building with agents ↗1.

• Austin Griffith’s workshop on AI and Ethereum ↗1 — draws on his argument that AI is a “one-time centering” of development 1.
• The community-led panel on securing Ethereum in the age of AI ↗1 — features Mooly Sagiv, who has been advocating LLM-assisted formal verification 2.
• Mario Behling’s Open Source Hub talk ↗1 — builds on his experience turning events into open commons 3.