Devcon 8 preview: Mumbai speakers have spent the year arguing that privacy should be the default

Several people on the Devcon 8 schedule spent this year telling other stages that privacy has to be designed into a system from the start. Devcon 8 runs from Nov 3 to 6 at the Jio World Centre in Mumbai, and its organisers pitch it as a gathering for people building free, open, private and verifiable systems ↗1. What follows is what nine of its speakers said in talks already in the StreamETH archive, and where to find them in Mumbai 123.

Harry Halpin, who runs the mixnet project Nym, said in an interview for the Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress that "privacy is quite slippery and hard to define. It's a holistic property which applies to a whole system." 1 He builds it up from anonymity: you start anonymous, use pseudonyms for different activities, and reveal your real name only when you choose to 1.

Halpin wants everyday tools to run over anonymous networks such as mixnets 1. On Nov 5 he gives an introduction to mixnets and network metadata at 10:30 IST on Lotus Stage 3 with Max Hampshire and Sachin Kamath, then runs a workshop on integrating a mixnet at 14:00 in Workshop 2 ↗2↗3.

Rob Knight, a research engineer at 0xPARC, argued that "privacy on its own or privacy as a kind of add-on is not sufficient" to build a whole system, and that integrity, composability and interoperability have to come with it 2. His goal is to reverse who proves what: "When we deal with a company, we can require proofs from them rather than them requiring proofs from us." 2 He and gubsheep present Digital Objects: What, Why, and How on Nov 5 at 11:30 IST on Lotus Stage 1 ↗4.

Jordi Baylina said in the same interview series that "the privacy should be something that's normal. It should not be an exception." 3 His Devcon talk is about something else: EEZ, a protocol for synchronous calls between Ethereum and rollups backed by real-time ZK proofs 4↗5.

In a fireside chat with Kartik Talwar, Baylina said his team can now "prove a full Ethereum block with just 12 GPUs" 4. He said the first such proof, about six months earlier, had needed roughly 128 GPUs, and put the gain down mostly to engineering work on latency 4.

He described EEZ as a smart contract on mainnet run by a non-profit association: "There is no multi-sig." He also said: "There is no token. There is no monetization." 4 He presents it on Nov 5 at 13:00 IST on Lotus Stage 3 ↗5.

Roger Dingledine, a co-founder of Tor, recorded a short appeal this year for the projects that grew up around Tor, saying "that ecosystem is at risk this year because of the loss of some of the big traditional funders." 5 He takes questions twice on Nov 5, at a Tor AMA at 13:30 IST on Jasmine Stage 4 and at an AMA on Tor, privacy and open source at 15:00 IST on the Community Led Stage ↗6↗7.

Kaan Uzdogan of Sourcify gave a talk called Goodbye YOLO Signing at Berlin Ethereum Day in June, and the same title is on Devcon's schedule for Nov 4 at 16:00 IST on Jasmine Stage 4 6↗8. In Berlin he said he had given a talk on human-readable transactions at Devcon four years earlier, and that "4 or 5 years later, things haven't been changed yet." 6

What changed since, Uzdogan said, is a clear signing working group built on ERC-7730, a standard first written by the Ledger team, with Trezor, MetaMask, WalletConnect and Fireblocks among the members 6. He argued it can work because the descriptors sit in an open registry off-chain, so they cover contracts that are already deployed 6.

Mooly Sagiv of Certora told ETHConf that the weak spot in formal verification is the specification, and showed a tool in which an LLM turns a developer's plain-language intent into a formal property 7. He pitched it as a step before an audit, and said it doesn't replace one 7. He speaks on bug-free Solidity coding agents on Nov 5 at 12:30 IST on Lotus Stage 2 ↗9.

Austin Griffith told ETHOnline that he no longer teaches Solidity syntax the way he used to, and that developers can hand his Speedrun Ethereum challenges to an AI agent and use it as a tutor 8. He also told them to keep understanding the work themselves instead of leaving all the thinking to the agent 8. His Devcon talk on teaching an agent everything it needs to know about Ethereum is on Nov 6 at 12:30 IST on Lotus Stage 3 ↗10.

Devansh Mehta, who works on funding coordination at the Ethereum Foundation, said Ethereum's public goods space "has focused too much on allocation" and too little on where the money comes from 9. He wants a share of fees routed to the commons, moving "from one-time big donations, which you can't really do planning on, into embedded value flows" that teams can hire against 9.

At ETHTaipei, Mehta showed how conditional markets could put a price on open-source repos that no evaluator has time to score, using a map of Ethereum's dependencies with about 4,000 repos 10. He runs a workshop with Clément Lesaege, The Future of Prediction Markets is Decision Markets, on Nov 6 at 10:00 IST in Workshop 2 ↗11.

Mario Havel told Berlin Ethereum Day that "there is not a single team of Ethereum core developers", describing more than 200 people in independent teams with no top-down control 11. He traced that way of working to the "Cypherpunk dream of digital cash" 11. His Devcon talk, Human rights in the age of technofeudalism, is on Nov 6 at 11:30 IST on the Lightning Stage ↗12.

Times are India Standard Time, from the session pages on Devcon's schedule as of Oct 24, and can still move ↗2↗12.