# A Brief History of Correlated Events (and What It Means for Ethereum)

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2026-11-11
- Duration: 05:27
- Topics: Coordination, Devcon, Open & Verifiable Stack, Research, Resilience, Risk, Thomas Humphreys, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt--CJxmQziE0I
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CJxmQziE0I

## Description

This talk will explore real-world cases where one event caused things that appeared independent to move or fail together, and what changed afterwards. It then turns to Ethereum and asks whether its combination of programmable value and cryptographic verification gives us new ways to respond to correlated events.

It is aimed at researchers, academics, infrastructure specialists and institutions that already study correlation and resilience in complex systems. Ethereum has its own versions of these questions, and studying them as a community will benefit from perspectives from other fields.

Speakers: Thomas Humphreys

Track: Open & Verifiable Stack

## Transcript

[music] Hey, Devcon. My name is Daryl. I'm a front-end dev and UI engineer, and I've spent the last 5 years building interfaces at define companies you might know, like DYDX and Coinbase. And the last two years, I've had the privilege of working on the website for a project called Wallet Beach. This is a project that's very near and dear to my heart. Uh, it's spearheaded by my good friend Poly Mutex who I originally met through Farcaster and we research the open source code bases of the wallet apps and browser extensions in the Ethereum ecosystem. And we rate them on a number of criteria which fall across five categories privacy, security, transparency, self-s sovereignty, and ecosystem integrations. And we publish all of our findings on our website at wallet.walletbe.e.limmo. So, if you've been following the latest outputs from the Ethereum Foundation over this last year, um you'll find that they're very into uh some principles like crops, censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security. And if you visit our site today, yeah, you'll find that our rating methodology is similarly quite objective in how we evaluate the criteria, but also rather opinionated in what we choose to focus on for our criteria. So when Polymutx and I first set out to build this site two years ago, we both felt it was quite important that we apply generally the same Ethereum values and principles across every aspect of our build and publishing pipeline that powers the website. So this led us to some rather interesting and non-obvious text decisions and I'm here to talk about a few of them. So there's two principles I want to highlight here which I think best encapsulates most of the decisions we made. First, there's this tweet from Vitalic um a number I think last year um dependency minimalism. That's writing software that deliberately tries to have as few dependencies as practical. And yeah, this is more important than ever now that we have you know AI kind of hacking everything left and right and uh you know just software supply chain attacks happening uh all over the place. And I'd say the second principle we're applying here is the walk away test. So this comes from a blog another blog post of Vitalix um on alignment and in in short the walk away test is you know if the maintainers stop spending time money and manpower to maintain a certain project will the output say the website or the app stay stay meaningfully usable and accessible to people who want to keep benefiting from it and I think some in our industry would argue that this is actually the entire point of the industry maybe the heart and soul of it and we need to keep it alive. So let's apply this to a few areas of the front end stack which is has been my area of expertise. So say you're building a web application today. Well the conventional path for this might tell you okay choose a popular off-the-shelf framework say react and nex.js JS maybe a database like sufabase or postgress it's quite battle tested maybe add on tailwind for styling and CSS author author uh authoring and maybe deploy the whole thing to a centralized cloud hosting service like rel or cloudflare and this works you know it works you don't have to reinvent the wheel too much but you know as with all technical decisions there's lots of hidden assumptions behind choosing any tech stack and they all come with their own set of trade-offs so what if we applied at our two principles here, dependency minimalism. Well, for wallet beat, right? If the data changes infrequently, right, we don't update our metrics um and and measurements quite often. So, why do we even need a database or why do we even need an ondemand server rendered page that dynamically generates the u the HTML on the fly when a static file server would suff suffice, right? And then to the second principle, right? The walk away tests. If we the maintainers stop running out of uh time and money and manpower to keep this whole thing running, you know what happens when we stop paying the hosting service? Well, yeah. Or or or maybe even paying the uh domain registar. Yeah, the the website's not going to survive long, right? So, what did we do? Well, here's here's the decisions we made for our tech stack. And this is just one possible solution of many, right? The data changes relatively infrequently. So we instead chose to model everything as static data structures in Typescript. So here's an example of one wallet that we model. And since the pages don't have to update in real time, we can use a static compiler such as Astro. And for the interactive bits, we can use another compiled uh language that is quite similar to Astro. Um and in this case, we chose spelt. Okay. >> What next? What about the dependencies we need to publish and distribute it? So yeah, Polymutex evaluated dozens of possible tools and in the end two technologies stood out. ENS and HTTPS gateways like E limo and yeah in the end we built our a custom GitHub actions pipeline around this. >> Appreciate it. Thank you. >> All right, I'm out of time. That's all. If you are curious about anything um I've referenced so far, um please stop by the wallet beat booth at the back of the third floor. And you can also come back to this room in approximately half an hour to hear from Polymutex over here about wallets and the integrity of the software supply chain. [music]