State Contention Rules Everything Around Me by James Prestwich | Devcon SEA

Thu, Oct 2, 2025, 12:00 AM

State contention causes MEV, prevents parallelization, breaks gas simulation, causes transactions to revert, etc. etc. We'll discuss state contention in practical and theoretical systems (e.g. OS threads and type systems) and how/why synchronization primitives developed. We'll cover why state is contentious, what state is contentious, what can be accomplished by making state non-contentitious, and strategies for refactoring existing systems to reduce contention. Speaker(s): James Prestwich Skill level: Expert Track: Core Protocol Keywords: Layer 1, Architecture, Cross-L2, concurrency Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum, https://warpcast.com/devcon Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/ Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on Swarm, IPFS and more. Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024. Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/