Seoul, Singapore Play Host to Crypto Leaders at Epoch Summit

Across two events in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, blockchain infrastructure conference Epoch Summit brought together a stellar line-up of speakers from leading crypto projects to discuss the future of the space.

At a one-day event held in Seoul as part of Korea Blockchain Week, and a two-day conference in Singapore, Epoch Summit saw speakers from projects including Consensys, Lido, Uniswap, Worldcoin, Berachain and Mantle come together to explore blockchain infrastructure in the APAC region and beyond.

Opening the conference in Singapore, A41 CEO John Park said that the aim of the event was to “address open finance, or state-free money, or how people are trying to imagine the future with less reliance on the government or corporations with blockchain.” He explained that in order to do this, the conference was exploring the wider blockchain infrastructure landscape, beyond A41’s own focus on liquid staking, with speakers covering topics including zero-knowledge technology, account abstraction and dark pools.

In a talk on the Future of Block Building, Max Resnick, Head of Research at Special Mechanisms Group, argued that, “We need to focus on  L1 because we’ve neglected it for too long.” He added that “the best thing to do would be to focus all of our attention on scaling  L1, making it faster, making it more competitive with some of the newer blockchains," and capitalizing on its network effects.

Francesco Andreolí, Head of Developer Community at ConsenSys, lauded the “customized experiences” made possible by Snaps, third-party applications for its Web3 wallet MetaMask. “You will have different customized journeys, pre-configured wallets, so that people don’t even know what they are transacting on which level,” he said.

Worldcoin’s Head of Blockchain, Remco Bloeman, meanwhile, took to the stage in Singapore to discuss how secure multi-party computation (SMPC) could be used to scale data privacy. “We quickly converged on linear MPC in a semi-honest scenario, mostly because this gives us the performance we need,” Bloeman explained. To address the “mild trust assumption” involved in semi-honest MPC, he added, Worldcoin turned to trusted execution environments (TEEs) for attestation.

At Epoch’s Seoul event, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes discussed how high-frequency traders are performing arbitrage between centralized and decentralized exchanges, capitalizing on the latency of DEX price oracles. “Usually most DEXs have a one-to-five second latency on the oracle update, so that means you’re always behind the Binances of the world,” he said.

While that persists, he explained, DEXs “are never going to be price setters. It’s a latency arbitrage game.” He argued that the pendulum will only swing towards DEXs after “more and more people get deplatformed from CEXs because they have the wrong passport, and they need somewhere else to trade.”

Speaking to Decrypt, A41 CEO John Park looked forward to a “more technical” focus at next year’s edition of the conference, saying, “We want people who have come to Epoch this year to experience how things are evolving.”

He explained that getting an overview of technical progress within the blockchain space through research papers can be a “burden,” with Epoch Summit presenting an opportunity for “face to face” discussion. “I think people will be able to granularize it and experience it, and learn about it further on,” he added.