Our inaugural event happens at Devconnect. We are inviting a global community of developers and researchers, connected by the common purpose of advancing what’s possible in blockchain.
Join us!

Nethermind Summit Istanbul is a 1-day builder event. The day will feature technical explorations around the cornerstones of blockchain: Security, Scalability and Decentralization. It’s a great opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with Ethereum, Starknet and Cosmos builders.

15 NOVEMBER 2023

|

ISTANBUL, TURKEY

1 day

Connecting builders from
the blockchain ecosystem

200+

Attendees expected
from around the world

18

Technical talks, panels &
workshops

Event sponsors

CHAIN sPONSORS

BLOCK sPONSORS

COMMUNITY sPONSORS

Agenda

Main Stage

Workshops

08:30-09:30

Registration and networking breakfast

09:30-09:40

Opening remarks
Tomasz Stanczak | Nethermind

09:40-10:00

White-labeling resistance for Lido: Systematization of knowledge, research, and mechanism design
Jorge Arce-Garro | Nethermind

10:00-10:20

Delegated time-lock puzzle
Aydin Abadi | University College London

10:25-11:15

Panel: Rollups design—From off-chain to on-chain
Keng Lim | Taiko
Mohammad Jahanara | Scroll
Patrick McCorry | Arbitrum
Jorik Schellekens | Starknet lead at Nethermind
Moderator: Swapnil Raj | Nethermind

11:20-11:40

EIP-4844 economics and rollup strategies
Akaki Mamageishvili | Offchain Labs

11:40-12:00

Designing the distributed validator protocol
Oisín Kyne | Obol

12:05-12:45

Panel: Decentralization—Why client diversity matters
Marius van der Wijden | Geth
Michael Sproul | Lighthouse
Gary Schulte | Besu, Consensys
Marek Moraczyński | Nethermind
Moderator: Ken Smith | Nextblock Solutions

12:45-13:55

Lunch break - Local Lotus Restaurant

14:00-14:20

Deconstructing PBS in the L2 landscape
Quintus Kilbourn | Flashbots

14:20-14:40

Stakesure: Proof of Stake mechanisms with strong crypto-economic safety
Sreeram Kannan | EigenLabs

14:45-15:30

Panel: Solo stakers
Soubhik Deb | EigenLayer
Darren Langley | RocketPool
Dmitry Gusakov | Lido Community Staking
Moderator: Michal Zajac | Nethermind

15:35-15:55

The elephant in the room: DeFi, cloud computing & (de)centralization
Vitaly Yakovlev | ZKX

15:55-16:15

Achieving composability between public and private state
Rahul Kothari | Aztec

16:15-16:35

The future of DeFi—Token plugins
Kirill Kuznetcov | 1inch

16:35-17:00

Coffee break with snacks

17:00-17:20

Shutterized Gnosis Chain
Jannik Luhn | Shutter Network

17:25-17:50

Panel: At the forefront of ZK—ZK-VMS and ZK-security
Grigore Rosu | Runtime Verification
Alp Bassa | Veridise
Misha Komarov | =nil; Foundation
Moderator: Julian Sutherland | Nethermind

17:55-18:15

(Almost) effortless formal verification of ZK-circuits: RISC Zero’s Zirgen MLIR
Julian Sutherland | Nethermind

18:20-18:45

Panel: The future of runtime monitoring
Caner Çıdam | OpenZeppelin-Forta
Sultaan Qazi | CyVers
Moderator: Tayfun Sur | Nethermind

18:45-19:15

Panel: Data availability
Nick White | Celestia
Anurag Arjun | Avail
Charles Lu | Espresso
Moderator: Swapnil Raj | Nethermind

19:15-19:20

Closing remarks

09:40-10:40

SUAVE & SUAPPs—Decentralize your MEV application
Dmarz | Flashbots

10:40-11:40

Account abstraction in Starknet—Not an option for crypto
Omar Espejel | Starknet Foundation

11:40-12:40

Programmable privacy on Ethereum
Cat McGee | Aztec Network

14:00-15:00

Multi-client and scalable Ethereum devnets for interoperability & protocol-layer testing
Derek Lee | Kurtosis and Gyani Mishra | Kurtosis

15:00-16:00

How oracles can hug you or rug you
Paweł Zaremba | Chronicle

16:00-17:00

Building security-in-depth cross-chain apps
Thomas Bertani | Gnosis Chain

17:00-18:00

How to build on RISC Zero
Daisy Adams | RISC Zero

18:00-19:00

Halo2 circuit verification using Lean 4
Ilia Vlasov | Nethermind

Speakers & panelists

ABOUT

Ilia Vlasov

Formal Verification Engineer, Nethermind

ABOUT

Misha Komarov is the founder of =nil; Foundation, a leading developer of trustless infrastructure for zero-knowledge proofs. Misha is a researcher and developer in the fields of cryptography and database management systems (DBMS).

Misha Komarov

Founder, =nil; Foundation

ABOUT

Derek is a Product Manager at Kurtosis focused on developer tools to make building and testing distributed systems easier.

Derek Lee

Product Manager, Kurtosis

ABOUT

Protocol Engineer at Consensys contributing to Hyperledger Besu

Gary Schulte

Protocol Engineer, Consensys

ABOUT

Developer of the Lighthouse consensus client at Sigma Prime. Lead maintainer of the blockprint project for client diversity data.

Michael Sproul

Developer, Lighthouse

ABOUT

Gyani is a Software Engineer at Kurtosis who also moonlights as a DevRel Engineer.

Gyanendra Mishra

Software Engineer, Kurtosis

ABOUT

Tomasz Stanczak

CEO, Nethermind

ABOUT

Ph.D. in theoretical computer science; interested in blockchain economics, rollup optimization and decentralized finance.

Akaki Mamageishvili

Research Scientist, Offchain Labs

ABOUT

General Manager of the Rocket Pool core team specializing in Ethereum staking and DAOs.

Darren Langley

General Manager, Rocket Pool

ABOUT

Senior protocol researcher at Scroll, a bytecode-level compatible zkRollup. His research interests encompass mechanism design, proof systems, and privacy-enhancing technologies. Previously, he was awarded an Ethereum Academic grant for his work on mempool encryption, and he served as a research engineer at Quantstamp and as a blockchain developer at Aquanow.

Mohammad Jahanara

Senior Protocol Researcher, Scroll

ABOUT

Vitaly is the CTO at ZKX, where he leads all aspects of the technology and innovation of a suite of Web3 products. He is a strategic, business-driven leader with 20+ years of experience and specializes in developing operational strategies to assure business growth through emerging technologies and product-market fit.

Vitaly Jakovlev

CTO, ZKX

ABOUT

Tayfun Sur

Forta Bots Developer, Nethermind

ABOUT

Alumni of the Warsaw University of Technology, Pawel has over twenty years of experience as a software engineer and has been developing Oracles for MakerDAO & Chronicle since 2020. Pawel is a core proponent of the global Ethereum community, the Co-Founder of ETH Warsaw, a regular speaker at Web3 events, and a three-times prize winner of the ETH Global Hackathon

Paweł Zaremba

Engineer, Chronicle

ABOUT

Jorge Arce-Garro

Blockchain & Cryptography Researcher, Nethermind

ABOUT

Kirill Kuznetsov is a lead backend engineer at 1Inch

Kirill Kuznetsov

Lead Backend Engineer, 1Inch

ABOUT

Senior Research Fellow at University College London. His main research interests include information security, privacy, and cryptography, with a focus on (1) Bank and Payment Fraud/Scam, (2) Developing Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) such as Private Set Intersection (PSI) and Time-lock Encryptions, (3) Blockchain and its Applications, and (4) Cloud computing's Security.

Aydin Abadi

Senior Research Fellow, University College London (UCL)

ABOUT

Daisy is a DevRel Engineer at RISC Zero and a ZK enthusiast. She will run a workshop on How to Build on RISC Zero.

Daisy Adams

DevRel Engineer, RISC Zero

ABOUT

Jorik Schellekens

CO-CTO, Nethermind

ABOUT

Technical Trainer, Web3 Speaker, Leader in the Small and Independent Staker Community

Ken Smith

Co-Founder, Nextblock Solutions

ABOUT

Founder and CEO of Runtime Verification. He is also a computer science Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Previously, he was a scientist at NASA, where he coined the term runtime verification with his colleagues.

Grigore Rosu

Grigore Rosu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ABOUT

Charles Lu is a co-founder and Chief Operations Officer at Espresso Systems. Espresso Systems are the lead developers of the Espresso Sequencer, which supports rollups with decentralization, scale, and interoperability.

Charles Lu

Co-founder & COO, Espresso

ABOUT

Jannik is the tech lead at Shutter Network and the main author of Shutterized Gnosis Chain's specification. Prior to that, he worked on Ethereum client development, scalability research, and mutual credit networks. His interests broadly span whatever is fun and advances crypto and Ethereum

Jannik Luhn

Tech Lead, Shutter Network

ABOUT

Flashbots Researcher

Quintus Kilbourn

Researcher, Flashbots

ABOUT

Oisín is CTO and cofounder of Obol Labs, and has been working on Ethereum since 2018 when he joined Consensys. Oisín has been working on proof of stake Ethereum since 2020 where he first built blockdaemon's Eth staking infrastructure. Today Oisín and the Obol Labs team are working with the Nethermind R&D team to develop the Distributed Validator Protocol.

Oisin Kyne

CTO & Co-founder, Obol

ABOUT

Previously Hype DevRel & AAVE. Cat will be hosting a workshop on programmable privacy on Ethereum.

Cat McGee

DevRel, Aztec Labs

ABOUT

Head of AVS Research at EigenLayer and is leading the effort in AVS integration with EigenLayer.

Soubhik Deb

Head of AVS Research, EigenLabs

ABOUT

Just an Ethereum fan and permissionless values believer

Dmitry Gusakov

Tech Lead, Lido Community Staking

ABOUT

Keng Lim

DevRel, Taiko

ABOUT

Julian Sutherland

Head of Formal Verification, Nethermind

ABOUT

Lead Developer at OpenZeppelin who mainly develops the Forta Network scan nodes.

Caner Çıdam

Lead Developer, OpenZeppelin

ABOUT

Michal Zajac

Head of Research, Nethermind

ABOUT

Founder & CEO of EigenLabs. A former professor at the University of Washington and the Head of the UW Blockchain Lab.

Sreeram Kannan

CEO, EigenLabs

ABOUT

Nick White is a COO at Celestia

Nick White

COO, Celestia

ABOUT

Patrick has spent most of his adult life working on cryptocurrencies and his time was split across academic research and industry. Before working at the Arbitrum Foundation, he has worked on transaction delivery, layer-2 protocols, atomic swaps, consensus protocols, and applied cryptography. In a past life, he was an Assistant Professor at King’s College London and an accomplished researcher at UCL, UIUC and NCL.

Patrick McCorry

Arbitrum Foundation

ABOUT

Head of Partnerships & Sales at Cyvers, the leading machine learning and AI-powered SecOps platform for web3.

Sultaan Qazi

Head of Partnerships & Sales, CyVers

ABOUT

Omar Espejel is a Cairo Blockchain Engineer at the Starknet Foundation. Before this, he worked at Starkware and was a Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face, the most important open-source AI company. He is the editor of the Starknet Book

Omar Espejel

Cairo Blockchain Engineer, Starknet Foundation

ABOUT

‍Rahul Kothari

Product Manager & Protocol Engineer, Aztec

ABOUT

Credible Auctioneer & SUAVE R&D

DMarz

Credible Auctioneer, Flashbots

ABOUT

Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail, is a seasoned entrepreneur who has founded several successful startups across diverse industries, ranging from cash flow lending to regulatory tech. With a strategic move into the blockchain space in 2017, he co-founded Matic Network, which has since evolved into Polygon Labs, a platform for scaling Ethereum.

Anurag Arjun

Co-Founder, Avail

ABOUT

Swapnil Raj

Head of Innovation, Nethermind

ABOUT

Alp worked as a mathematician in academia for around 15 years, doing research on number theory and cryptography. He joined Veridise, a blockchain security company, where he does research in automated verification of zero knowledge circuits and detection of vulnerabilities.

Alp Bassa

Researcher, Veridise

ABOUT

Marius van der Wijden joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2020. He's working on go-ethereum and in the past worked on the merge and 4844. He's currently focusing on cross-client security and EVM fuzzing.

Marius van der Wijden

Developer, Geth

Talking tracks

Enjoy technical talks, panels and workshops covering each side of the blockchain trilemma.

Security: How can we build robust, resilient, secure networks, protecting data integrity and user assets?

Scalability: Builders all over the globe are thinking about how to onboard the next billion users.

Decentralization: It is a pivotal decision for any blockchain ecosystem and a central topic for blockchain builders.

Steering committee

Jorik Schellekens

CO-CTO

Swapnil
Raj

Head of Innovation

Michal
Zajac

Head of Research

Julian Sutherland

Head of Formal Verification

Cristiano
Silva

Head of Smart Contract Security

Marek Moraczynski

Lead Ethereum
Core Developer

Luciana
Silva

Smart Contract
Auditor

Aikaterini-Panagiota

Cryptography Researcher

Albert
Garreta

Senior Cryptography Researcher

Jorge
Arce

Cryptography Researcher

How do I participate?

ATTENDEES

Engage directly with fellow builders through hands-on workshops, talks, or panels.

Register here

speakers

The lineup includes speakers and leaders in their fields, from each corner of the blockchain ecosystem.

Speaker applications are closed.

Lineup

Sponsorship

We take pride in collaborating with ecosystem visionaries. Get in touch to hear about sponsoring opportunities.

Contact us

The venue

Workinton Lotus Nişantaşı, is centrally located in the Nişantaşı area and is only a 14 minutes walk from Devconnect coworking space. Food and drinks will be served throughout the day!

Address: Halaskargazi, Halaskargazi Cd. No: 38-66, 34371 Şişli/İstanbul, Türkiye

See you in Istanbul

We couldn’t be more excited to host you at our inaugural event. Join our Telegram channel for more information during the day, and to connect with fellow attendees, speakers and sponsors.

Join our Telegram Channel