ETH Denver Recap

After a fortnight immersed in the majestic Rocky Mountains, the collective at Inco is eager to disseminate our reflections and achievements from ETH Denver 2024 to our growing community. Encompassing our Hackathon endeavors with the seminal relationships established with leading blockchain protocols, ETH Denver represented the initial stride towards integrating on-chain confidential computing within the Web3 ecosystem.

Introducing FHE to the Ethereum Ecosystem

While FHE is still an unfamiliar acronym in the Web3 space, we were pleased to see the number of people curious to learn more about us at the Inco booth, asking: ”What is FHE?” and “How is FHE applicable in blockchain?” Our team really enjoyed educating new builders on the advantages of FHE cryptography and exploring new use cases that leverage on-chain confidentiality.

To illustrate the uniqueness of Inco, our booth displayed a few demo dApps, showcasing use cases such as private voting, slot machines, hangman, confidential ERC-20, and more. We also allowed folks to try out a fun social experiment called “guess ⅔ of the average” game built by 0xAkrasia: participants can submit a hidden guess between 1 and 100. The game utilizes FHE to compute the average guesses of all the submissions, and the winner is the person who guessed the closest to 2/3 of the average of everyone’s guesses.

Inco abstracts away all the complexities of FHE and enables builders to develop dApps using the familiar Solidity language and Ethereum ecosystem infrastructure. This makes the developer experience simple. We were impressed by some of the ideas builders were interested in building on Inco, and will keep the community updated on the progress.

Fundraise announcement and GENTRY Testnet Launch:

We kicked off the week by announcing our $4.5m fundraise led by 1kx with other investors like Big Brain Holdings, Robot Ventures, and Circle Ventures, to bring confidential computing to Web3 and the launch of our Gentry Testnet. Gentry is our first test net that allows builders to start experimenting with the idea of building confidentiality dApps using FHE. We will have a second testnet (Paillier) in Q2 with additional features, bringing us even closer to our Mainnet, estimated for Q4 this year.

If you are a builder, please check out our docs section to learn more.

ETH Denver 2024 Hackathon Results:

Our team had the pleasure of presenting Inco during ETH Denver and sponsored the hackathon with $5000 in prizes. Six submissions covered a variety of use cases, and here are the top three winning projects.

1. Stealth Command by @prolificsaurav on X: A multiplayer city defense game using FHE to encrypt defenses built by the respective players.
2. Red Envelope by @omurovec @WEBthe3rd @jackpooley @0xluie @0xdist on X: A derivation of the millennium-old Chinese tradition of red envelopes, the project utilizes Inco’s on-chain randomness to add random amounts of USDC to a selection of built-in envelope frames (Farcaster).
3. Pokerr by @julieshi_eth on X: Poker built on Base, leveraging encrypted data on Inco to generate and store the hidden cards.

Our team is eager to see what other novel use cases builders will develop on Inco! If you are interested in building on top of Inco or wish to receive feedback on your idea, feel free to join our Discord community and chat directly with us.

What we heard in Denver:

TLDR: Modularity and EigenLayer

Whether at modular day or just at a booth at ETH Denver, the consensus that the space is moving towards modularity was obvious. Modularity for most projects means being interoperable and serving a specific purpose. For example, Celestia is a modular blockchain that provides Data Availability (DA) services to blockchains. Inco, as a modular Layer-1 blockchain, provides confidentiality as a service to Ethereum and other public blockchains. Our protocol makes it easy for developers from different ecosystems to leverage Inco as a layer to store and compute hidden states.

The other major topic of discussion was EigenLayer, which is coming to Mainnet soon. There was a lot of excitement around restaking, LSTs, LRTs, dual staking, and upcoming AVSs. EigenLayer recently published a blog post regarding Inco and introduced FHE as a promising new paradigm in privacy technologies. We are really excited about the economic security that EigenLayer provides and are building as an AVS.

Events:

Our team had fun attending, speaking, and spreading the word about Inco at various conferences and events. The attendees asked us amazing questions, and it felt like the beginning of a new movement. Some of our participation includes:

House of ZK: FHE Presentation & Intro

Jessy Hacker House:

DInfra:

Pragma:

SevenX Research Day: Research insights about dual staking on EigenLayer

X post

ETH Denver:

Video

We can’t wait to bring in more awareness to the web3 space about FHE. If you want to stay updated with Inco and get involved in our quickly growing community, please join us on Twitter, Discord, or Telegram. Looking forward to meeting you!

Until next year Denver!

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