Hi everyone,
The team and I got back from last week’s Devconnect in Istanbul and we had an amazing time! 
Devconnect was brimming with some amazing people working on some amazing things. This post is just to share my experience and key takeaways from the week, as I reflect upon the conversations I’ve had.
To begin the week, we at Avail hosted our first event, the Hot Take Series, where in this edition of the series we focused a lot on the Battle of the L2s and their differing visions for the rollup future. The conference was packed with great talks, workshops, and networking opportunities.
We expanded upon the thesis for each major L2s on their L2/L3/appchain/rollup stack. Whatever the implementation, it’s quite clear that the future is not monolithic. The multi-layered blockchain stack with different specialized layers working together to create one big cohesive system for scaling and enhancing the experience for users is a trend we are fast approaching. During the Hot Take Series event, we also spent our time with various Rollup Stack customers, who utilized stacks like Polygon CDK, OP Stack, Orbit, etc. to build their own rollups/optimiums/validiums.
However, the conversation did not end there, we also took a peek into the world of Rollups-as-a-Service providers and how they will be making the lives of developers easier when spinning up new chains.
By the end of the event, it became clear to me that the future is multi-layered. Gone are the days of monolithic, single-layered L1 blockchains. We are now approaching a future where L1s want to become a data availability layer or transition into an execution layer as a rollup.
Whatever the path taken, Avail is ahead of the curve by being a foundational, VM-agnostic, and transparent data availability layer for the rollup-centric future.
After a successful event with over 300+ attendees, and star-studded speakers and panels (read more about the different panels on our blog), it was time for us to take Istanbul by storm and solidify our presence.
Avail’s Co-Founders, Anurag & Prabal, participated in multiple talks and panels throughout the week to expand everyone’s knowledge about Data Availability, and how we’re effectively tackling the problem, and the different solutions we are building.
Here’s a rundown on some of the events we participated in throughout Devconnect:
As I'm leaving Istanbul, the last week around @EFDevconnect has been awesome. Teşekkürler Türkiye. A quick recap:
— Prabal Banerjee (@prabalbanerjee) November 18, 2023
Sunday was full of anticipation and nervousness. We at @AvailProject were hosting our maiden event, the first of the Hot Take Series. The day was full of catching...
Apart from the good vibes and meow-mazing cats 
here in Istanbul, there have been a lot of discussions that took place. Here are some of my takeaways from the week:
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The emergence of alt-VMs for rollups is a topic of interest: Let’s be real, EVM has its limitations, at least for now. It does get some of the job done, but not all of it. The work done for application-specific engines and OSs specifically fine-tuned for certain applications will go a long way. We’re already starting to see it with on-chain gaming engines(e.g. Paima Studios), and VMs that allow you to execute parallel transactions, and privacy-enabled features using FHE and MPC constructs. These open up doors to a whole variety of devs and use-cases in the space, and not be limited by the EVM itself, but also take advantage of the network effects settling on a chain like Ethereum provides.
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ZK Friendly compilers and alternative Smart Contract languages: Solidity although the number one DSL for EVM today, doesn’t mean it will continue to be. With the introduction of alt-VMs we may start seeing alternative, more traditional development languages for smart contracts that could be more efficient, such as Rust, Golang, or WASM languages. We’ve seen talks about zkWASMs, and ZK Friendly Typescript-like languages from various teams.
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Data Availability is the talk of the town: Data Availability and the need for blockspace are becoming apparent day by day, with proto-danksharding around the corner, and with the amount of L2s on Ethereum growing day by day (I’m looking at you Blast
), we are clearly moving to a more rollup-centric future for web3 applications, which also means there’s going to be an immense struggle for blockspace on Ethereum. This is where Avail excels. Avail’s elastic block size (like a rubber band) increases based on demand and can also utilize light clients to sample the network through DAS to ensure trustless verification of blocks. Throughout last week we have just been able to solidify our thesis and are working towards becoming the elastic base layer for the rollup-centric future.
This space never fails to surprise me. I highly recommend attending Devconnect next year if you have the chance. It’s a great way to learn, network, and be inspired by the best and brightest minds in the web3 community.
It’s also been a great experience to just hang out with the team in this chilly Istanbul weather 
Thanks to everyone who made Devconnect Istanbul such a great experience!
