Highlights from EDCON Sydney 2019

EDCON 2019 kicked off with a bang in Sydney this year. F2Pool was fortunate enough to witness one of Vitalik's famous blockchain raps with his associates from the Ethereum foundation as backup dancers. After an entertaining introduction, the event immediately began the first of many presentations and discussions surrounding Ethereum. Of the numerous talks, a good majority of them pertained to Ethereum's technical developments (being a developer's conference of course) which were intermittently broken up with discussion panels and various other Ethereum-related topics. Blue skies, blockchain projects, engaging discussions, and EDCON's generous sponsors ensured a fruitful event down under.

Stake.fish, Chainlink, MakerDAO, Exodus (HTC), and of course F2Pool were among the many exciting projects present at the event. Our friends at stake.fish shared their experiences supporting Loom and becoming the #1 validator for Cosmos in the Game of Stakes. Their future seems bright and we are eager to see how they develop with the growing popularity of Proof-of-Stake blockchain projects. While all had exciting developments, the focus of this year's EDCON remained focused on the upcoming implementation of Casper and CBC.

The talks began with a strong focus on Ethereum 2.0 and Proof-of-Stake, however, scaling still received some of the spotlight as plasma proponents and researchers took the stage to describe their latest updates and progress.

F2Pool, in an effort to make mining more transparent to the Ethereum community, gave an exposition of the current Ethereum mining industry, mining machines, and the proposed ProgPoW upgrade to Ethereum’s hashing algorithm.

As a sponsor of these events, miner of 5 Million ETH, and strong supporter of the Ethereum network, many at EDCON were naturally interested to hear our perspectives on the current climate of Ethereum mining and the implementation of Proof-of-Stake. While we support the implementation of ProgPoW, we also realize that PoS means an eventual conclusion to mining activities. However, mining will continue to play a critical role in maintaining the security of the Ethereum network for many years to come, as pure PoS remains far down the Ethereum development timeline. F2Pool plans to continue its role in providing this security and will support the network through the launch of Ethereum 2.0 and beyond.

Overall, EDCON was educational and inspiring. The future is bright for Ethereum and F2Pool will continue to play its part in helping it reach fruition.