University students reveal new Web3 solutions at ETHDenver 2023

Thousands of attendees recently gathered at Denver’s National Western Complex for ETHDenver 2023 to learn about the current and future cryptocurrency ecosystem. 

John Paller, founder and executive steward of ETHDenver, told Cointelegraph that 15,000 ticketholders attendedr ETHDenver’s main event.

While ETHDenver attracted a diverse crowd, many students from leading universities attended the event, showcasing new solutions to advance the crypto and Web3 sector.

Devs focus on UX, security and privacy

Gil Rosen, president of the Stanford Blockchain Accelerator — a program that connects Stanford University students and alumni founders in the blockchain space — told Cointelegraph that he believes current Web3 technology platforms are generally non-performant. “These platforms often lack privacy preservation, are extremely challenging to develop on (especially complex applications), and are even more complex to use,” he said.

Given this, Rosen mentioned that student attendees at ETHDenver 2023 seemed to be focused on building developer tools, and solutions to simplify user experience and privacy. “These features will enable future applications to be easily built and fully capable. This is what the teams that are part of the Stanford Blockchain Accelerator are primarily focused on this year,” he said.

For example, Rosen noted that Stanford’s “0xPass” team was present at ETHDenver 2023 to demonstrate how account abstraction could be used in the future to enable Web3 wallets to be externally controlled by smart contract code. Such a feature would mean that wallet owners would no longer have to sign off on every transaction. The launch of the new ERC-4337 standard is set to enable use cases like account abstraction.

Kun Peng, an adviser for 0xPass and a Stanford lecturer on Web3 entrepreneurship, told Cointelegraph that while several projects were demonstrating how the ERC-4337 standard could be used for account abstraction, 0xPass is unique because it has built a software development kit (SDK) to simplify account abstraction implementation. He elaborated:

“This SDK will provide decentralized apps with a significantly better onboarding and authentication experience. As a result, the Web3 market will expand to ‘normies’ who don’t want to use wallets with private keys. Such a feature will allow the use of social logins for authentication, the same login for multiple wallets,…