06-02, 13:00–13:25 (Europe/Prague), Leaf Stage
To make the crypto ecosystem accessible to billions, we need to offer self-custody in a timely and secure way. Escape hatches provide self-custody on Ethereum L2 and are tailored for specific uses like DeFi transactions.
We aim to bring self-custody to billions, but the decentralization of sequencers may initially be imperfect and delayed. Proven tools like escape hatches in StarkEx have been crucial, successfully serving thousands in platforms like Sorare and dYdX. Implementing these in a permissionless blockchain like Starknet, where anyone can build censorship-resistant apps, is key to reaching millions. It’s essential for developers to recognize this as a viable way to provide self-custody to a massive audience.
I'm Omar Espejel, with a background in Blockchain Engineering and Developer Advocacy at Starknet Foundation and Starkware. Previously, I also worked at Hugging Face.
At Starkware and the Starknet Foundation, I helped developers navigate Cairo and Starknet technologies, spearheaded the Starknet Book development, and presented at key conferences in Europe and America, including Devcon 2022 and Devconnect 2023. I've led hackathons and edited the Starknet book, a major resource in the Starknet community. This role deepened my blockchain expertise and honed my ability to demystify complex tech.
At Hugging Face, I developed courses on Transformers and Gradio, focusing on sentence transformers and the fastai library, aiming to make machine learning more accessible and innovative.