Prof. Peter Ruppel (CODE University) - Token Networks and & Announcements - #BFSCON

Duration: 8:56 1114 transcript words EN summary

Video summary

Professor Peter Ruppel from CODE University introduces his institution as a private, state-accredited university of applied sciences located in Berlin, which focuses on self-directed, project-based learning within interdisciplinary teams. Drawing on his background as a postdoctoral researcher at Technische Universität Berlin and the Telecom Innovation Laboratory, he explains that CODE is deeply embedded in the local business ecosystem, allowing students to choose their own problems while professors act as mentors rather than traditional lecturers. This educational model aims to cultivate blockchain expertise by having students work on real-world challenges, bridging the gap between academic theory and practical industry application. A significant portion of his presentation highlights the Token Gallery, a web-based tool he developed for analyzing token transfer networks on blockchains. This visualization platform displays thousands of different token networks, revealing complex transactional patterns such as failed airdrops, fractal structures associated with token burning, and hub-and-spoke models involving major exchanges. Ruppel emphasizes that while these visualizations are fascinating, the underlying graph theory reveals entirely new structural patterns emerging from blockchain usage that differ from traditional social, communication, or transportation networks. Whether analyzing tokens used for online poker, test smart contracts, or failed distribution events, these unique structures offer rich opportunities for research and potential future applications. The discussion further extends to the critical topic of blockchain governance, illustrated through a visualization of token delegations on the Cosmos blockchain where holders delegate ATOM tokens to validators. Ruppel points out that analyzing these networks helps answer fundamental questions about control and authority within decentralized systems, particularly when observing burst events like massive reallocation of tokens triggered by real-world incidents. By examining proxy votes and delegation shifts, researchers can better understand who effectively controls the blockchain and how governance dynamics evolve over time, providing valuable insights for both academic study and practical system design. Finally, Professor Ruppel invites the audience to engage with this growing field through an upcoming conference called Triple E ADEPTs, scheduled for April in Oxford, UK. As one of the organizers, he notes that this is the second edition of a conference focused on decentralized applications and encourages researchers and practitioners to submit their ongoing work before the end of the month. He concludes by expressing his willingness to answer questions regarding how these analytical models can be integrated into university curricula at CODE University, acknowledging that while decisions on specific processes are still being made, the goal remains to enrich student learning environments with advanced blockchain analytics tools.

Read the full video transcript

thank you very much when I came here this morning I wasn't aware that I'm going to give a quick talk presentation so thank you very much for the opportunity to talk a little bit about what is code and what code has to do with with blockchain and blockchain research so I'm Peter I recently joined Cote University of Applied Sciences we are a private state accredited university of applied sciences about 500 meters from here into that direction 400 students 3 study programs software engineering product management interaction design and part of my new job is also to cultivate and to build blockchain from an educational perspective before I was a postdoctoral researcher at technische universität Berlin and telecom innovation laboratory is also here in Berlin doing blockchain analytics and in case if you haven't heard about code before code is basically trying to do a lot of things new and better when it comes to education it's about self-directed project-based learning in interdisciplinary teams and code is also very deeply embedded into the Berlin ecosystem of companies so that students basically can choose their own problems working on them and we the professors are more acting like mentors or consultants to the students and helping them learn along the way and what I would like to do in the next few minutes is to introduce you to some of the work I also did in the past and I'm currently working on one example is called the target gallery you can also open this in a browser and this is an example for an analysis of token transfers on block chains and you can see visualization of about thousand different token networks in which we can observe different transactional patterns where tokens are being transferred between different addresses some of these tokens are being traded on major exchanges and by just browsing through this list you can already just by looking at these patterns guess that tokens different tokens are being used in different ways somehow we can see some I mean obvious patterns like this this is probably a failed airdrop so not a lot of activity here we can see some fractal patterns down here they typically come with burning token somehow we can see some quite obvious structures maybe over here what we have one big exchange involved and we have a couple of bigger hub-and-spoke patterns but there are also some patterns that can't really be explained so far so if you're interested and want to learn more about this go to token gallery dotnet and you can yeah basically find find more at this website now I just wanted to point out that when it comes to analyzing token networks nowadays that it is first of all fascinating I mean this is very nice it's very colorful but also if we went more deeply into the network and the graph theory behind we would find that many of these structures very new we haven't seen them before if you do social network analysis if you look into communication networks if you look into transportation networks the structures in these graphs are different and these are new patterns that we can now see emerging from the usage of tokens on block chains and no matter whether this is about for example a token that is used to play poker online or someone deploying a test smart contract on the blockchain or again a failed airdrop over here these are all new patterns and that is from a research perspective of course fascinating to analyze and to observe first of all but it is also interesting maybe for future applications to look into how tokens are actually being used and what we can learn from these patterns yeah there are many of these visualizations available just feel free to go there and look look around and the second topic I would like to very briefly mention is also the topic of blockchain governance and here you can see a recent visualization where atom tokens on the cosmos blockchain are being delegated by the token holders to validators so that these validators can - it can take the delegated tokens and then get elected to create new blocks on the blockchain and by just looking at this again this is just a high-level visualization but we can first of all apologize for the low resolution is I think better if you go online later on but you can already see that in time there are some burst events where massive read allegation of tokens happen at some point in time in indicated by blue lines now probably this was some real-world event happening many people reconsider the delegations and this is of course also interesting if you ask who's actually in charge who is actually in control of a blockchain if you look into token delegations read allegations proxy votes and the ultimate question who is controlling the blockchain so these are questions we are we are currently dealing with we are we are looking at to analyzing these networks and basically here today to say that you are welcome to join this discussion if you're interested in these topics and the last thing I would like to briefly mention is that there is also a conference upcoming which I'm one of the organizers it's I Triple E adepts it's going to take place in April in Oxford UK next year it's a second edition of conference on decentralized application and the submission deadline is the end of this month so if you have something some ongoing work you would like to submit you're very welcome and hopefully see you in Oxford these are my coordinates and feel free to contact me if you like I'm also be around only today unfortunately not tomorrow and now I'm open for a couple of questions thank you very much [Applause] okay yeah have you tried to apply any like you're like token garments model within a quad University within within quad Berlin well one of the ideas is now to build some environments and some structures at code first of all to make students able to quickly learn about these concepts but we're also thinking currently about what kind of processes we could possibly integrate and enrich we are by means of DLTS to the best of my knowledge and no decision has been made yet but we are actively thinking about it thank you do you know that they had ropes failed because there was no usage anymore at some point in time so basically usage was was dead you