ETH Denver 2024

Posted: March 3, 2024

My experience

ETH Denver 2024 is my first ETH conference. In 2022, I have attended my first Web 3 conference DCentral and described my experience here. ETH Denver felt massive, with many vendors, presenters, and developers attending. Denver, CO, at this time of the year, was great, with gorgeous mountains seen on the skyline from almost every point in the city. I have attended speaker sessions, explored the vendor booths, and talked to people. I also attended some side events off the main venue, and they were complimentary to the main experience. Overall, in the two days that I was there, I got the full emersive experience into Web 3 industry and got the idea about its future directions. Below, I summarize the main takeaways. I also included links to speakers and panels that reveal the listed ideas in detail.

Takeaways 

• Embeddeddness. Blockchain industry grew big over the past decade and is here to stay. The presence of VC capital is signaling about the future developments and growth in the sector. The total VC investment in crypto and blockchain startups was $10.6 billion in 2023 (roughly 7.5% of global VC funding). In the words of Dovey Wan, VC pursues the opportunities for making money, and investing in individual developers who upgrade the existing blockchain infrastructure is one of them, e.g., developing NFT standard for Bitcoin blockchain.

• Synergy. AI and blockchain are merging. We will see more projects where these two technologies will combine. This will happen through distributed data storages and processing capacities. Following the panel with Ilya Polosukhin, the idea is to build a fully sovereign fundamental AI models using principles of decentralization and blockchain.

• Culture. Token reward systems will power decentralized communities. The important element of discussion is culture within communities. According to Greg Bresnitz, culture can become a great driver for the adoption of a coin/token. For example, the culture of meritocratic rewards is suggested by the tea.xyz project to support the open-source development of innovative projects that power all tech infrastructure. 

• Diversification. Politically, decentralized blockchain may never become mainstream. Nevertheless, according to Eric Voorhees, the idea is not to replace centralized services, but create another option, altrenative to the traditional payment processors (Visa, Stripe, etc.), data integrators (Google and Amazon, etc.), and computing resources (Microsoft, Amazon, etc.), so that consumer could choose. In addition, based on the panel with Matthew Green, the following idea shines brighter that the individual and regulator have the same objective - preserve privacy, which the cryptography can help. 

• User experience. Making Web 3 UX/UI user-friendly is on a current agenda of blockchain developers. In Francisco Pinto's words, seamless Web 3.0 experience means that customers wouldn't even know they use Web 3. One example of such "seamless" Web 3 experience is in creating single-sign-on with Web 3 wallets. For example, Dynamic.xyz does that - offers the B2B product for integration of wallets with services.