We're back from an intense, informative and ultimately productive Blockchain week in New York, and I am going to dedicate today's daily in briefly capturing what are some of the learnings I took away from it. Here we go:
Ethereal Summit
The Ethereum community is as strong as ever. There is a certain kind of kool-aid being passed around, which although I personally might find a little disconcerting, I recognize that given that this is a global decentralized community we are talking about, it's a really important glue for the community. There are a few key takeaways from the 2-day conference that I think are worth focusing on; (i) Enterprise is building on Ethereum - Microsoft, VMware, Ernst and Young, are all heavily involved with building PoC's on the Ethereum blockchain - how long until those PoC's become fully fledged products?; (ii) much of the middleware is here - the Ethereum ecosystem is much further ahead than any other blockchain project in providing ample tooling for dapp developers to use; (iii) Gitcoin is becoming a prime distribution platform for middleware, especially for the Ethereum ecosystem - though indirectly.
What is perhaps most striking, however, is that this "flamboyant" gathering took place amidst rumours of Consensys seeking $200M in external funding. In other words,
while many outside the Ethereum community and Consensys seem to believe that they are in trouble, Consensys itself appears strong in its foothold.
Highlight: I paid for Souvlaki with crypto. 2 of my favourite things in the world combined!
Token Summit
This one covered a wide range of current "hot topics" in cryptoland - ranging from regulation to use cases, and from grassroots development and Ethereum community drama to go-to-market for dapps. On the regulation front, the overview is that positive steps are being taken, thought at a pace that is slower than many would prefer. Playing by the rules is expensive (Blockstack apparently spent $2M in funding their Reg A+ offering), and the SEC does not show any willingness to expedite the process of firming up regulations around crypto.
Anecdotally, some of the other most interesting notes I took from Token Summit were that (i) mainstream developers are coming in the next 12 months - Nick Grossman from USV, (ii) STOs are a long process that will likely not yield materially in the next 2-3 years, but in that respect it appears that tokenizing debt is more interesting than tokenizing equity - Josh Stein from Harbor, (iii) marketing seems to almost be a forbidden word among all builders, who seem to be firmly set on "build it and they will come" - an observation echoed by many audience members fairly vocally and defended against by the panelists - industry insiders and that (iv) WASM is a big deal as apart from the huge performance gains, it can compile all popular programming languages AND is maintained by behemoths such as Microsoft and Google. Incidentaly Ethereum 2.0 is swapping the EVM from WASM - though Polkadot will launch first. Finally, speaking of Ethereum, (v) it appears that a lot of the creative funding efforts (e.g. Moloch DAO) the community came up with when ETH was lingering at $100, have been put on hold due to - well - their runway having effectively doubled.
Highlight: Fred Wilson, half jokingly posting up a "bounty" for interested parties to create a DAO that would collect funds to short zombie projects, that hackers affiliated with the DAO would then proceed to attack.
Best of the rest
The rest was a flurry of meetings, run-ins and meetups - perhaps too dense to be granular, so I'll stay on the high level. Many echoed that the energy had shifted from "chasing a quick buck" to "higher quality, long term focus" - indeed, scammy ICOs were nowhere to be found and the mainstays of the scene have shown demonstrable progress. There is a lot to be excited about, with several important Mainnets coming online in 2019.
Also, while the NFT hype train has somewhat ran out of steam, there is real building behind the scenes.
The gaming community is VERY excited about what's coming, but what they are citing is lack of agreed-upon standards that results into a lot of doublework on infrastructure - although a little bit of digging might reveal poor diligence in the available solutions. Interoperability in gaming environments is still something that excites a lot of people, but it appears that it is going to be a grassroots movement first.
