In early March 2020, Tara and I presented the collaborative State of Adoption report at the Bitcoin MIT Expo. As Covid-19 was starting to spread fast in the West, we opted for zooming in rather than attending in person - a decision we made only a week before the event. As things unfolded, more than half of the presenters and panelists ended up tele-participating.
Read MoreEthCC impressions and takeaways
Finally back from a week in Paris at EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference) 2019, and as promised I am devoting this section to the key takeaways from the conference and related events. At a very high level, the community interest is strong - the event was attended by over 1000 people, the building continues and Paris appears to be one of the most active hubs for the industry in Europe - it probably helps that central Paris is much smaller than London, Berlin or New York. Without further ado, I give you the key themes and takeaways below;
1) Governance, governance, governance; I think it's no overstatement to say that this was the biggest theme of the week, driven both by the multitude of speakers focusing on DAOs and related concepts, but also by the fact that many key members of the Ethereum community openly acknowledged that governance is a big issue in the community at this stage. It's interesting how the geist sets the stage for a discussion around governance; a lot of the people involved in the research and development aspects of programmatic governance are European and coming hot off a decade of governance woes at the sovereign level. Grexit (almost) in 2015, the looming Brexit, the migrant crisis, the yellow vest movement and the general sluggishness of the EU institutions in various fronts, are all owing to negative governance externalities to a large extent. The promise of permissionless blockchains and governance thereof, in this context, is that they can help generate and sustain independent jurisdictions.
Aragon & the Web 3.0 foundation (Polkadot - who pretty much had a whole track devoted to them) both featured heavily, and the talks revolved around the role software can play in governance, oftentimes getting very granular. If you want to get deeper into the content, is suggest checking out these talks from Julien Beranger, Hudson Jameson, Jorge Izquierdo, Vlad Zamfir and my favourite from Matan Field.
2) Ethereum 2.0 is a bunch of napkin plans put together; the problems that the underlie the general ptrajectory have been documented by this newsletter several times. Given that governance was the main theme, I will choose to focus on this. It would seem that there is no official consensus on whether the current model works - rather opinions differ. It does seem though, that discontentment is taking root in the land of unicorns and cat herders. Rick Dudley's talk was one of the first I caught, and his candidness about how Ethereum's current governance model does not work and does not scale was almost shocking. He also went on to state that Ethereum "is not the world computer (laughs)" and will probably never be it.
"What's the biggest risk to #eth2? A: that it never happens because there are too many vested interests, too much invested and too much at stake in this existing system. People may not want to see it change."
— Lane Rettig (@lrettig) March 6, 2019
3) Tokens are far from dead; in fact experimentation is going to a whole different level. That said, tokens in their 2017 form, are probably dead - at least that's what the ethcc mindshare purported. There is a lot to be excited about on tokens facilitating governance, and powering well designed ecosystems, however. Token bonding curves were the focal point in that context, with @thibauld making a fantastic case for "continuous organizations" (read more here), and Griff Green took from that and expanded on the philosophy of how token ecosystems should be launched (TL;DR - more simulation, more rapid prototyping, more sandboxing before launch, more iterrations).
4) UI/UX is of course a focal point; pretty much that point was reinforced in every talk I sat in for, in one way or another. Argent and Portis both had a strong presence (both wallet related projects), while Pedro Gomes drove a point home when he talked about implementing widely agreed wallet standards in order to drive adoption (this newsletter has talked about the waste of resources that poor co-ordination and/or competition at an early stage amounts to). Going beyond wallets, a couple more interesting approaches that go beyond the interface, but are crucial for the experience, were regarding reducing Mainnet transactions by Craig Williams specifically, and overall on protocol design by Thomas Chataigner. Overall, meaningful steps towards further adoption are being taken (see: Opera browser integrating IPFS and ENS - the Ethereum Name Service that basically allows Ethereum addresses to be represented as human-readable domain names), while the Brave browser has hit 20M downloads, as the BAT network publisher stats are starting to go hockey-stick.
5) STOs are a pipe dream (in the short term); while many of the speakers assumed otherwise (none of them was an STO expert - and to be fair no-one specified timing in their expectations), the majority of the crowd that I interacted with did not seem to expect them to happen materially in the next year. Among those that voiced the opinion were European VCs, Genesis and Circle execs and various developers. While everybody thought that they will happen (and will matter) eventually, no-one knew of anything material being on the rails. This might be a case of "none at all and then all at once".
6) Attracting new devs is table stakes; William Mougayar made a whole talk out of this, but the theme kept arising in different instances. Of course, as it stands, Ethereum is very well positioned to be the first point of entry for devs that want to dabble with the Web 3.0 or Open Finance stacks, as it is the better tooled platform, with the most engaged community. That said, with Polkadot and Substrate launching in less than six months, there is some serious competition on the horizon.
7) Paris is beautiful and VERY liveable; but that you knew already....
Bonus Content: The 3-day conferece was followed up by EthParis - a hackathon with some talks that largely overlapped with the content and speakers of EthCC. While I didn't manage to go, I kept an eye on submissions and outcome and am presenting you with the most interesting projects that came out of it, below:
GoMommy - tokenized ENS marketplace built on 0x (GoDaddy for Ethereum addresses)
12months - Request a DAI loan by collateralizing a car via the 0x protocol and Estonian E-ID system
FiatFriends - send $ and receive ERC-20s via Venmo
QRToken - insert tokens at QR codes (for events etc)
CryptoWedding — marry two NFTs together… and invite other NFTs
Ayyo — ERC721 paywall, price increases in price per tokenID.