While EthCC does, of course, center around Ethereum, a lot of the conversations I had in Brussels earlier this month, and the takeaways I brought back with me, spanned the entire crypto ecosystem.
With so many smart people occupying one city and so many side events at my disposal, it really was a choose-your-own-adventure for digging into niche interests. I spent a lot of my time talking with fellow attendees about how Ethereum's L2s and other Alt-L1s would respond to Solana's rise, what decentralized AI needs to take off, how to navigate the landscape of endless new chains, and how to prepare for big launches like Berachain and Monad.
Again, these are a few of my takeaways – there were millions of conversations happening at EthCC on other topics! All that said, let’s dive into a few of my takeways from the conference. 👇
Expect Many, Many Chains
A point that came up frequently in conversations involved the exponential increase of new chains this cycle. Many, including myself, expect this to continue, given the profitability of sequencer fees, which are already evident as six of the ten top protocols for generating revenue this past year have been L1s and L2s. While this may prove exhausting to all of us, given that 64 L2s and 18 L3s are live (at least), with 80 more in the pipeline, so this trend will continue.
Helping AI's Data Problem
Another takeaway from ECC revolved around quality data curation and datasets being as important, if not more so, than decentralized GPU networks for decentralized AI and augmenting AI with blockchains. Data labeling has always been of paramount importance when it comes to machine learning. While blockchains provide new data and new ways to collect data, the protocols that harness this ability must be able to organize the data properly to prove useful. The protocols that can do this and create standout datasets via blockchains will prove among the most useful for decentralized AI. While Bittensor, with its subnets focusing on specific data, and Grass, scraping web data to compile quality data sets to sell, Vana, a user-owned data network with a series of data DAOs pooling user-owned Reddit data, dating app data, and Twitter data stood out as targeting niche, privatized datasets.
TON's Rise and Future Scaling
A point that came up around TON in multiple conversations, which I had read about online, revolved around lengthy settlement times. TON uses sharding to achieve a large scale so many transactions can be processed in parallel. A downside of this is that if a transaction needs to ping multiple shards across the network to settle, it can take a while to settle finally. As a result, TON may have a strong need for L2s so applications can batch and submit transactions to the main chain instead of waiting for them to settle. Atlas Protocol is one example. Consequently, another L2 for the network built using the Polygon CDK was announced the same week as the EthCC.
Ecosystem Upside of Big Launches
With Berachain and Monad on the horizon as two of the most anticipated launches this year, it may prove more beneficial to poke around their ecosystems rather than build a bag of their native token. Interesting projects on each chain that warrant more research are Infrared Finance, a liquid staking solution for Berachain, and Kodiak, a concentrated liquidity DEX with a suite of DeFi tools, also on Berachain. On Monad, Magma, a liquid staking protocol for Monad, and Curvance, a liquidity management protocol across EVM chains including Monad, stand out.
With EthCC’s timing hopefully correlating with the local bottom (plz), conversations felt deeply honest and transparent. People were reflecting clearly on existing pain points in Crypto and communicating what was giving them hope and excitement in the coming months.
These are just a few of my takeaways based on the conversations I had in Brussels, but there are plenty of Twitter threads filled with others' takeaways.
EthCC was a blast, but it was also a time for reflection. Not only for why we're all still here, but for what's keeping us bullish on the future.
