Insights from ETHDenver 2023: What will be the engine driving the next round of bull market?

From February 24th to March 5th, 2023, ETHDenver 2023 will be held in Denver, USA, which is known as the largest and longest-lasting ETH event in the world. The event is mainly divided into two parts. From February 24th to March 1st is "BUIDLingWeek", open source activities and gatherings will be held on site; from March 2nd to March 5th is "BUIDLingathon+Festival", everyone will share and share Witness the future of blockchain innovation.

According to the interviewees who participated in the meeting, nearly 40,000 people attended the event in Denver. Many top project teams in the Ethereum ecosystem arrived at the scene. The zkDAY, Github activities, and Coinbase activities in the peripheral meetings were more popular. During the guest speech,"Layer 2 Limitations"、"Account Abstraction and ERC-4337 Wallets"、"ETH Struggles on Testnets: Scarcity, Tradable Goods, or Public Good"、"How to stop a wallet from collecting personal data"and other topics have aroused more discussions.

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New trends in ETHDenver 2023: more people, developers-oriented, interlacing and integration of East and West

With 25,000 people attending ETHDenver this year, compared to 15,000 last year, an estimated 40,000 will flock to Denver for Crypto-related events, including women in their 50s and teens. Child. There were a lot of BuidLers participating in the event, and in the end, more than 300 projects were released. Participants generally said that this is a developer-oriented event, mainly for in-depth technical discussions.

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Discussions focus on infrastructure, with ZK at the fore

Among various projects such as infrastructure, DeFi, NFT, GameFi, and metaverse, the interviewees said that everyone is more concerned about infrastructure in this event. DeFi and NFT are more about tools and public products, without too much emphasis on the role of tokens. GameFi mainly focuses on full-chain games, while domestic attention to Metaverse is rarely discussed.

The infrastructure narrative has reached a phased peak in the past year, innovative topics are stagnant, and there are many entrepreneurs around the hot infrastructure topic Buidle. It is foreseeable that no matter from the perspective of industry development, narrative or talent overflow, the narrative center will gradually shift to the direction of applications and scenarios.

It is worth mentioning that ZK became the most concerned topic of this Denver conference. Vitor Ji, co-founder of Manta Network, said that ZK occupies a dominant position in the infrastructure. It has more solutions, better performance, and its value in applications is gradually emerging. The combination of ZK and modularization is also a important part. zkDAY co-hosted by Manta Network and investment institution Polychain Capital is also one of the most popular side conferences.

Wei Wei, senior business development manager of OKX Web3 Wallet, believes that after the rapid development of the ZK system in the past year, the circle culture has gradually become clear, and it has been organized and planned. It is very good at forming a developer community. There are many Chinese projects and developers in the ZK world. are highly recognized on the international stage. The three brothers Manta Network, Scroll, and Aleo, with their patron Polychain, continue to attract excellent new members, such as the ZK compiler Nil and the programmable ZK oracle machine HyperOracle that shined in the primary market last year.

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Impressive projects: ZK, LST, DeFi+ChatGPT

ZK-based Scroll announced on March 6 that it had completed a financing of US$83 million at a valuation of US$1.8 billion. In addition to almost reaching a consensus that they are optimistic about ZK projects, the interviewees said that at the Devner meeting, LST (liquidity staking tokens, mainstream liquidity staking projects are working together to educate users, and want to avoid the title of derivative in LSD), ChatGPT The related projects are also impressive.

Another dimension said that under the background of the upgrade of Ethereum Shanghai, LST projects also have a good narrative. The Shared Security Summit of this meeting mainly discussed the Ethereum security layer, mainly for staking and resttaking. Various Liquidity staking project parties have arrived on the scene, such as Lido, Eigen Layer, Rocket Finance, and Stader.

Arbitrum's operational capabilities also impress another dimension. Not only the online TVL and user growth, but also the star-making ability of the project has begun to form a brand, attracting the influx of application layer projects such as blockchain games, and the offline operational capabilities have also improved a lot . They organized a series of activities, from the on-site booth sponsorship, to the sharing of Arbitrum's technology and vision by several founders, to the restaurant dinner party directly facing the community and project parties, and every link from top to bottom was precise hit, and did a good job of community dissemination.

Duan Shao, the open source community manager of Mask Network & Next.ID, gave us some inspiration on new projects. He said that he was impressed by Swappy made with DeFi + ChatGPT and OPOLIS for global digital nomads.

Swappy is one of the 5 winning projects of the last Demo Day of #BuidLathon. The interface is as simple as a Google search input box. When the user types in, for example, "exchange 2 USDC for MATIC", the UI will automatically pop up, and the user can proceed to the next step. This kind of interaction method that only appeared because of ChatGPT, I believe there will be more and more in the future.

OPOLISIt is convenient to pay wages and pay social security and medical insurance to digital nomads. One of its leaders, John Paller, is also the founder of ETH Denver. Spork DAO, the organization behind ETH Denver, is a Co-op (cooperative). Meanwhile, Nathan Schneider, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, is also a proponent of this idea. He shared a Mastodon instance at Web3 Social House (organized by Mask Network)Social.coop, the user must pay to become a member. "If you don't contribute financially and directly use a product for free, you will become a part of this product."

The Engine Driving the Next Bull Market

Regarding the direction they are optimistic about, the incremental market that attracts new users to enter, and the engine of the next round of bull market, the interviewees have different opinions, and generally prefer their own direction.

Vitor Ji, as the co-founder of Manta Network, is more optimistic about ZK and modularization. He believes that ZK is a technology with the same vision as the blockchain, allowing the entire society to have more ownership. Modularization is earlier, but it is the most effective step in reducing costs. In addition, from the perspective of the incremental market, the most effective increment comes from the decentralization of Web2's cash flow business and people's time-consuming business, as well as the tools and technologies that serve these applications.

Another dimension is more optimistic about projects such as LST, Layer 2, ZK, GameFi, developer tools, and one-stop solutions for the decentralized world. The largest effective incremental market last year came from STEPN with 3 million users and a maximum of 1 million daily active users. NFT is also the main scenario for seamlessly accepting new users, such as the NFT cooperation between Polygon and Reddit, allowing 2.5 million people to own wallets and NFT without knowing it. Therefore, he believes that the task of the incremental market will still fall on the shoulders of games and NFTs that can be easily understood and used by Web2 people. The one-stop solution in the decentralized world is also a tool to lower the overall entry barrier of Web3. In this regard, exchanges and wallets may have certain advantages. OKX has always positioned itself as a technology company and a tool provider for web3. OKX Web3 is committed to providing the best user experience for future Web3 and lowering the industry threshold. At present, the self-hosted wallet has been connected to 50 public chains, and has its own Dex, Swap, Bridge, Yield and NFT aggregator.

Yinghao is more optimistic about the three directions of the combination of games, payment and the real world. Games include content, infrastructure, industrial chain upgrades, and cutting-edge narratives. They have the ability to actively acquire users, expand the capacity of NFT assets, and feed back the evolution of infrastructure. The payment direction includes wallet and stable currency payment. The real world includes productization of native Web3 brands, traditional brand Web3 extensions, PoPW, etc.

Duan Shao is optimistic about DID and smart contract wallets. He believes that only by further lowering the threshold for new Web2 users to enter Web3 can the consensus of the entire Crpyto circle be expanded. The engine driving the next round of bull market must be social products, but the infrastructure is not mature enough to support the scale of social networking for the whole people. It may be social networking that came out of a certain vertical field.