Jeff Cangialosi

My first time attending ETHDenver was March 2023. This was post Terra-Luna and a couple months after the FTX bombshell. Crypto was a sad, dark place. As a third-timer at ETHDenver, I am far from a veteran, but I at least have the hang of this conference now and can more easily pick out the themes and general sentiment.

This year, I tried to spend time at events and with people I don’t normally bump into regularly on the New York crypto scene. Of course, I still ended up seeing into New Yorkers everywhere. The running joke being that we all see each other once or twice a year in locations that are not New York.

With that said, I attended DePIN Day for the first time. For those unfamiliar with DePIN (“Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network”), it is a sub-segment of the industry focused on bringing blockchain technology to physical infrastructure. While the definition is still a bit contested, you see a wide range of projects in the DePIN space, everything from decentralized compute to solar, cellular networks, AI services, and gaming. I am planning to write a whole other detailed post on DePIN, but at a high level, I would say it is the most exciting area in the industry. The use cases are tangible for every day consumers and businesses, and in most cases, the blockchain or crypto elements are abstracted away from the end user. There is real revenue being generated by the projects in this space, and the potential for growth is massive. Two of my favorite talks of the entire ETHDenver week were by David Vorick from Glow and the fireside chat between Tom Trowbridge from Fluency and Guy Wuollet from a16z Crypto.

I also spent time at Solana Snapshot, an event focused on the latest technical developments in the Solana ecosystem. As someone who has been more deeply embedded in the Ethereum world the last several years, it has been great to meet more teams on Solana and learn about the technical nuances of the chain. It made me realize I need to get smarter on the MEV structure for Solana and how the chain is thinking about block space longer term.

The third event I would highlight from the week was Bitwave’s B2B payments event co-sponsored with PayPal and Google. They fact that PayPal and Google are co-sponsoring an event at a crypto conference is already a major win and a take-away in an of itself. This definitely was not the case two years ago. Google is also accepting crypto payments! And they are doing real volume with payments in the tens of millions of dollars. That’s great validation for the space, and it also shows you the potential for crypto payments for enterprises. It’s not controversial at this point, but it is clear to me that crypto payment adoption starts with enterprises, not consumers. More and more people will start using a stable coin to buy coffee, but first, it’s going to be enterprises using stablecoins for really large payments. The economics and speed of using crypto rails are a huge value add in those instances.

It was a great couple of days in Denver. One of these years, I will make some time to get some skiing in! Until next year.