3 Takeaways from The 3rd Ethereum Community Conference

Bunch of limes are on their way back from Paris where EthCC had just taken place – one of the biggest Ethereum conferences in Europe. Neither the bad weather nor the global virus panic stopped the brightest minds in the Ethereum space to get together once again, sharing knowledge brainstorming and having a good time pushing the technology further.

Below are my main takeaways after spending 4 days in the city of love, giving a keynote on bonding curves and revenue-generating decentralized organizations on day 2 of the conference

DeFi is here to stay

DeFi (Decentralized Finance) was all the rage in 2019 and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. While open finance may be a better term, there are tons of quality investment products out there.

With an upgraded DAI stablecoin, serving as the big building block behind the movement, the Ethereum ecosystem is now referred to as money legos.

The space definitely seems more mature than the crazy days of speculations couple of years ago, offering sustainable investment returns more attractive than what you’ll get at your local bank.

DAOs are moving towards sustainability and revenue generation

While most DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are still pretty much a cypherpunk experiment, the community has realised that those experiments need sustainable funding models. While the first wave of big DAOs out there like Moloch and MetaCartel have done great “charity” work pooling funds together to support dApps (for more info on dApps click here) and developer tools, DAO enthusiasts are now looking to make those organizations sustainable in the long run through implementing an actual business model (who would’ve thought, right?).

A movement in that direction is the transition towards decentralized investment funds – a prime example of a brilliant continuous organizations use case (for more info on bonding-curve enabled continuous organizations click here).

The community is finally transitioning from building cool stuff to building valuable products

For a long time, two of the main hurdles in the way of bigger blockchain (and Ethereum) adoption have been scalability issues and UX. We’ve made quite a lot of progress over the last year or so on both. What was missing however was actually building stuff for people outside of our beloved Web3 space. That’s no longer the case.

As a sign of maturity, we are seeing teams building great banking SaaS platforms (e.g. Multis), beautiful, secure and user-friendly wallets (e.g. Argent, Pillar and Gnosis for companies), and quality NFT-powered entertainment, all abstracting the complexity of the Web3 infrastructure. The main driver behind all of this has been focusing on adding value to enterprises. There was a whole track dedicated to that at EthCC 3 – something usually missing at Ethereum conferences.

Going deeper into 2020, I am positive for the community overall, currently in a transition towards sustainability. As the blockchain (and Ethereum) space matures, there’ll be more actual products popping up, driving investments into the space.

Aur revoir, Paris. We had a great time!