Because the seventh annual ETHDenver drew to a end on Sunday, reflecting on who got right here and presented provides a hint at the future of Ethereum and crypto on the total. The festival announced it had extra than 20,000 attendees this yr, a extra than 33% accomplish bigger from last yr’s 15,000 unfamiliar traffic. Among them dangle been founders and developers of layer 2 and non-Ethereum initiatives as well to members of the U.S. authorities and a presidential candidate.

the attendees and presenters of ETHDenver 2024, right here are three takeaways about the future of Ethereum and crypto in long-established.

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Takeaway #1: Horizontal May maybe maybe additionally neutral Be the Acknowledge to Ethereum’s Scalability Field

Ethereum has prolonged had a scalability plight. When the number of transactions and users increases considerably on Ethereum, the blockchain community suffers in efficiency, marked by excessive ranges of gasoline prices. Layer two (L2)  rollups, which dangle been endorsed by the blockchain’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin since Oct. 2020, are considered because the reply to the scalability plight.

The number of L2s has considerably grown in the previous couple of years as data analytics online page L2Beat reveals that there are 44 L2 initiatives for the time being.

No subject the proliferation of scalability solutions in the accomplish of L2s, “we are beginning to peek plenty of boundaries on the efficiency of L2… notably lately with Inscriptions,” Kenny Li, co-founding father of L2 Manta, acknowledged to Unchained in an interview. For instance, Arbitrum suffered an outage in Dec. 2023 on account of a surge in inscriptions.

Li acknowledged, “The scalability plight isn’t solved at all, namely when we’ve talked about these killer apps, these 1 billion users… These sorts of L2s are not going so that you just’ll want to maybe lend a hand 1 million vigorous users, and so now the seek data from is: what will we live subsequent?”

Whereas L2s offer sooner and more cost effective transactions than the base layer of Ethereum, they possess from fragmentation. An application on one L2 can’t effectively focus on with the model of itself on a various chain, can’t half liquidity, nor procure admission to the the same consumer base, in accordance with Li.

Polygon co-founder Brendan Farmer famed a identical instruct. “If we predict about the most modern command of crypto, we’re restricted by infrastructure, and so we predict about that in justify to grab latent build a query to that we reflect exists, we’ve to remove the scaling boundaries.”

For both Manta’s Li and Polygon’s Farmer, how the crypto home progresses forward with popular adoption is by scheme of “horizontal scalability.”

“We’re at some extent now where we are in a position to cure it, [scalability], in the sense of it’s not going to be by scheme of one singular L2, or L3 even. It’s going to be by scheme of horizontal scalability,” Li indicated. “In command of correct having the [transactions per second] of one L2, you’ll want to also rob excellent thing about the TPS of the total various L2s which could be existing as of late that scheme applications after they want to scale their consumer base, they’ll look for all over all these L2s and declare, ‘Okay this one’s obtained the TPS I need for the time being and open running compute by scheme of that… I reflect that’s very comparable to a actually tried and factual model, which is cloud computing.”

Eradicating boundaries on infrastructure, in accordance with Farmer, is the flexibility to scale horizontally by scheme of Polygon’s aggregation layer. “The formula we predict about the agg layer is, it’s this half of shared infrastructure that provides unified liquidity and composability and a consumer base that’s accessible to any chain and there’s no requirement to affix the agg layer.”

The purpose of passion on horizontal scalability has offered a sense of optimism for Farmer. “That is the foremost time where it’s felt love there are real solutions to infrastructure concerns which dangle been facing us for a actually prolonged time. We are in a position to peek in the distance make an web scale crypto ecosystem that isn’t restricted by most of the infrastructure bottlenecks that we confronted in the previous,” Farmer acknowledged.

Takeaway #2: Ecosystems Merging

ETHDenver, as its name suggests, has historically been the house of Ethereum fans, contributors, and developers, and but the annual community gathering has attracted folks and communities from various blockchain networks, notably Solana and Bitcoin, demonstrating the rising overlap between the a form of sub ecosystems internal the crypto home.

Regarded as one of many talks on the mainstage became about how initiatives such as Eclipse, Neon, Monad, and Polygon dangle been merging Solana and Ethereum together. Regarded as one of many audio system, Polygon guide Ajit Tripathi, praised both Ethereum’s culture of study and Solana’s product first, engineering culture, saying “these two issues want to diagram together.”

Sukanya Parashar, senior integration engineer for Neon EVM, which is in preserving with Solana, acknowledged on stage, “We wanted one thing to make for the Ethereum community so that they with out concerns can deploy their existing apps on Solana and procure Solana’s advantages of excessive transaction elope, low gasoline prices and naturally parallel execution.”

Cosmos, but any other blockchain community, is additionally seeing an overlap with the Ethereum community. “We’re headed against an industry where the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystem are slowly converging… For instance, there are rollups on Ethereum appropriate now which could be secured by Celestia DA,” acknowledged Avril Dutheil, a core contributor of Cosmos-based completely chain Neutron, in an interview with Unchained.

Celestia, as a conventional Cosmos-SDK based completely blockchain that is well-known for its data availability companies, is “an example of Cosmos in actual fact securing Ethereum,” Dutheil added.

Similarly to those in the Solana and Cosmos ecosystem, Bitcoiners are discovering out from the experiments going down on Ethereum. In actuality, “there’s an wonderful opportunity to learn from all the pieces that has already came about in Ethereum,” Muneeb Ali, the co-creator of layer 2 Bitcoin community Stacks, acknowledged in a focus on known as, “Like Fun Staking Turing Incomplete: What Bitcoin Builders Borrowed From Ethereum.”

David Tse, co-founding father of BabylonChain and professor at Stanford University, acknowledged in the the same focus on that 1,200 of us confirmed up to a Bitcoin tournament at ETHDenver, highlighting the synergy between Bitcoiners and Ethereum contributors.

“The tournament became to showcase that there are synergies between Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos, and various ecosystems… Maximalism isn’t good, and I reflect whereas you happen to work together, we are in a position to accomplish phenomenal bigger issues and proper grow the half,” acknowledged co-panelist Alexei Zamyatin, co-founding father of BOB, a hybrid L2 between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Takeaway #3: Politicians Peek the Importance of Crypto

The US federal authorities has not been pleasant against crypto, but three authorities officials and candidates got right here to ETHDenver to focus on how they hope to alternate the relationship.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, local congressional representative Brittany Petterson (D-CO), and neutral presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., each spoke on the mainstage.

Peirce lamented the inability of regulatory clarity from the company she for the time being serves, the U.S. Securities and Commerce Commission, saying, “Whenever you happen to if reality be told favor to form the depraved behavior from the correct behavior, having rules which could be clear to of us who favor to dangle a look at them is a considerably better ability.”

When CoinDesk’s Jennifer Sanasie asked Petterson about how to pause American crypto startups from leaving the U.S. and establishing in areas with extra regulatory clarity, Petterson acknowledged that the flight of investments — crypto or not — is a peril of hers in long-established.

“Just correct-attempting now, it’s in seek data from whether or not or not we can also live our job and pay our payments as america of The United States, whereas you happen to can also even place confidence in that’s how depraved it’s gotten at the federal level. And so our lack of ability to govern, our lack of ability to administer and alternate with altering cases as speedily as technology is innovating and [as] our economy is innovating, that is an gigantic plight for our prolonged-timeframe success as a nation,” Pettersen acknowledged on ETHDenver’s foremost stage.

Kennedy Jr. emphasized his alignment with the crypto community, saying how he became going to “live the war against all cryptocurrencies,” in his press conference at ETHDenver.

“We favor the infrastructure for transactional freedom in this nation so that of us can express Bitcoin and they actually feel happy… There’s 1,000,000 ways to live that and I must detect all the pieces,” he acknowledged. The political discussions at ETHDenver boil correct down to the prominent and rising intersection between the crypto industry and the U.S. authorities.