Consensus 2019: The Takeaways

With ticket prices for Consensus 2019 being $2,000 and pockets still empty from 2018, many internationals decided to not attend New York this week. I just wanted to give a quick summary post trying to amalgamate opinions on some key talking areas, for anyone who missed it (Twitter has plenty of gossip, if that’s your bag). These are not my own opinions.

On Blockchain Adoption

This is the reason I get out of bed every morning, so here’s what happened on the ground.

• Big enterprise software companies are making waves. IBM, Microsoft, Quorum, Consensys, Enterprise Ethereum, amongst others were seen in force and had the busiest conference booths.
• Plenty of Proofs-of-Concept, but 2019 should start to see more implementations as all major corporates look to internally hire blockchain specialists.
• Some great launches of Flexa for real payments in major retailers and plenty of DApps and wallets with great UX and use cases beyond tokenized cats.
• Everybody seemed to really believe adoption was on the horizon and that regulators have now realized they have to engage.
• Spoke with many traditional investors who wanted to enter the space, not necessarily just betting on tokens.
• The whole market is maturing from investors to projects to corporates.

On Investing

An overall summary from speaking with many crypto VCs and other investors

• IEOs now not favorable for presale investors
• Exchanges too powerful and presale investors don’t like that
• Money still being raised by new funds to invest in the space
• Investors looking for value, but also thinking very much about liquidity
• The investment climate is still very tough for new projects. Reasons:
• Path to liquidity less clear
• Tokens often locked for a year or years
• Many equity models have unclear fundamentals
• Investors still feeling the burn from 2018 and many tokens still locked
• Great projects will still get funding
• Token economics and logical path to adoption are key in 2019
• Many investors haven’t invested yet this year in new projects, some have

On STOs

• Unclear regulation is blocking real-world investors from taking part
• STO Bullrun looking unlikely for 2019
• Many investors don’t think the best use cases for STOs have been dreamt up yet
• The whole STO market itself may look nothing like the crypto space. Dominated by large firms more like the IPO space.
• Projects need investors, but the issue right now is returns are not high enough for crypto investors and regulatory risk too great for many traditional investors.
• Overall a lot less talk about STOs than 6 months ago (at least the conversations I had)
• Many people think that this will happen, but might take longer and look different to what we originally thought.

On Ethereum

• Shoutouts at Ethereal Summit calling for DeFi to be the way forward for Ethereum.
• Many different DeFi projects circulating the conferences and as we know, a strong trend.
• Some people worried ETH 2.0 might be too slow to arrive and still not be the fix
• Joe Lubin did a great ‘Visionary’ speech at Ethereal talking about a blockchain world in 2047.
• Ethereum ecosystem is leagues ahead of the rest (looks different to the Bitcoin one).

On the Market

The meme came back to life this year. Consensus 2019 saw a lot of green movements on the market.

• Everybody was surprised with just how far the market could go.
• Even large OTC players seemed surprised by how far BTC moved in such little time.
• The sentiment was definitely positive

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