Misang’s First EthDenver Experience
Denver, Colorado, USA
Ok, first of all, my journey to EthDenver was so special in many ways. It was my semi-first US trip, and the first time to Denver. I arrived on Valentine’s day. (a big 💋 to my husband for supporting me!) Right after check-in, I tried to buy a can of beer at 7eleven nearby to satisfy myself after a 15 hours trip, but they refused to sell it as my (foreign) passport or driver’s license was not something they could scan! (Alright, thank you USA, I can pass for 21 now?) I bought a Pepsi instead, came back to the hotel room, and turned on the TV, and there I saw Crypto.com’s Superbowl ad. This was a ‘wow, I am in the USA!’ moment.
Why Am I Here?
I came to Denver alone representing Confio, the makers of CosmWasm. I actually enjoyed it, almost as much as I would have enjoyed the company of the team members.
Here are my main goals for this Denver trip;
- Get more awareness of CosmWasm in the Ethereum ecosystem
- Pull in developers to the world of CosmWasm
- Meet people and network for potential partnerships, and solidify existing ones
- Learn about the Ethereum ecosystem (DAO, DeFi, NFT…)
- Last but not least, enjoy EthDenver
And I think I nailed all the above!
EthDenver 2022 sketch
I can’t compare with the previous EthDenver as this is my first one, but people said there are way too many people this year thanks to(or because of?) the bull market. More than 12,000 people from 100 countries attended, and there were long lines everywhere; for the registration, food trucks, entering the main venue, Sports Castle…
No wonder some people said, “Oh, how I wish bear market is here!” and I guess Vitalik also aligns with this idea.
On the bright side, it shows how much fever there was. There was a lot of attention on many different projects on DeFi, NFT, ReFi of diverse layer one and two blockchains.
Developer-focused, Developer-first approach
Joseph Lubin’s fire side chat shows how strong a developer-centered community has Ethereum, and they are proud of it as it is in many ways different from those of Bitcoin. Developers get the privilege to enter the Sports Castle first, meanwhile, non-developers have to wait in a long queue. Next time I might have to register myself as a developer! Well, after all, I develop something, business! 😉
Politicians
I was impressed by the Colorado governor’s speech, how crypto-friendly a politician could be, that he aims for Colorado to be the first state to pay taxes in crypto. The same ideas are shared with Wyoming and Arizona. Interesting that a state like Miami focuses on Bitcoin though. Different cryptocurrency and layer one protocol-friendly policy for different states? 🐣
Social Goods and Activism
I could eye-witness how a thought leader like Vitalik cares about public goods, talking about quadratic funding and DAOs to make a better world. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is happening at the time of writing, and he shows how exactly DAO can act and how cryptocurrency can be useful at a time like this.
Women in Blockchain
I got to learn that Colorado was the first state in the US to enact women’s suffrage. In this light, no wonder we found some relevant events there.
Also, during the open mic time with Vitalik, there was a question on not enough female presence in the blockchain ecosystem, and he answered any woman should do whatever they feel like doing.
“Yes, we are on the EVM-compatible chain.” “You too, Brutus?”
I met a lot of people related to EVM-compatible chains in Denver whether it is layer one or two; such as Avalanche, BSC, Fantom, Harmony, Moonbeam, Optimism, Polygon, and many more. And now, Algorand declared to be one of them, incentivizing developers for Ethereum compatibility.
This gives a lot to think about as we, Confio, are the makers of CosmWasm, and WebAssembly, WASM is different from EVM.
EVM vs WASM:
Cosmos is the future, but now is Ethereum?
No doubt, Ethereum is the king, and EVM is on hundred of EVM-compatible chains.
However, we see Cosmos as the only viable blockchain ecosystem beyond Ethereum. Cosmos is consist of more than 30 sovereign blockchains, all connected with IBC(Inter-Blockchain Communication).
3 of the top 10 chains on DeFi llama are Cosmos-SDK based blockchain with IBC; Terra, Cronos and Osmosis. Terra is using CosmWasm, and Cronos(Crypto.org) and Osmosis are adding it soon.
Cosmos is also a blue ocean when Ethereum is red, especially for the builders of blockchain and dApps.
Being a latecomer, we learned the lessons from Solidity/EVM and we built CosmWasm, the smart contract engine which works faster, is cheaper, and with better security. You can find the technical details of why CosmWasm is better than Solidity/EVM here, in the nice article written by Ethan Frey, the father of CosmWasm.
Wasm is the future, but now is EVM?
People say that Rust has such a high entry barrier and Solidity is so easy to learn, mainly because of the similarity of language, Solidity with Javascript. But is it really that difficult to write smart contracts with CosmWasm? Not all developers start with JavaScript, and not all developers would feel the same way. Also, I met some developers in Denver, who told me Rust is not that hard and shared their experiences how they learned it.
We will have to explore more about this as this is out of the scope of this article, but I am starting to wonder whether this is an ‘over hyped’ myth. (Then maybe probably nothing…..I am not tech-minded.)
Awesome CosmWasm
One thing for sure is that more and more chains are integrating CosmWasm, and there are reasons for that.
Do you know how many times I heard “WOW! CosmWasm! Cosmos!” here in EthDenver? 3 times. Which I completely didn’t expect to experience at an Ethereum event, and made me pleasantly surprised.
My Takeaways
- People talk about Cosmos here. I verified the awareness of Cosmos and CosmWasm in the Ethereum community.
- Agism is severe. MakerDAO is called boomer DeFi.😆If you are 30, you feel already old in this crypto world!
- Embrace Hedonism. You gotta enjoy what you are doing.
- Crypto people love grouping, labeling. Always there are blah blah tribes, blah blah maxi, siloes here and there. Two people actually called me a ‘Cosmos-maxi’, but I don’t want to limit myself there. I just believe in a multi-chain future.
- We gotta work more on promoting CosmWasm and InterWasm DAO, embracing more chains to be the members of it, and pulling off more developers to build dev toolings, to create documentations and dApps.
- As more and more chains integrate CosmWasm, we get more requests for technical consulting and auditing, as well as connections to different partner chains through us.
- Now is the time for Confio to further CosmWasm and work with our partners to build bigger and better.
It was physically and mentally tiring, to attend this big event for a whole week alone for sure. I felt sick on the day of the snowstorm but luckily recovered soon. Even though it was challenging, I really enjoyed meeting people and networking. I can proudly say I learned a lot from every one of them. Appreciate all the people who have met me and shared their opinion and knowledge, really looking forward to keeping this friendship forward!
