Vitalik with the Governors of Wyoming and Colorado at ETHDenver

Why I’m Bullish On ETH

I’ve been to dozens of crypto conference over the last three years. The last conference I was at that changed my world view was The Asia Blockchain Summit, in July last year, when I experienced crypto Asia for the first time. Like that trip, ETHDenver was a revelation. Below are the three reasons I’m now bullish on ETH.

1. The Ethereum Community Has Tipped and the World Has No Idea

I’m all about community. I think it’s the defining characteristic of crypto. If we don’t get community right (i.e. governance & consensus, token economics …), the majority of the value created by crypto tech (blockchain, cryptocurrency, smart contracts, zero knowledge proof…) will go to FAMGA:

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I was so excited to experience EthDenver. I had been to the Ethereal Summit in Tel Aviv last year, and it was great. But the audience there was largely business people, not developers. While ETHDenver had plenty of business people, the majority of the attendees were developers. And the business people who were there we’re simply deeper in to the community then the Ethereal Summit crew.

To begin with, the scale of the ETHDenver venue (“six” floors) and the sheer number of attendees at the event were impressive. So let’s start with a nod to John Paller for organizing such an awesome event (and his talk on Opolis, his employee commons, was also super impressive).

But the scale of a community is only interesting if the community members are engaged. And while I’d prefer to have metrics to put engagement in to context, at this time, my gauge of engagement was simply an overpowering visceral feeling that something very special was happening.

Floor after Floor Of Engaged Developers

The bottom line is that there is no community in crypto that has anywhere near the scale or engagement that is powering Ethereum. A funny meme that appeared post ETHDenver captured it well:

In December, First Round published it’s “ “State of The Startup 2019”, in which they declared that “Community Is The New Moat”. I couldn’t agree more. And that’s why I believe, that, day-by-day, it is increasingly difficult for any new or emerging crypto project to compete against Ethereum given its community. While I’m not the first person to appreciate the Ethereum community, I’m pretty sure I’m pretty early to the party. I’m confident the community will continue to flourish and increasingly blow our minds with innovation. In which case, it seems to follow, that the price of Ethereum is on an inexorable march higher.

2. DAOs Are A Thing, And They’re Poised To Ramp Dramatically

While Aragon was the earliest DAO ecosystem, launched, in Feb. 2017, Aragon didn’t seem to have much of a presence at ETHDenver. But DAOstack and MolochDAO, the two other significant DAO ecosystems, both seemed ubiquitous at ETHDenver.

In Denver, the DAOstack ecosystem included:

1. DAOfest — their mission is to advance the technology and adoption of decentralized governance globally, through real people interacting in real places. A DAOfest can be a smaller Meetup (like DAOfest NYC) or am all day event, like the one they threw the day before ETHDenver at the same venue.
2. dHack — which runs decentralized hackathons, inclduing the one at ETHDenver, such that hackathon judging will no longer be the domain of the elite few.
3. dORg — a blockchain development cooperative that organized itself such that its the first legally established DAO under United States law.

The MolochDAO ecosystem in Denver included:

1. MetaCartel — a rapidly growing ecosystem of creators and operators funding and building decentralized applications
2. DAOhaus — helps people discover existing DAOs or build new ones.
3. MetaFactory — decentralizing the means of production by leveraging complex game theory & bonding curves to incentivize the purchase of high end apparel

It’s still early days for DAOs, but the progress is accelerating dramatically. I got so excited, I even started my own DAO, PropaganDao. More to follow.

3. Innovation In DeFi Is Going To Blow Peoples Minds

MetaCartel has already given grants to various innovative DeFi projects including DeFiZap (making DeFi easy to use) and Rocket (loans backed by NFTs).

Many of the most interesting hackathon projects were DeFi including:

1. Upside DAI — provides up to 20x leverage on DAI while remaining capital efficient with 100% collateralization.
2. ShopiFi — allows e-commerce solutions to funnel USD purchases into DeFi protocols like Compound or PoolTogether via a credit card or other payment systems like Apple Pay.
3. OhMyDeFi —is a tool to address crypto volatility via a suite of options represented as ERC20 tokens. enabling traders to hedge against future volatility on any asset they’d like to hedge against.

I couldn’t be more excited about Ethereum, DAOs, and DeFi. They’re going o make the world a better place! And I can’t wait for ETHDenver 2021!

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