Ethereum as a meme coin
It seems that, in general, people were happy with what they saw at Prague’s Devcon iv this year. Most mentioned how impressed they were with the venue, the level of organisation and its sheer scale.
While all of this is true, I left unimpressed by what I saw and, in general, more pessimistic about ETH’s future. In particular, it’s future as a dApp platform (world computer).
To start, the keynote was underwhelming (and bordering on bizarre). If you came to see what is next for ETH you were out of luck. Instead, what you got was 20 minutes of a 38k youtube subscribers ‘song a day guy’ explaining his life story and singing his daily song. When Vitalik did eventually come on stage, rather than offer any meaningful news or progress report, he proceeded to deliver a 10 minute ETH history lesson.
The only real news was that they are renaming ETH 2.0 back to Serenity. No grand vision. No roadmap .And most importantly, still no deadlines.
The rest of the conference was better with many interesting talks. Yet, just as I was starting to feel better about Devcon I realised my favourite parts had very little to do with Ethereum.
Since ETH became a synonym for crypto last year (once the BTC community started being all about guns and meat) they have attracted a lot of smart people. Those people were there at the conference, presenting the projects they are working on. However, most of these projects, if they become successful, will do very little to increase the value of ETH as a platform with a good chunk becoming competitors.
The only ones I saw that were truly adding to Ethereum as a platform were either receivers of their foundation grants or somehow connected to Consensys (who had a big presence at Devcon).
To me, this looks like ETH has quietly given up on the dApp platform dream. The call for BUIDL (I cringe on the spelling) is still there but who is actually building and what? These are not people building on ETH, they are building alongside ETH. That’s a huge difference.
Does that mean ETH is going to zero tomorrow? No. They have firmly established themselves in store of value territory. The utility of the ICO boom was enough for them to make that jump. So in that respect the fact that they can get the whole crypto community to fly down to Prague for a week is impressive. It’s just not impressive for their ambitions of becoming a world computer.
