March 2024: Crypto Spring: Financial Products Take Center Stage; Ethereum Upgrade Improves Economics; Builders Come To Denver

Web3+AI was one of the focus areas at the conference with a variety of insightful side events, like Data Summit. Bittensor was one of the most discussed Web3+AI companies. GPU networks for machine learning were a big topic. Multiple projects, including Gensyn, indicated successfully securing GPU capacity from a variety of data centers, which implies a promising availability for other networks seeking similar GPUs.

ZK technology and performance have improved tremendously over the past year, and this was a major theme covered by many ZK-focused teams. In particular, ZK rollup teams like Polygon, zkSync, =nil;, and Starkware discussed this at the Scale Summit. ZK-rollups protect data privacy on blockchain and improve transaction throughput, leading to increased scalability. ZK-rollups unlock new use cases where data privacy is essential for the users.

DePINs can bootstrap real-world infrastructure by incentivizing the supply side through tokens to outpace demand. DePINs allow a maximally cost-effective solutions through open market price competition of idle supply. There have been encouraging signs of adoption for decentralized physical infrastructure: Helium, Filecoin, Akash, DIMO, io.net, and others.

Innovations in liquid staking and re-staking protocols attracted considerable attention, as they unlock new possibilities for decentralized ecosystems. EigenLayer was one of the most discussed companies in this sector. Liquid staking technology allows users to stake token while maintaining the liquidity (in a derivative form). Restaking protocols emerged to allow users to stake the same tokens on the main blockchain and other protocols, securing multiple networks at once (and earning several layer of yield, and introducing more leverage into the overall system).

Bitcoin is more than “digital gold”. BitVM, taproot, and the potential upcoming Bitcoin softfork allow for creating programmable applications (smart contracts, rollups, L2 chains) on top of Bitcoin, using its security infrastructure. Stacks ecosystem continues to be a leader in this category. Yes, Bitcoin was discussed at an ETH conference.

Tokenization of real-world assets is believed to be one of the main growth drivers of Web3 and attract a lot of interest from tradFi people. Ondo Finance and Securitize, some of the leading players in this field, made important announcements during the ETH Denver week.

Lowering the barrier to entry for developers can spark a wave of innovation in Web3. Wallet technology and UX have increasingly improved, and numerous teams have been building at each layer of the wallet stack. One of the major announcements came from Coinbase with the launch of their Smart Wallet.

According to LVMH, digital luxury makes as much sense as traditional luxury products; customers don’t care just about functionality. Luxury brands think about NFTs as the new entry-level good in their brand.

Brands emphasized that digital twins are an equally important part of RWAs (30% of watches above $5k are expected to have a digital twin by the end of 2024).

Digital product passports are gaining popularity among brands. A digital product passport is a digital twin of a physical product on the blockchain.

Key benefits of launching a digital product passport for a brand include authentication of products, increased interactions with customers, connections with secondhand customers, and thus getting secondary revenues.

The end of 2024 will be roughly three years since blockchain games became an idea in 2021. As for any serious game, the development cycle takes between 3-5 years, users should expect to see blockchain games that start to rival traditional games in terms of graphics and gameplay in the next 1-2 years.

Incumbents are also starting to enter the blockchain gaming space now, with Epic and Apple allowing Web3 games onto their platforms, while both companies were strongly against it in prior years. Ubisoft even had its own booth at the conference.