2024 Reflections From ETHCC
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Topics Covered
Overview of ETHCC
The Gaming Focus on TON
The Demand for dApps in Web3
Full Analysis📝
This month, I had the chance to travel to Brussels, Belgium for the 7th annual ETHCC Conference. I always revel in the opportunity to travel abroad, and this was the first time I’ve done it for business. While ETHCC is a conference, most people connect outside the confines of the conference through the wide variety of side events. Some days, I went to four to six side events daily to source deals, meet new friends, and understand the current state of all things crypto. The conference attracted many different people from all over the world. I had a couple of meals with founders from Paris, Poland, the United States, and Germany.
Additionally, the Portuguese government should invest in the next rounds of funding from the founders I met in person as they did a great job selling me on moving.
Founders, investors, and business developers, like myself, were all placed together which created an incredible atmosphere to create synergies within the broader crypto industry.
There are a couple of themes that I want to dive into further:
The TON Ecosystem is Loaded With Gaming Talent
The TON ecosystem seems to have a lot of buzz online but unfortunately, there didn’t appear to be much fanfare regarding the protocol during the event. Unless there were more private events focused on the ecosystem, I could only find one in the flurry of Luma options. Helika hosted the event that I was able to attend and it was very focused on the TON gaming theme. Telegram seems to attract many quality game developers, and gaming appears to be the primary non-messaging use case gaining traction within the industry. Two games that have been very prominent in Telegram are Hamster Combat and Notcoin. NotCoin has around 40 million users and Hamster Combat has over 250 million users.
While gaming was a strong focal point of the TON ecosystem during Brussels, I was surprised that there weren’t other narratives that drew a ton of attention. Outside of the event, it appears that TON is growing in DeFi and other subsections of crypto technologies. The TON ecosystem has seen exponential growth in DeFi TVL according to Binance.
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There is a Demand for More DApps in the Marketplace
Broadly, one of the topics that intrigued me was how the crypto space has largely garnered the most attention from an infrastructure lens. What I learned is that infrastructure projects tend to be more investable due to the value they can attract relatively early in the project lifecycles. They enable venture capital investors to gain more liquidity than a typical dApp.
However, this investment in infrastructure has consequences for the broader crypto ecosystem. Builders are more likely to develop projects that center around this vertical as opposed to applications on top of the infrastructure. This stifles the growth of ecosystems as the purpose of the infrastructure is to deploy applications on their respective blockchains. Conversely, any founder that is working on dApps at this time is more investable as it is clear they aren’t looking for money grabs and following narratives.
One of the solutions that was proposed by, Vyas from Eigenlayer, is that ecosystems have to allocate capital to projects independently to grow their respective projects. With this being true, projects will need to create initiatives pre-token launch to be able to weather the storm post-liquidation events. Ecosystems investment in projects could drive better fundamentals so that the company and ecosystems can be positioned to be successful in the long term.
Discovery of new dApps and Ecosystems is Key
Based on what was learned at ETHCC, the CryptoJeter newsletter will focus more on new applications in emerging ecosystems. We need to understand the innovations and how these ecosystems prioritize different narratives. The narratives that are being prioritized will give insight into what stage of consumer demand certain products have and how to identify the direction of the projects. While crypto evolves fast, the missions of quality projects should remain constant. Thus, it is interesting to learn how they plan to evolve from the products that are in demand currently. The future of crypto is unpredictable and can take many directions. Ultimately, it is important to stay informed, adapt to new trends, and continuously evaluate the core missions and strategies of these projects to make well-informed decisions in this ever-changing landscape.