I spent the past week at ETHDenver, “a community owned innovation festival” aka the largest Ethereum-led crypto meetup in the world. Summarising my findings in a few bulletpoints is a challenge, but I will try my best – hit me up if you want to chat in more detail.

💪 Energy was high! From the second I arrived in the Mile High City there was a buzz of activity: a few folks wearing their event lanyards; excited voices as people checked their bags (Bitcoin approaching all time high as I type); and tired founders trying to crank out a couple hours of work before the daily event tsunami hit.

Bitcoin was represented! I kicked off events at Bitcoin Renaissance where I rubbed shoulders with stalwarts like Nic Carter and Dan Held, and many buidlers. Yes, there were usual PoW [proof-of-work] and PoS [proof-of-stake] debates, but mainly the talk was about bridging to other protocols and being EVM compatible. Bitcoin Startup Lab shared that their next cohort is 50% non-bitcoin native developers. It might be early to declare, but the tension between bitcoin and Ethereum communities felt like it was easing into a collaborative mindset.

😎 Solana is definitely the cool kid in town (with honorable mentions for Arbitrum, Optimism and EigenLayer). I talked to a lot of folks about DeFi and RWA [Real World Assets] – my main areas of expertise – and pretty much every one asked ‘have you thought about doing that on Solana?’.

💸 Speaking of RWAs, the domain is advancing rapidly – bridging TradFi and DeFi worlds – but with the many TradFi challenges being tough to solve within DeFi. One example is that we must follow ‘real world’ timing, as loans are not being originated on-chain (yet!) hence we have to follow Wall St working hours.

🐝 If I had to choose a few buzzwords, it would be ‘interoperability’ and ‘bridging’. I heard these words on many stages, pitches, and side conversations, “we work on XX+ blockchains”, etc. It was difficult to tell how many projects are customised vs. plug-and-play, but there was near universal consensus that we need a standardised UX (one use case is staking and restaking, for example).

🧐 One of the funniest asides I heard was from a founder debriefing after their time on stage. The most interesting question they got: ‘Should an L2 become an L1?’. In the founder’s words, “If I build the Facebook of L2, why would I pay rent to Ethereum?”. If we are indeed in the opening throes of the next bull cycle, then this question for sure will come up more and more often.

🤔 Finally, it is important to add that most of Denver’s population had no idea what crypto is. We are still so early! From my unscientific measure of rideshare app drivers, none really had a clue what was going on, but more than a few mentioned how crypto folk seemed to think they were smarter than anyone else.

If we are going to lead the evolution of Web3 (and the revolution of the global financial system, my closet Bitcoin maxi self is compelled to add) we need to carry everyone with us and buidl solutions that everyone can understand and get behind.