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OKX Ethereum Denver Chronicles: Astonishing Industry Development Speed

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ETHDenver is different from other summits, primarily focused on developers and very Web3 native.

Source: OKX

Editor's note: On February 24, 2023, "ETHDenver2023", the largest and longest-running Ethereum event in the world, officially opened. As a representative of Web3 technology enterprises and an official sponsor of the conference, OKX was invited to give a keynote speech, set up activity booths, and hold peripheral activities.

OKX Web3 Wallet Senior Business Development Manager, Lingwei Quan, participated in the event and had in-depth exchanges with practitioners, developers, and partners on site. This article reflects Lingwei's observations and feelings, aiming to share with everyone the current development status of the overseas cryptocurrency industry. It does not constitute any advice.

The following is the original text:

4万人涌入丹佛，大会现场彷佛置身WeWork

40,000 people flooded into Denver, and the conference venue felt like being in WeWork

Visible to the naked eye, there are more and more people.

Last year, 15,000 people attended the conference, and this year, 25,000 people attended. A total of 40,000 people flooded into the city due to various summits. For the past 20 days, the entire Denver has become a Crypto city, with huge road signs advertising Web3. Whether you walk into a restaurant, hotel, nightclub, or even on the street, you will see familiar faces everywhere.

More importantly, the collaboration between projects is becoming increasingly close. For example, our OKX Web3 product integrates Swap, Dex, Bridge, Yield, NFT market, and Web3 search engine aggregation as functions into the OKX Web3 self-hosted multi-chain wallet. We work closely with major public chains and dApp project parties. Currently, the OKX Web3 wallet has connected to 50 public chains and aggregated most of the excellent projects in the Web3 ecosystem, empowering projects and providing value.

These days, it's basically just meeting up with partners on Zoom Call and AMA every day, introducing new business to each other. The atmosphere is very harmonious, and everyone feels that their work efficiency is higher during the summit. If you need to chat, just go to the Booth and grab someone, bring your own branded gift, and go to recognize faces with TG's work group. The meeting is very exciting.

For industry practitioners, the entire ETHDenver venue is like a WeWork playground.

ETHDenver is very Web3 native

ETHDenver is different from other conferences, mainly targeting developers and being very Web3 native. The professionalism is very high, which has been the main feature since its inception.

NFT LA and NFT NYC are designed to be user-friendly for those outside the industry, with no barriers to entry.

Although Bitcoin Miami is OG, it is too focused on Bitcoin and mostly about mining. It also lacks a diverse ecosystem. We look forward to seeing some surprises in the future.

Consensus is positioned between Bitcoin Miami and ETH Denver, with a strong comprehensive nature that includes both POS and POW ecosystems. Its advantage lies in its high profile and popularity, but its disadvantage is that it does not fully focus on Web3.

Currently, the only summit that can match ETHDenver in terms of Web3 native level and professionalism is the Ethereum Annual Developer Conference DevCon, but DevCon has a different atmosphere.

From these perspectives, it is not difficult to understand the most popular topics at ETHDenver, which are infrastructure and DeFi (DeFi refers to financial infrastructure).

Although the metaverse, NFT, and GameFi sectors also have a large area, they did not compete with ETHDenver and the infrastructure because these three tracks have their own dedicated summits.

Ethereum's two major narratives, ZK and LST, leave the deepest impression

From a Top Down perspective, the most impressive impressions are the two major narratives based on Ethereum, ZK and LST (not LSD), and the projects on the track have developed very quickly, as well as the amazing progress in the operational capabilities of mainstream projects and public chains.

ZK has experienced rapid development over the past year, and the circle culture has gradually become clear. There are already organized and planned communities that are good at working together as developer communities. Many Chinese projects and developers in the ZK world have high recognition on the international stage and are very capable.

Manta Network, Scroll, and Aleo, the three brothers with their investor Polychain, have strong networking abilities. They have led everyone well and continuously recruited excellent new members, such as the ZK compiler=Nil and the programmable ZK oracle HyperOracle, which shone brightly and caused a frenzy in the primary market last year... In short, Manta Network is almost leading the organization of the largest ZK Day summit.

The narrative of Ethereum 2.0 has become even more explosive against the backdrop of the Shanghai upgrade, forming an independent mafia.

Although Eigen Layer is a new project, it has strong gathering ability and is good at storytelling and conceptualizing. This time, it organized a Shared Security Summit, which focused on Ethereum security layer, Staking and Restaking. The venue also included various Liquidity staking project parties, such as Eigen Layer, Rocket Finance, Stader, and so on.

LIDO has not received much exposure this time, not because they are not a leading player, but because most of their team is in Europe. Although many new members have joined the team, they have been focusing on major product updates recently and have not put much effort into sponsoring ETHDenver. Instead, their sponsorship focus is on ETH CC, the largest summit in Europe.

LIDO has brought many people this time, all of whom are having small meetings with partners such as OKX Web3.

Speaking of the operational capabilities of mainstream projects and public chains.

Arbitrum has not been seen for half a year. Not only has the online TVL and user growth been impressive, but its ability to create stars for projects has also begun to form a brand, attracting a swarm of application layer projects such as chain games. Its offline operational capabilities have also made great progress. They have organized a series of activities, from on-site booth sponsorship, to several founders sharing Arbitrum's technology and vision, to direct face-to-face dining activities with the community and project parties. Every link from top to bottom is accurate and achieves good community dissemination.

The Arbitrum team has fewer members compared to some mainstream DeFi projects, yet they have achieved impressive results. It is definitely worth learning from them. I have spent a lot of time with Arbitrum recently, thinking and learning about their online and offline operations.

Uniswap operates offline at ETHDenver and is one of the few that can compete with Arbitrum, but Uniswap's operational capabilities have always been good, with a high starting point and less obvious progress compared to Artbitrum.

值得关注的方向

translates to

Worth paying attention to directions

The previous bull market was not formed by the Web3 industry's own closed-door development, but was more closely related to the world's overall large-scale easing and negative interest rate economic environment. However, I am not discussing the world economic situation today, but rather a few directions that I am personally interested in.

Ethereum 2.0 narrative, LST - liquidity staking token, everyone will soon gradually replace the term LSD with LST. The mainstream project parties of LST are working together to educate users, and everyone wants to avoid the word "Derivative" as much as possible.

In addition, Layer2 is currently very popular, and it is obvious that each Layer2 is gradually finding its direction - focusing on operations, helping projects to grow and market empowerment, and taking advantage of the infrastructure built by Ethereum.

The most notable momentum in Layer2 is Artbitrum, whose TVL has increased by 60% in the past month despite the team adding less than 10 people since October last year. During ETHDenver, many Chinese Dapp project parties asked me to talk to Arbitrum on their behalf, and Artbitrum's Partnership department has also added many people.

A new batch of L1 and L2 chains, such as Shardeum and Caldera, have emerged, and the public chain ecosystem is rapidly developing. The current leading position is not necessarily stable.

ZK, not to mention, was a star at ETHDenver last year and its valuation has also risen.

Overall, I believe that LST, Layer2, and ZK are all ultimately building infrastructure for the Web3 world. As for where the incremental market is, there is no need to predict - just look at the past to know.

Last year, the largest effective incremental market came from STEPN, with 3 million users and a peak of 1 million DAU. NFTs were also a major scene for seamlessly adding users, such as the NFTs from the collaboration between Polygon and Reddit, which made 2.5 million people unknowingly own wallets and NFTs. Therefore, I believe that the task of incremental market will still fall on games and NFTs that can make Web2 people easily understand and get started.

There has been a directional divergence in the GameFi track between the Eastern and Western markets.

When I observe the global GameFi market, I find that there is a directional divergence in the GameFi track between the Eastern and Western markets.

In the West, "capital disk" is generally regarded as a problem that needs to be solved. The main narrative focuses on how to achieve massive adoption, that is, how to enable a large number of Web2 users to enjoy the benefits of Web3 without knowing what Web3 is. For example, games are trying to combine traditional film and television production, music, and Web2 traffic ports, achieving the same user experience as Web2 games in login and asset transactions, and the economic model is not their primary consideration.

There are also some entrepreneurs in certain countries and regions who are generally committed to making their "plate" last longer and solving economic model problems. I understand that the paths brought about by two different cultures, environments, and regulations are different, so I also pay great attention to cross-cultural communication.

However, I have no bias towards either path. I believe they are both addressing important application layer issues and are excellent contributors.

GameFi includes subcategories such as SocialFi.

The decentralized business launched by centralized trading platforms such as OKX is rapidly developing.

It can be noticed that there are more and more project parties for developer tools and service-oriented projects, and they have become more mature compared to last year. APIs and specialized services are becoming more refined, which makes me look forward to seeing a reduction in the overall development cost of the industry.

In addition, many people who focus on market and operational solutions have come from various countries, regions, and major languages, and they have all done well. Compared to this time last year, the operation and marketing strategies of Web3 are also rapidly taking shape.

A one-stop solution in the decentralized world, integrating high-quality assets and reducing the entry barrier for Web3. This is also the direction in which OKX Web3 is practicing.

I noticed that someone at the venue summarized that only OKX and Binance came to the trading platform, which may be somewhat one-sided.

All the people from the trading platforms have arrived. I have met with friends from mainstream trading platforms such as Coinlist, KuCoin, Coinbase, etc. to exchange projects in the past few days. However, the main sponsors of the venue are indeed only OKX Web3 and BNB Chain. Everyone's booths are also very close, and they coincidentally chose the infrastructure and DeFi areas.

OKX comes from the Web3 team - OKX Web3, which is the most important department and development direction of OKX.

OKX Web3 not only set up a Booth at the venue, sponsored the venue's WiFi, prepared exquisite gifts for everyone, but also held a new user acquisition activity for OKX Web3 wallet. They hosted one of the biggest night parties at ETHDenver, and Jeff Ren, the head of OKX Ventures, and the Head of Engineering both gave speeches and shared their technical understanding and product ideas on stage.

OKX firmly believes that the future is on the chain, decentralized and multi-chain. OKX has always positioned itself as a technology company and a provider of Web3 tools. OKX Web3 is committed to providing the best user experience for the future Web3 and reducing industry barriers.

OKX Web3's self-hosted wallet has integrated 50 public chains, with its own Dex, Swap, Bridge, Yield, and NFT aggregator. Although users may not feel it, OKX Web3 wallet users can now complete cross-chain transactions with just one click on their mobile or web browser, and can also easily stake their coins in various mainstream yield protocols such as LIDO. They can also easily list multiple NFT markets, view transaction records, gas fees, signature authorization records, and cancel them with just one click. In short, OKX's sponsorship is very appropriate. Looking around the venue, almost all of the public chains and DeFi projects are our close partners. We work together every day through Telegram and Zoom, and now we can easily communicate and discuss new ideas in person at ETHDenver for four days. It's very convenient and enjoyable.

If you are also a project party, welcome to join our OKX Web3 ecosystem.