Takeaways from EthCC in Brussels

Transcript

GM good morning welcome to the milk Road show The Daily crypto show that's juicier than gossip at a high school reunion I'm your host Jay Hamilton and today we're talking about investment insights and Alpha from ECC Europe's largest annual conference for ethereum which just happened this past week in Brussels and the milroad team was there led by Raul the head of growth of milroad and the guy behind our Twitter Raul welcome to the show start off by telling us what is EC and give us a bit of background on this conference GMG MJ glad to be on the show as you said Etc is um the largest annual ethereum event in Europe and it's a very Builder focused conference that is

usually hosted in Paris France since it's organized by the etherium France Community with the Olympics being in Paris during this time they decided to host it in Brussels the main thing about this event is that he had a whopping 6,450 people that attended officially now that is a massive community and from like what I've seen the diversity is insane and not only did you have people from all over the globe all nationalities there were also like I didn't expect this but there were more women than you know I was expecting to see which is a breath of fresh air and just great to see so the diversity was amazing my key takea away from this is that you know the ethereum organization and the community is absolutely amazing

just the fact that we had almost 6,500 people from all over the world contributing to this net Network in one way or another in in just one city and everyone just came together to figure out how to you know improve this this network that we all um love and use every day I think it's very very powerful and it made me feel just like we have in web 2 you have the Apple's worldwide developers conference uh which we know is uh you know Mega powerful for Apple it's where they launch all their products and get all their ecosystem updates and that's kind of like how I felt about etcc being to crypto and ethereum in my mind Etc just a decentralized version of Apple's conference and it's just a place where Builders come together you know to talk

and how to improve and grow the network which in my opinion is was was completely magical it's it's a great uh comparison to make is that and we talk about this all the time is like what is ethereum well ethereum is really just an open-source App Store with crypto payment rails and here we have a conference which which as you said 6,500 people attended all building on ethereum all building this network building the ecosystem that's so powerful and so incredible uh R give us a breakdown these 6,500 people you would say majority Builders and can you give us a little bit of stats on how many developers ethereum has globally in total yeah so um ethereum has almost 9,000 monthly active developers now not

everyone at the conference was a developer but in my opinion and like how I felt the vibe everyone was a builder whether that's a Founder a marketer a writer uh they were all building some something cool whether small whether you know large doesn't really matter but everyone was super focused on building something to give you a ballpark it was like maybe half uh were like developers just heads down coding building apps and the rest were like more soft skills like marketers and speakers and Founders and writers and so on uh before we jump in we're going to talk about uh the sentiment that you gathered from this conference what that means in your mind for ethereum prices and for the market as a whole uh we're going to talk about some Builder stats we're going to talk

about our onchain apps really here what did you see from onchain apps let's start by though what was your favorite thing that you did at this conference my favorite thing that I did was buying a coffee for two usdc US using my coinbase wallet and using usdc on base that was a cool experience okay man that is amazing that we're doing that that that is happening let's talk a little bit about The Vibes and the sentiment what did you find uh how many people did you talk to over it was four days was it and and what sort of sentiment did you pick up from them yeah it was 4 days from Monday till Thursday and I've talked to hundreds of people like my telegram right now is swamped I just got to get back to everyone this week was just like recovery I've slept 24 hours in the last

two days uh just to recover so yeah it's been crazy so after speaking to hundreds of people surprisingly that the sentiment was very bearish when you talk about prices now you know we love to talk about this from an Investor's perspective and everyone I've met almost everyone I've met at Etc was more bearish than I expected on prices alone so for example most people that I talk to don't expect Bitcoin to surpass 100K by end of 2025 and when it comes to eth almost nobody expects etherum to to reach 5,000 or above by the end of this cycle which in my mind I'm more bullish it's it's been uh you know a bit surprising to to hear these takes but again going back to

the context this was a very Builder focused conference so it was a lot of like builders that one they're probably very like crypto Rich so they don't really care about prices they have you know enough plus because they're they've been in this space for so long they're kind of like thinking ahead so like they're always thinking long term and if you do that like you know that in five years prices will be much higher than they are today so there's no point in even like caring about the prices and the whole sentiment was just like Builder Builder Builder Focus so everyone was just focused on how to network what apps to build next what everyone is working on and everyone was just like heads down building and thinking for the long term and that was pretty pretty awesome to see it's it's a bit of a breath of fresh air from what

you see on Twitter everyone talking about these meme coins SB coins prices whatever uh here it was just like True Builders that are like behind theack um and he's just the real people building behind it is amazing because I'm assuming everybody listening to this show invests in ethereum I think and if you're not I would say you might be slightly crazy uh so it's amazing to hear though that at one of the ethereum's largest annual conference is the biggest one in Europe most of the people there are not talking about prices that's what you want if most of the people there were talking about prices they'd kind of be full of right you'd have a bunch of people that aren't they're just kind of they're they're pumping bags they're just excited but instead what you have is you have a bunch of people that don't care

about prices they're not they're not there for that they're building and they're focused on the longterm and they're doing it for the right reasons not to get the eum price to the Moon not to get their own project price to the moon but just to build a app that has real product Market fit that really impacts the world and that gets crypto out to the masses so it's kind of interesting bearish on prices is what I'm hearing but bullish on the future of ethereum and the future of onchain and the future of crypto bearish on the prices bullish on the tech let's just take a step back and look at some Global Builder stats though just to give us an idea of like where are we from a builder perspective we don't look a lot of that we look a lot of stats of price stats

but give us an idea of where we're at from a builder perspective right now we can see here from AC that this is a report that it did recently and if we look at the number of contract deployers which is how many developers are are writing code on the public blockchain we can see that in the last three months we are at insane highs and it's only only growing since 2020 so again like this kind of like mirrors the sentiment that I got from Etc is like okay if you look on chain people are actually shipping and then again this is in my opinion the most important stat to look at which is verified smart contracts um and this is the number of new crypto applications that are being launched again a 3mon high which we haven't seen you know ever before so definitely a wave of of

Builders building mode uh and just everyone focused on Bolding yeah when we look at this this verified smart contract chart it takes you back to 2016 when basically there was Zero verified smart contracts being launched and it stays pretty level until it was like 2021 when it really started to go up and then we hit an all-time high in August 2023 at 46,000 verified smart contracts launched in that month and then since then boom the past three months we've been above 50k three months in a row hitting 60 almost 67k in April so you could see the building is not just talk that's happening there is real verified smart contracts that are being launched every

month right now which means new new apps are here and they are being being launched to the public that's super exciting to see okay let's go into um so the builders are here great and they're really building which is what we want to see uh but are the apps here are there any consumer apps that are actually ready for Mass adoption what was the Takeaway on that side R yeah so U Everyone likes to refer to these apps like as mass consumer onchain apps and before I I I give my answer I just want to give you some context about what that really means so these are better app that have better ux than what we currently have and that attract users

without needing an incentive like a token or a points program and the closest we have to that right now is poly market right uh we don't really have any other like Mass consumer onchain apps other than poly market so uh the short answer to to your question is no the the apps are not really here and the reason I'm saying that is because I haven't seen any major you know breaking apps launching at ECC but the way I saw it is kind of like different so I think what's what's key here is that we're kind of like building the onchain economy still and as I said before we're in a big Builder wave that's happening right now we have hundreds and thousands of onchain apps launching every day and every month and the most important thing that I got from Etc is that like while we're launching

all those apps everyone is kind of like obsessed with the ux so here's kind of like how I think about it now that I've just had a few days to to uh think about this so ever since the Ico bubble maybe like last cycle 2 2020 kind of everyone in the community has been focusing on building the infrastructure so we were focused on improving ethereum that means like launching l2s you had you had the merge uh we had like EIP 4844 and other eips um there was a lot of talk about blob space and whatever uh then you had like a bunch of ethereum killers launching like l1s like there were a million uh you know launching like salana Avalanche and and just like you know trying to fix scalability and then there was a trend with data availability Solutions like Celestia tried to lower

gas feeds um and there was all of this talk about infrastructure now the feeling at etcc is that now that's behind us we don't need more infra nobody talks about infra anymore now everyone is obsessed with building apps that have good ux again while there were no apps that like I I used or like I saw at Etc every startup I I talked to probably like 30 or maybe 50 startups everyone was just talking about like small wallets which is a way to set up your wallet without uh thinking about a seat phrase account abstraction uh which is the tag that enables launching actions that don't require gas and signing transactions you had you know ZK proofs let one party prove a statement that is it's true without revealing any details and things like intents which is basically a specific goal of a user that

he wants to accomplish on chain they just put it out there and then someone goes and solves it and the user basically gets the best price and outcome without doing basically anything and I'm oversimplifying all of these features but the point is that uh they're all features that abstract away the clunky Tech in crypto that we're all used to like siging transactions paying gas whatever it's hiding all of that away from the users and again everyone I've talked to is like very very focused on building you know these features and having the best and smoothest ux possible okay so uh if I could summarize the apps aren't here yet although I think there's a few that you're going to tell us about in just a minute but yeah they're not really here yet but everyone's focused on building them I guess like are you optimistic you know

you were just there you were on the ground you're around you know hundreds of projects that are building for you know Mass consumer adoption are you optimistic that they're capable of that and that they're heading in that direction or is it just a lot of talk because it's great for everyone to say yeah we need better ux like of course we need better ux yeah I'm very optimistic just because he was like the main focus like this is the main takeaway that I got from the event like no one thinks about like boring stuff like U oh we got to I'm going to another L2 to solve all of your problems there was none of that there was like I'm going to give you an app that solves this issue for you that you're going to use every day with no incentives or whatever just going to use

it because this is better than the the web to Alternatives so I'm very optimistic tell us uh about a few of the the favorite experiences onchain experiences that you had while you were there onchain ux and whatnot I think uh coinbase is still leading the way here and it's not even close I talked about poly Market before and that's kind of like great but still going based that in my opinion is leading the way and the coolest experience as I said before was paying for coffee in a few seconds using my coinbase wallet uh now this took me a few seconds because I already had usdc on base on my coinbase wallet but if I didn't have that then you could easily install coinbase's Smart wallet which is another feature and actually the lead engineer at at coinbase wallet his name

is chintan tuia I hoping I'm not wiering his name uh but he had a very cool talk presenting how this works uh and just to summarize you basically set up a wallet you don't need an extension you don't need an app you don't need to store your seat phrase you set it up with your face ID and your keys are stored on your phone and you can just go interact with um anything that you want on chain now again for this to work like to pay for coffee you would still need that to usdc so you would need to load that wallet but you can do it uh with Apple pay and stuff which is super easy but that is the main application that I've seen use you know like the ux features I was talking about this one this particular one was using account exraction uh to

provide the best experience possible everyone's talking about stable coins we've talked about it a ton on the show it is clearly the main Breakaway use case that we have in crypto that has real product Market fit I don't think there's any debate that stable coins are the future my one question about this though is okay great I I have coinbase wallet I have usdc on base I'm sure a lot of our listeners do as well or maybe a lot of our listeners don't but I'm sure our listeners know how they can set that up but doesn't mean I can go to my local coffee shop and they accept crypto how how is that going to roll out what was the POS

system that was really allowing I mean I'm sure actually let me ask who who are you buying coffee from was this like a a coinbase coffee shop that they' just set up for the weekend or were you actually going to a CO coffee shop in Brussels this was a base coffee shop it was base coffee whatever ever and the the way it works from the POS perspective is they partnered with an aching payment solution called slice and basically when you do your transaction you go through slice and they have like an iPad at the counter and they see your transaction coming through like immediately uh they confirm it and then they give you a coffee so that's pretty pretty fast okay so the POS side of this is coming along because obviously it's not enough to just have everybody have a wallet we

also need the coffee shops and not just coffee shops at any store that you want to go into and spend money on would ideally one day accept usdc or some form of stable coin so it's great to see that happening as well if anybody listening to this is a uh a merchant an in-person Merchant make sure you go check out slice if you want to start to accept crypto at your coffee shop uh any other onchain apps that stood out to you yes so I had a pretty funny interaction with a team called saier I had they had a booth and I went out to speak with them and found out they were Romanian so I was like oh nice I'm Romanian too let's talk about this and so I was like kind of biased towards this project and I liked it uh basically what they do is uh

they provide a way for token distribution so like if you have a token as a DA or another project you can basically distribute your token to like pay other like third parties that you work with or employees that th might have and so on um and I was like cool and then a few hours later a client that we work with who's a DA as well they just reached out and they were like is it okay that if we switch from this payment service that we we we we used to saier I was like sablier are these the guys you're talking about andent sent out the picture they're like yes they offer so so much better ux I was like whoa that's amazing and so like again this comes back to to the fact that like on site everyone was like okay how do we

build the best ux these guys have figured something out that one of their features they have many features but one of the features that our client was looking to use that was the best feature on the market so that's why they they chose saier to to pay us basically and that was a very fun Interac and I love it okay great to see so you know maybe the on the mass consumer onchain apps aren't here yet uh but they I I'm kind of feeling like they are here they just maybe don't have the mass adoption or they're just they're just new to Market because as we said we've seen all-time highs in verified smart contracts launched in the last three months so possible that they're here they just don't quite have mass adoption yet when you look at the ethereum

conference one thing that's really nice to compare is the ethereum conference to the salana conference if you were to compare those two how would you what would you say yeah so I haven't been to a salana conference uh recently but I I do know that they have a lot of apps launching a lot more apps than ethereum I agree with you like we don't have the killer app that that you know brings us Mass adoption but we do have Builders working on this however this is why I'm more more bullish on Solana when you go to a Solana conference there's a lot of apps launching you know there's like demos and people can use them and so on I I kind of like fully agree with what merch is saying here um he's the CEO of helus and he says that the biggest difference between ethereum and Solana

conferences is that 80% of events on ethereum are about infrastructure now I disagree uh this time it was different it was not that much about infra versus almost all events on salana are about apps and that's kind of like true okay everyone's just like building apps so yeah that makes me uh more bullish on um on Solana but if you're listening um the point I think everyone needs to like walk away uh with from this podcast is that as an investor it's not really relevant to like find the next big app or whatever um because you don't need to pick um and invest in one particular App instead I think to capitalize properly on the growth of crypto um I just think you need to invest in the underlying infrastructure and the blockchains upon which the apps are being built the way I

see it right now ethereum and Solana are the place uh where apps are being built and that's kind of like the two system that I think will benefit the most long term and if you're an investor and all you care about like how you to capitalize on this in my opinion I think just you know buying these two assets e and so is like investing it's it's close to like investing in the internet in the early 2000s it's like you don't have to catch the Amazon you just have to you know have a stake in the internet because then Amazon will bring so much value uh to the you know to the whole infrastructure that you as an investor will benefit so that's my take the biggest bullish number that I keep looking at at is that salana is accounts for about three maybe 4% I haven't

looked at it uh in the past few days 3 4% of total crypto market cap and I'm pretty bullish that salana is going to end up capturing more than three or 4% of the total crypto market cap and that's it that's all you need to know if you're bullish on that then salana is a great investment because you believe that they are the future of onchain activity and they're still quite small comparison to the total crypto market cap ethereum they have a much bigger percentage of the total crypto market cap but I believe that total crypto market cap is going to grow which we've talked about Lots in the show likely going to hit 10 trillion by the end of this cycle by the end of 2025 and if that's the case then ethereum feels like a pretty great investment too uh rul

before we wrap up here uh you also attended vitalic ethereum uh talk obviously everybody talks about vitalic uh would love to just get some quick takeaways from that I don't feel like you need to drive too deep I know vital can be quite uh uh in in the weeds and Technical uh but what was your takea away from that talk yeah so just for context um when Vali comes to speak at these conferences he's basically giving his opinion on what needs to be built and then everyone in the audience just goes ahead and builds that stuff uh so that's what he did here he came in and he was like okay guys we need to focus on uh how can we prevent a 51% takeover off the chain that's when um you know and entities have more than 51% of all

the ethereum in circulation and then because they do that they can you know approve or disapprove transactions at their own will and more importantly if that kind of 51% attack happens how can we recover the chain and so that that was like a very technical part that I don't want to get into uh but the main idea of the of his talk was how can we decentralize the ethereum network even more and he was talking about like okay how can we help people run their own validator and other other things that can make the more decentralized so that people don't only stake their eat with like Lio coinbase and Kraken because he was kind of like giving this analogies like what if Lio Kus and Kraken partner they have like over 50% of the the nodes because they have so much eat that

they're taking on behalf of of their customers what happens then you know just giving some examples and talking about how we can prevent this and in case an attack happens how we can recover the chain again very technical but again the the audience was very like you know a lot of developers a lot of builders that know the stuff so it didn't surprise me but for me like the vitalic talk was super bullish for one I just love the guy I think he's a genius and I think like everyone in there was like again just going there for guidance like on what to build next and since I trust you know vitalic so much I know that the devs in the in the audience are just going to go and execute now um and I I have I have the the confidence that um they have the ability to to pull this

off so Raul thanks so much for joining us today it sounds like your experience ECC was awesome and it sounds like eth is on the right path a lot of bullish Vibes coming out of all this building that is happening I think the thing that most of our listeners and most of the world quite frankly isn't really aware of is just how much building is happening behind the scenes on chain when you have as you said at the beginning of the show over 8,000 monthly active developers that are building in an ecosystem right now that is still very small compared to much many web 2 ecosystems but the developers are there

at that scale I think we can be confident that like the apps are coming and when the apps are here then the people come and when the people are here then number go up and that feels good for all of us roel thanks so much again for joining us today thank you for listening thanks for listening in everybody have a wicked awesome day thank you for listening to milk Road radio the easiest path to get smarter about crypto if if you like this episode share it and hit subscribe or follow so you don't miss out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free 5 minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game then we'll leave a link to milk Road Pro as well your number one resource to help

you invest successfully in crypto one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto is risky so you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and we'll see you in the next one