A small CP Media delegation attended EDCON 2023, held from May 19 to 23 in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. The event was claimed to be an essential gathering for the global blockchain community. Leading experts, developers, and heads of companies were expected to speak at the conference, which was mostly dedicated to the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem.
The event’s main guest was supposed to be Vitalik Buterin, Co-Founder of Ethereum, who, despite his peculiar behavior and appearance, always reveals interesting and important things. Spoiler alert: he didn’t disappoint this time either, both in form and content.
The first day of the conference was devoted to a competition of innovative startups. More than 40 teams presented their products to the jury. One of the trends that stood out in the presentations of the startups was working with the community. Many of the products were focused on content and its monetization, including working with bloggers, generating digital avatars, and creating new social networks based on Ethereum.
Fun fact: the conference saw a lot of representatives from Southeast Asia, indicating once again a strong interest in blockchain technology in that region.
The second day of the conference attracted lots of attention thanks to Vitalik Buterin’s highly-anticipated speech. He appeared on stage in the national costume of Montenegro and raised the three main technical problems of Ethereum:
- scalability;
- privacy;
- user security.
Besides that, other speeches covered such topics as the evolution of crypto wallets, the development of the Web3 infrastructure and Layer 2 solutions, the creation of EVM-based private smart contracts, and the uniqueness of tokens. There was also a “privacy” panel discussion where market leaders discussed privacy issues.
The remaining days of the conference were dedicated to various aspects of blockchain and its applications. The speakers conducted a comparative analysis of various blockchain networks and cryptocurrencies, made forecasts, analyzed options for the future development of the Ethereum ecosystem, shared the difficulties of the practical decentralization of the Ethereum network, and discussed many other things. Each day also ended with panel discussions on the opportunities and prospects for the blockchain industry over the next five years.
“Ethereum holds the potential to surpass Bitcoin in capitalization due to its community and utility. There are no barriers to this. The main thing is to keep experimenting and constantly looking for better solutions. This will solve the existing problems related to scaling, privacy, and protection from hacker attacks and establish Ethereum as a mainstream project in the blockchain industry,” Dragan Pilipovic, Open-Source Developer and Member of the Ethereum community, shared his opinion on the largest altcoin’s prospects.
In short, EDCON 2023 proved to be an inspiring event, where the main trends were discussed not only concerning the Ethereum community but also the blockchain industry. Various problems were touched upon, and the key trends of the nearest future in the context of the Ethereum ecosystem’s development were outlined. The EDCON 2023 conference showed that blockchain and crypto continue to develop and remain one of the most important and promising sectors in the field of innovative technologies.
What Does Ethereum’s Outlook Look Like from the Inside?
During the event, the CP Media team talked to many interesting people: developers, representatives of various projects, and just enthusiasts. But one opinion, in particular, stood out about Ethereum’s prospects, which we managed to capture and would like to quote in its entirety.
Grigorii Kair, Developer at Pontem Network:
“Ethereum’s trump card is the prospect of mass adoption. A lot of conferences and educational programs that attract individual developers and entire companies contribute to this. Bitcoin doesn’t do that. Look at how actively L2 solutions and the entire ecosystem are evolving. Yes, maybe mass adoption isn’t a one- or two-year prospect, but it should definitely be expected within five to ten years.
Today, what’s most important is connecting with the Web2 audience, which doesn’t yet understand why crypto is needed other than to make payments between countries. Stealth addresses, zkSync, Proof-of-Stake, and more are certainly driving the blockchain industry into the future, but the Ethereum community has yet to answer the questions and close the needs of ordinary users to make them move to Ethereum. So, the biggest hurdle is our modern society that doesn’t yet accept crypto to the extent that our community would like it to.
I think that in the next ten years, Ethereum will turn into something like SWIFT — many people will use the network without even knowing about it or what it is. Ethereum will become a global intermediary for financial transactions and beyond. The community will continue to research and discover new technologies, just as it does now, but on a more global and large scale, with recognition in the scientific community and at the governmental level.”
Collected comments and shared insights:
Darya Antipenkova and Egor Beltsov
