Paris Blockchain Week: The Only Way Through is to Build

It’s day 2 of Paris Blockchain Week, one of the biggest crypto conferences of the year. Here's your early-bird inside scoop of what's happening in Paris 🇫🇷.

It will be complicated and it will be hard over the next few years. But the only way through is to build.

This is how Joseph Lubin, Ethereum Co-Founder and ConsenSys CEO, concluded his speech this morning.

While Day 1 centered on Web3, NFTs, and brands entering the space, Day 2 is entirely about crypto.

Here's an early-bird, concise inside scoop from the trenches! 👇

My impressions so far: 

• Some of the old guard and household names are missing (e.g. Coinbase, Kraken, Anchorage, Galaxy, etc.). Generally, not a lot of US companies have made it over the pond (except for Circle).

• Little presence from infrastructure builders or foundations (except Cardano & Tezos) and a lot of smaller, less known companies focusing on applications.

• Little institutional presence from big financial-services players (banks, payment providers, etc.).

Some key themes I’ve seen: 

• “Value” & “Honesty”: Web3 will only succeed with a relentless focus on value and honest products. “We cannot tolerate flippers anymore”, says Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.

• “Interoperability”: Making different Web3 platforms connect and talk to each other has been a theme multiple times. The metaverse is already here, we just need to connect its parts. Thereby it doesn’t matter whether we enter the Metaverse in 2D or 3D, on mobile or on desktop. What matters are the social connections that we’re building. The vision: Making digital assets not only transferable but also usable across different Web3 dApps and digital environments.

• “We don’t need digital zebras”: PfPs (profile picture NFTs) are over, according to 0xb1, an NFT OG. The next phase will be about connecting digital and physical, about real world asset tokenization (how many times have we heard that?).

• “Phygital” & “Empathy”: Physical and digital (assets) need to co-exists and complement each other; without storytelling or content neither of them has any value.

My personal highlight: Joseph Lubin

The speech of Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum. He was profound, mesmerizing, and encapsulated what this thing we call “crypto” and “Web3” is all about:

The universe is saturated with awareness and likely brimming with life and intelligence. If you were the universe and alive before the beginning of time, you would create novelty, invention, creativity. You would champion diversity and decentralization, so all the fragments of yourself could be empowered to self-organize, and become sovereign. And God like. Like yourself.

He’s convinced that we’ve built the foundation of a new super cycle of how we connect and transact each other, and of how we construct our civilization.

“The tools, components and infrastructure necessary for Web3 are ready now to support the killer apps that will define the next generation of hot virtual neighborhoods and killer ecosystems.”

Or, in the words of Tim Draper, US venture capitalist:

Embrace the change. Love the change. Trust the people and set them free.

I’d love to go on, but that’s for later.

Day 3 awaits and I can’t wait to share my full reflections with you in the coming days. Follow me on Twitter for short-form updates.

Talk soon,

– Marc

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