This year was my first year attending ETH Denver. I came in expecting a conference for ETH maxies where other chains would be largely ignored in favor of the raining champion. What I found was incredibly jarring.
It is important to note before we get going that this is an opinion piece based on my personal experience and conversations I had with attendees. This is not investment advice or a realistic health check on the ETH token. With that said, let’s get into it.
Right out of the gate it was obvious that there was a large purple elephant in the room. That elephant’s name was ETH 2.0. I know it has been a fair bit of time since the initial announcement but if there is one place I would expect to see enthusiasm living healthy it would be with the people and companies that have been building in the ETH ecosystem for the last few years. To my surprise not only was there a total lack of spark on the subject but the topic seemed almost taboo. Every time I brought it up the conversation was quickly changed to a different topic or ended.
The other striking thing was how prominent other chains were at the conference. Not only were the most viable ETH alternatives present but there were almost more logos from Near protocol than ETH plastered on the walls.
This continued as the conference went on. I personally work in the Cosmos Ecosystem and when people found this out I wasn’t hit with questions about what I was doing there or opinions on why ETH was better than Cosmos. On the contrary, people would flood me with questions about how Cosmos could solve their technical challenges. This kind of openness to alternatives was honestly refreshing but still somewhat troubling when approaching it from the perspective of Etherium.
If I had to summarize what I saw I would say people are over the hype of ETH 2.0. They have waited for a long time to have the solution to the issues that have existed with ETH since the beginning. Even though it was promised a long time ago there is little faith that the next big update will come in time to solve the issues projects are having today. Especially when there are other chains and ecosystems already built out that can pick up the slack.
I plan on attending ETH Denver next year and will be cheering ETH 2.0 from the sidelines but at this point, I don’t think I will be building anything new on Etherium. The community there is great but the simple fact remains that the tech is outdated and moving too slow to catch up.