Last Updated: 07/29/2022

We virtually attended the Ethereum Community Conference #5 (ETHCC 5) in Paris last week. ETHCC is an annual three-day event dedicated to exploring the intersection of Ethereum technology and community. Outside of the Ethereum Developers Conference (to be held this fall in Bogota, Colombia), ETHCC is one of the larger and more important gatherings for the protocol. This year’s ETHCC comprised of over 250 speakers across six separate stages: Builders, developers, and leaders in the Ethereum community gave talks and held workshops that confirmed our bullish thesis on ETH and reaffirmed our confidence in our long-term price targets.

Protocol supporters have treated the multi-stage endeavor of network development like the Tour de France: a lengthy journey conquering rugged crypto terrain, but their persistence has yielded results. Here are the key highlights, plus a few other notable themes that validated our thinking on where the Ethereum ecosystem is headed in the coming years.

Key Takeaways

  1. Rollups emerged as scaling solution winners and the primary medium for expanding block space on the network. Layer 2 rollups, like Arbitrum and Optimism, are Ethereum-compatible but separate chains that batch activity to decrease the number of transactions happening at the base execution layer. They remain pillars of growth for the Ethereum ecosystem.
  2. Multiple themes, iterations, and implementations of portable web3 identities via user wallets are beginning to emerge in a notable way.
  3. Cross-chain messaging applications are in the process of being built and will transform how users communicate in decentralized environments.
  4. After the Merge occurs, potentially during the week of September 19th, roughly 50% of base-level Ethereum primitives will be complete. Important future milestones like sharding, data availability enhancements, and other data management changes will eventually increase network throughput to 100k transactions per second and lower gas fees (see ‘Future Protocol Roadmap’ below).
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