If last year’s ETHDenver signaled crypto is back, this year’s event says crypto is here to stay. After the grind of the Biden administration, licking wounds post-FTX and a crypto winter that rivalled Buffalo in February, things have finally thawed. 

It’s been a big year for crypto – super PACs raising record amounts in D.C., the approval of the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, Bitcoin hitting an all-time high, and the change of administration with Gensler out on the curb. 

ETHDenver, the world’s biggest Ethereum event, which kicks off this Thursday, will be a cause for celebration. This is the seventh instalment of ETHDenver and is the year of the regenerates. 

“It’s the Avengers meets ETHDenver,” said the event’s founder John Paller. “We’ve turned our previous year’s characters into superheroes. It’s like you’re in a comic book, a choose-your-own-adventure experience, with fun creative collisions happening everywhere.” 

There’s about 30,000 applications this year, and while it’s not the 2021 NFT boom numbers (closer to 45,000 attendees), Paller said this year is more high signal. “The opportunists aren’t coming right now. The people who are here are really hardcore believers and curious in how this is going to take shape,” he said. “They’re paying attention to social innovations in addition to technological innovations.” 

Although we now have an administration that’s much more favorable toward technology, it’s not all fun and games. Regulatory clarity will continue to be a hot topic this year, regarding both investing and innovation. Bo Hines, the executive director for President Trump’s Council on Digital Assets, will be speaking. “We’re looking forward to hearing from Bo and his team on what the actual plan is going to be,” Paller said. “What I’ve heard so far is very positive for the space..” The Trump administration has yet to make good on most of its promises to the industry. 

John Paller

Restaking, DeFi, gaming and infrastructure will be important tracks this year, Paller said. There’s no specific AI track because it applies to everything, he added. AI, and more specifically, AI agents, is the big narrative shift this year. 

Web3 isn’t all kumbaya 

User experience (UX) is an ongoing issue in web3. Paller believes AI is the solution for UX and mass adoption. 

“AI agents can be trained and programmed, whether in a dApp, a community or even as a personal agent in a dashboard. At scale, projects could build assistants into all the things that people need to do” he said. “So, let’s say I want to join a community that has to have me stake tokens from some wallet in order to vote, I could tell it to vote on this proposal and it’ll do it for me.” 

That type of evolution of the technology doesn’t “just move the needle but opens the floodgates,” he said. “You’re going to see AI applications on just about everything.” 

Political association aside, big names are putting blockchain on the radar of the masses. Elon Musk has recently said we should put the entire treasury and budget on the blockchain. It seems, for the first time in crypto’s history, it’s in the public discourse. 

With tens of thousands of the brightest and bullish minds in blockchain under one roof, this year’s ETHDenver is set to celebrate the spirit of the moment.