ETHDenver’s ‘Buttoning Up’ as it Matures Into the Mainstream
It looks to get a bit more serious at the largest Ethereum gathering this year
Expect to see fewer purple unicorns and no toilet paper rolls embossed with SBF’s face this year at ETHDenver – they’re getting serious. As the world’s largest live-action web3 experiment, playfulness and policy discussions are about to co-exist.
With some distance from the FTX collapse, this year’s event promises productive conversations to take web3 to the masses – centering on policy, regulation and usability, and the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
ETHDenver Co-Founder John Paller says we’re in an important transitional phase and are going to be exploring how all of this will actually work in the real world. Part of this is tackling tough questions like why we haven’t made more progress and how to mitigate crypto’s trade-offs and give people technology that’s cheaper, better and faster.
“We’re going to see a lot of inertia being put behind how we trigger mass adoption, not just in our own little echo chamber,” Paller said to me in an interview. He also hinted at a renaissance in the DAO communities and next-generation DeFi platforms. “The fidelity of these things improve, lessons are learned, people upgrade from past thinking, and when we’re doing this in a community setting it gets accelerated,” he said.
The elephant in the room
Even with 25,000 of the brightest minds in the space coming together to solve these problems, we’ve still got Gary Gensler running the SEC.
John Paller
“We’re going to spend a lot of time talking about regulatory clarity because we don’t have open roads and green fields for crypto innovators in the United States,” Paller said. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, Colorado Securities Commissioner Tung Chan, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other politicians will all weigh in on these issues as speakers during the event.
Beyond what happens in Denver, Paller believes the most interesting unfolding of events to influence crypto will be the lead-up to the presidential election.
“The Biden campaign has been openly hostile to crypto, driven largely by Elizabeth Warren’s camp,” he said. “I don’t see how anyone who cares at all about the social-political goals of crypto and web3 would vote for Biden. Crypto isn’t political in the traditional sense, but in the functional sense it’s very political. It just so happens that we don’t ascribe to the existing sort of binary options. Most of us are political, but we don’t want the flavors that we’ve been given, so we’re building our own.”
“Regulation by anxiety” out of kilter with the American spirit
Christopher Giancarlo, the previous Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), believes the recent approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF signals that the worst of the repression of innovation is over. “With the election underway, there’s a lot of hopefulness that the SEC hostility will either be moderated in a second Biden term or completely reversed in a Republican government,” Giancarlo said to me.
We can expect to see more moderation towards crypto, in part because it’s attractive to younger voters which both parties are trying to appeal to, he said. Giancarlo added that a change of government or policy will likely usher in a “gold rush into this asset class by traditional finance.”
“Pursuing a policy of crypto hostility is unsustainable and it’s a minority position, even within the Democratic party,” he said. “I don’t see the antagonism toward crypto mirrored inside the CFTC or in leading members of the party, some of whom are very positive on crypto.”
Giancarlo said it’s unlikely any important crypto bills will pass after Memorial Day in an election year.
“What’s clear is that there’s not likely to be one singular regulator like the SEC. The current legislation would continue the American style divide between commodities under CFTC regulation and securities under SEC regulation. Both agencies are going to have a big role to play in the future,” he said.
With spokespeople from these agencies, a presidential candidate, and all sides of the industry under one roof, this year’s ETHDenver brings a surge in new optimism, beyond the beginning of the latest bull run.