It's been over a week since I've come home from EthDenver. I'm inspired by the builders advancing this space, and I'd love to share what I've learned. After attending the EthDenver talks and chatting with builders in between sessions or over meals, I'd break down the buzz into four main web3 trends:

1. Scaling DAOs

   Talk to Listen To: DAO Misadventures

   The sentiment toward DAOs at EthDenver is 50% excitement, 50% frustration. On one hand, builders are ecstatic about a future where users across web3 come together to build, invest, and create communities. On the other hand, nearly all active DAO members talk about the shortcomings of Discord, the hundred tools used to run a community, and the challenges of trusting anonymous peers to complete responsibilities. For example, in the talk above by Sam Harrison, Eric Arsenault, and John Lee talk about how consensus-building and rallying people towards a vision is a significant source of "DAO misadventures."

   Here's a set of problems DAO builders are sharing with me. First, DAOs are still working out how to find and onboard new members. (For example, Kristin Chen and top.gg building the discovery layer for DAOs.) Second, there's frustration around Discord. In particular the volume of spam, the difficulty of parsing dozens of channels for relevant info, and the repeated zigzag between Discord and third-party tools. Third, DAO leaders are working to figure out how to balance speed and democracy.

   I'm excited to see how DAO tooling and governance evolve over 2022.

2. The Creator Economy

   Talk to Listen To: The Future of the Creator Economy

   EthDenver saw a plethora of artists and musicians who've been drawn to web3 by better opportunities to monetize their creations and engage with fans. I heard stories like Daniel Allen's from artists, namely moments like the below.

   https://twitter.com/imdanielallan/status/1469067623774113795

   Collectors and artists are talking about platforms like Catalog Works, Sound.xyz, Soundmint, or Royal.io for sharing ownership of music or Quantum Art for photography.

   There are two trends to watch out for on the topic of the creator economy. First, both artists and fans are looking for new mediums to engage with one another. There's a search for what ownership of an artist's NFT means beyond discord access and social proof.

   Second, there's a search for new artforms to bring to web3. The most innovative of which is shibuya.xyz by pplpleasr, which allows the community to control the direction a long-form video narrative will go. Shibuya.xyz turns a traditionally static piece of art assembled by a single creator or team into a community-led initiative, where fans have a voice in how that art will be shaped. This, to me, is the next frontier.

3. The Post-Profile Picture NFT

   Talk to Listen To: NFTs - Beyond Art

   Amongst the attendees I spoke to, there is a general sentiment that the era of PFP NFTs is waning. NFT enthusiasts believe that blue chips will live, but as GaryV notes in the tweet below, most will be forgotten like the ICO boom of yesteryears.

   https://twitter.com/garyvee/status/1462521219287334915

   Thus, the narrative at EthDenver is what's next for NFTs. What new use cases will there be for digital ownership?

   Ben Lakoff's talk hints at what's next. He mentions the financialization of NFTs which includes such use cases as the renting of NFTs, use of NFTs as collateral, and NFTs as an identity layer online and perhaps someday offline. Charged Particles. which Ben leads, allows NFTs to become containers that hold additional assets inside of them. I anticipate we'll be seeing more NFT protocols built to bridge the offline world with what happens on-chain.

   In 2022, look out for more protocols providing the infrastructure for NFTs to expand to new use cases.

4. Solving Multichain

   Talk to Listen To: EVM Interoperability to Across Ecosystems

   Defi veterans will know the user experience pain of managing tokens across chains. For example, if you're providing liquidity to Curve on Avalanche, you can't see or interact with your tokens on Curve on Polygon from the same interface. Furthermore, if you wanted to move your tokens from pools in one chain to pools in another chain on the same protocol, you would need to bring your coins out of the tool, leverage a 3rd party bridge, then redeposit those coins.

   The last key trend I've noticed from EthDenver is making a multichain world simpler and more secure. Solutions here range from better bridges to protocols like LayerZero, which allows users to interact with protocols cross-chain. This means that a user with money on Chain A can farm on Chain B without having to deposit, borrow, bridge, swap, and deposit on the other chain. As a whole, builders in this sector are focusing either on making bridging more robust or abstracting chains away from the user, so users can focus on the journey they are trying to complete.

And that's a wrap. Four trends that seemed to be top of mind at EthDenver. I'll be writing more short articles and tweeting at @alxtsu. Will see you next time!