Network States and Castles in the Sky | TOKEN2049 Day 1 Morning Session
What does Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky have to do with crypto and blockchain? Well, turns out the beloved anime was the inspiration behind the logo of what eventually became Ethereum, the second biggest blockchain network today behind Bitcoin.
This little nugget of trivia was revealed by Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin as he gave his keynote speech at TOKEN2049, explaining that “blockchain enables us to build ‘castles in the sky’ the way physical concrete enables the building of physical buildings’ in order to provide protection and utility to its inhabitants.
Happening on Sep 18 to 19 in Singapore at Marina Bay Sands, TOKEN2049 is the largest event on the crypto calendar, with over 20,000 attendees and 400+ exhibitors comprising leading blockchain institutions, investors and platforms including CoinW, one of the event’s platinum sponsors.
With a global active user base of over 13 million, CoinW is one of the fastest-growing exchanges on the scene today, offering a suite of cutting-edge trading tools for traders in over 200 countries and regions. As a strategic partner of Dubai Blockchain Center, the Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy, the Abu Dhabi Blockchain Center and the UAE Ministry of Economy, CoinW is also playing an active role in blockchain innovation, incubation and education.
What Makes Vitalik Buterin Excited about the Next Decade
Speaking from beyond a protective barricade of bodyguards, Buterin expressed optimism about how far blockchain as an industry has come. “We are no longer early to crypto. We are early to crypto being usable.”
Titling his speech “What Excites Me About the Next Decade,” Buterin shared that technological innovation was no longer the differentiator between tradfi and defi. After all, the ease of payments and low fees that defi used to offer, players like Venmo and Wechat Pay can also do now. In order to achieve healthy adoption over the next few years, affordability needs to be improved, he said, pointing to rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism effectively addressing this market need. “We don’t need to sacrifice decentralization for practicality or vice versa, we can do both,” he said to loud applause from the crowd.
Prior to Buterin’s speech, another crowd favorite, Balaji Srinivasan, an investor and author of “The Network State” caught the imagination of attendees with his speech on the concept of technodemocracy, which envisions a future where like-minded individuals can form virtual communities that evolve into real-world polities, leveraging cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, and digital networks to establish governance structures, economies, and even physical territories.
Yet another speaker who received a strong reception from the crowd was Arthur Hayes, co-founder and former CEO of BitMEX. Sharing his thoughts on investing in an environment where US Fed interest rates make or break all markets, Hayes cautioned that there will be a high probability of a market collapse if rate cuts exceed that expected by the market.
At the same time, he explained that the ETH bull market will be reignited if the market expects T-bill yield to drop below 4%, as ETH bonds will become more attractive by comparison (with a staking yield of 4%).
