EthCC offered a lot of talks that discussed different approaches to improving blockchain scalability with Casper, Plasma, and sharding. If you want to learn more about the topic, we recommend Karl Floersch’s energetic talk on these topics. In the short-term, we also find the upcoming ERC-777 token standard very exciting. Among other things, the standard brings improvements in the protection of users from locking tokens and losing money; we have already heard that some startups are planning on using the ERC-777 standard for their tokens in their upcoming crowdsales, instead of the better-known ERC-20. And we can’t wait for the Swarm team to bring the Swarm Orange Summit to Ljubljana in May!

Among the various presentations and discussions, we spotted a great number of startups who already have a beta version of their product deployed to the Kovan Ethereum test network with plans of releasing their smart contracts to the mainnet after thorough testing. We are certainly excited about seeing more startups focused on building products before going into an ICO and not relying only on whitepapers. This is in line with the overall trend of tokens becoming more tightly connected to the actual utility of the products. For a short and sweet summary of token model trends, we recommend watching the talk by Evan van Ness (disclosure: Evan is our advisor).

Even though we were very interested in the latest technical innovations, we also enjoyed talks that challenged us to discuss the ethics, privacy, and social impact of the technology we’re building. For instance, DataFund’s Gregor Žavcer reminded us about the value that can be extracted from our personal data. Several other talks also emphasized the importance of greater diversity — something we value highly at Cofound.it — and the need for better user experiences that are more welcoming to less experienced users.

If you want to catch up with some of the #EthCC talks, check out the recordings of the livestream. For the Cofound.it tech team, the next big event will be EDCON in Toronto at the beginning of May — we hope to see you there, or at other upcoming events!