Photo credit Joseph Lubin

As some investors fly home from Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting this weekend, I’m leaving Toronto, which was home to the second annual Community Ethereum Development Conference (EDCON). About 900 people attended the conference (a 3x increase from last year), mostly software developers and startups.

The EDCON organizers put together a great event, and this really felt like a community-driven conference. Folks from the Ethereum Foundation, the Ethereum Community Fund, and Consensys had major speaking roles, but the conference was actually organized by a blockchain development company called LinkTime, and members of the community were great MCs and contributors.

After three great days of content and meeting folks in the Ethereum community in Toronto, here are my five key takeaways from the event:

1. Community is one of Ethereum’s most important assets

Despite the amount of hype that crypto gets in the media, this is still a relatively small, tight-knit community. For example, it was great to hear from Thomas Greco how a number of well-funded projects such as Omise Go, Cosmos, Golem, Maker, and Raiden, were able to pool $100M+ in funds to create the ECF - Ethereum Community Fund to make grants to projects building blockchain infrastructure and tooling.

Thomas Greco presenting the ECF Founding Members

The willingness and dedication of many different companies, foundations, funds, and non-profits to support the Ethereum platform and ecosystem is one of Ethereum’s most important competitive advantages, and this was highlighted in my interactions with people through at EDCON.

2. Scaling is front and center for researchers and developers

The topic of scaling was the most popular topic of the conference, and attendees got to hear the latest on the progress of both Layer 1 (solutions that require core protocol level changes like sharding) and Layer 2 (solutions that don’t require changes to core protocol like state channels and Plasma) scaling solutions.

All-star scaling panel with Vitalik Buterin, Vlad Zamfir, Philip Daian, Joseph Poon, Karl Floersch, Hsiao-Wei Wang, Justin Drake (MC: Jon Choi)

Everyone agrees that the current state of Ethereum, where there is a maximum of 15 transactions per second (TPS), is not sufficient for a world of thousands or millions of dApps, but no one really knows how much improvement in TPS each of these solutions will deliver.

Right now, the core research team’s approach is to work on all of them simultaneously (with support from community members), make sure individual solutions are composable, and see how much they can improve performance while maintaining the core tenants of security and decentralization.

3. Devs need to spend more time thinking about customers

One of my favorite talks was by the CEO of Paradex, a decentralized ERC20 exchange built on the 0x Protocol. His key takeaways were that dApps need to stop making excuses for bad user experiences and start building apps thats users actually want to use.

In addition to spending more time thinking about what consumers want, there was a missed opportunity to get developers from Ethereum Enterprise Alliance companies to discuss what they are building and how blockchain is being used to solve problems for their companies and customers.

4. We need to spend more time analyzing blockchain data

Several of the most interesting sessions were researchers and companies who took the audience on a guided tour of actual blockchain data. For example, did you know that 50%+ of the transactions on Ethereum over the last month have been between users and smart contracts? What a great demonstration of the power of a smart contracting platform.

Check out live data on Amberdata

In addition to Ethereum data, we can also use data from Github, other blockchains, mining pools, and exchanges. One article recommended by multiple speakers on this topic was Quantifying Decentralization by Balaji S. Srinivasan, CTO of Coinbase. This is a great piece that lays out a framework for how to measure and compare key data across different data sources in order to define the real benefits of blockchain.

5. Growth generates lots of excitement and many new questions

I love stepping into a room of mission-driven founders who are working on projects because they believe they are changing the world. The Ethereum Foundation’s vision of a “more globally accessible, more free and more trustworthy Internet” is certainly a reflection of the community’s heartbeat, and it leads to a lot of excitement because this is a game-changing opportunity.

However, as Ethereum continues to grow, the community is going to come up against many difficult questions. Some that came to mind this week were:

How much do customers truly value decentralization, and when do we know when we have “enough” decentralization in a blockchain?

How do dApps make money? What portions of traditional, “legacy” business models stick around in a decentralized world?

How do we measure blockchain’s promise to make the world a better place? What are the KPIs?

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I’m looking forward to the rest of 2018 and continuing to be a part of the growth of the Ethereum and crypto ecosystem. Hopefully we will get around to answering some of these tough questions, and if you have thoughts, hit me up on Twitter! @danielxli