Written by: Yangz, Techub News   From July 8th to July 11th, the 7th EthCC was held in Brussels, Belgium. As an annual Ethereum technology and community event, the conference invited 350 speakers and set up more than 500 peripheral activities. However, apart from the content of Vitalik’s speech, especially his thoughts on "The Ethereum network should deal with 51% attacks in a more automated way", and the report of the "century frame" of the three core founders of Ethereum on the 10th anniversary, Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin and Gavin Wood, there were not many other discussions in the industry. When browsing the posts about EthCC on Twitter, the author found that in addition to the project parties’ review of the event and the various group photos posted by KOLs, there were also many slots and interesting stories.   Full of slots   The first is the dissatisfaction of many participants with the venue of the conference, Brussels. Unlike previous years, due to the need for Paris to host the Olympic Games, this time EthCC was chosen to be held in Brussels, the capital of neighboring Belgium. However, many participants felt after the conference that "Brussels is great, but I won’t come next time."Some attendees reported that non-EU residents had to queue for 3-4 hours when passing through customs at Brussels Airport, which was a very bad experience (of course, this does not seem to be the fault of the organizers of EthCC). In addition, the security issue of the venue has also become a major criticism of this EthCC. Many attendees said that they were robbed near the venue, and "many thugs target cryptocurrency people." @0xmarcello recalled that in less than a week, he was not only hit by a car, but also broke his phone. When he went to the Apple store to buy a new phone, he met many "same-suffering" attendees, which was "really miserable." The hardware wallet OneKey also took advantage of this and listed a "Travel Anti-Theft Guide for Crypto Practitioners" (do the operators have to get extra chicken legs?). Although the organizers strengthened security measures after the incident and advised attendees not to show the conference logo in public, this bad experience may be difficult to erase from the minds of attendees.In addition, the agenda setting of this EthCC has also been criticized by many. Some people reported that the main venue was sparsely populated, and some people reported that the surrounding activities were unpopular. In short, the on-site conditions of different activities varied greatly. Unlike the packed venue when Vitalik delivered his keynote speech, many surrounding activities may not have so many listeners. @rexstjohn, a member of the Anza team, developer of the Solana client Agave, posted photos of himself participating in an Aptos-related peripheral event. Obviously, the audience was very few. This also makes people wonder, is it necessary to set up more than 500 peripheral activities? Or is it just to highlight the "grandness" of the event?As for the conference theme, @cryptobuilder_ used the picture below to summarize the key points of this year’s EthCC discussion, including zero-knowledge (zk), multi-party computing (MPC), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), artificial intelligence (AI) and trusted execution environment (TEE).As a technology event, there seems to be nothing wrong with EthCC discussing these things, but Blockworks co-founder Mike Ippolito commented, "Last year, I ended my EthCC journey with great enthusiasm, but this year I found it difficult to find a common theme for the event. The excessive number of peripheral activities caused the entire event to be very fragmented. The worst thing is, there are no applications." Nate Hindman, a member of the Molecule team of DeSci funding platform and former head of Bancor growth, also commented that the most common comment he heard during this conference was "boring." Sandy Carter, COO of Unstoppable Domains, wrote in Forbes that "the conference delves into complex topics such as protocol optimization, smart contract security, and scaling solutions, providing deep insights for people with a technical background. However, there is a clear lack of content for business leaders, policymakers, and newcomers to the blockchain field who do not have a technical background." Interestingly, a story shared by @cryptobuilder_ indirectly confirms the problem of "more technology and less applications" in this conference. According to his description, when Vitalik and zkSync founder Alex Gluchkowski and others were having a panel discussion on the topic of privacy, a participant sitting in the middle of the audience started painting his nails.Regarding the theme of the event, Antonio Juliano, founder of dydx, expressed his views from an industry perspective. Antonio said, "Over the past year, discussions about cryptocurrency have been repetitive," "I love my career because I can always feel the energy of the industry working together to create something new, ambitious, and meaningful. But now, I can't feel it. I no longer care about new infrastructure, venture capital, or the 10,001st DEX." Antonio pointed out that the question we need to think about is, "What are we building that people in the real world really care about? Is it something that can change the world?" Similar to Antonio, Tommy of Crypto.com also expressed his reflections on the current state of the industry from a general direction after a 1-on-1 exchange with participating project parties, VCs, and market makers. According to Tommy, many venture capitalists at the meeting said they were interested in consumer dApps, but looking at recent financing announcements, it is not difficult to find that the financing market is still dominated by infrastructure transactions. In addition, according to Tommy's understanding, VC's interest in investing in early-stage projects with high FDV is shrinking, and the FDV of many VC-backed projects is lower than the level in the last round of private financing. In addition, due to the overall poor performance of altcoins, many funds no longer have "bullets" in their hands. After communicating with the project parties participating in the conference, Tommy pointed out the problem of "old wine in new bottles" in the current industry. Just as the last round of securitization token projects turned into the current RWA narrative, many projects have added the label of "chain abstraction" to themselves, and most DePIN projects have also added "AI" elements to their branding strategies to attract the attention of venture capitalists. In Tommy's view, there is nothing wrong with repackaging, but it is not easy to find a narrative that the market can buy. The market is waiting for the next new narrative, not a narrative repackaged from the old narrative. In addition, not all narratives are "investable". For VCs, if they do not analyze the vertical field (product) and just blindly chase the narrative, they may invest in the hottest narrative in the wrong vertical field. In addition, after talking with the market makers attending the conference, Tommy found that the competition among market makers has become increasingly fierce.Some market makers competed to lower prices in order to win transactions. As project parties deepened their understanding of different market makers, the transparency advantage of market makers in negotiations was also disappearing.   No shortage of interesting things   Of course, in addition to various complaints, there were still many interesting things happening at this EthCC, such as the "on-chain wedding" held by Cami and David Phelps of Berachain, which made others envious.Similarly, @amelia_guertin organized a social experiment called "Crypto Soulmates" during EthCC. Amelia Guertin said, "Many crypto practitioners are immersed in their own small circles and cannot make new friends or establish deeper connections." To this end, she envisioned "matching" people in the crypto community by collecting the interests, values, personality traits, and wallet addresses (to understand on-chain behavior) of this year's EthCC attendees. Amelia Guertin said that the initial target of the experiment was 30 people, but 150 people filled out the questionnaire, and ultimately 120 people actually participated in the event. Judging from the feedback from the participants, the event was well received.In addition, "reuniting old friends" is a common pleasure at conferences, and it also appeared in this EthCC. Hudson Jameson, a former Ethereum Foundation developer and current Polygon VP, met four old friends during his trip to Brussels. At first, Jameson thought that the other party might just be an ordinary follower on Twitter, or knew him through the Ethereum Foundation or Polygon Labs, but after communicating, he found that the two parties met because of a football match of West Ham United Football Club. Jameson commented: "I don't know what this means, but this is the third most surprising thing on this trip and my favorite story." Indeed, as many participants reflected, this EthCC did have many shortcomings, but considering the manpower and material resources required to organize a conference, it may not be a big deal. Like Jameson, arranging the itinerary reasonably, not attending too many parties, and choosing to meet with old friends may bring more surprises than simply attending the conference. Future Vision Finally, the author would like to end with Jill Gunter of Espresso Systems's vision of future cryptocurrency conferences. “EthCC was great, but I don’t want to go to another conference. Instead, I want to go to an expo, a world expo for crypto. No more forums, no more speeches. Show me the future! Show me what you’re building! Let me touch it, feel it, use it!” Will the next EthCC in Cannes feel different?