BTC Miami is over and we’ve wrapped up a couple of hot and humid days in Miami!
BTC Miami wasn’t the only event in town as most people in the crypto ecosystem saw the week as a chance to reunite with old friends and colleagues. Over the week, discussions and events were held for just about every network you can think of.
In terms of the real meat of events, BTC Miami is one to talk about for what was often described as ‘cringe worthy’,but there were also many other types of events, including investor/project happy hours or parties, and smaller private dinners.
Some of what we saw included:
https://twitter.com/titodurriz/status/1400997001861296129
https://twitter.com/cryptocobain/status/1401261909240864777
Which led to some thinking around whether this is a local top:
https://twitter.com/0xtuba/status/1401268256497930250
Outside of the fun, here are three trends that stood out during the week:
1. Builders are more excited to build than ever
While we no longer see many large scale primitives like Compound being introduced, we’re still seeing an enormous design space that plugs into the existing ecosystem on Ethereum. One project is Greenwood, which aggregates the best interest rates across protocols like Compound and Aave. Projects like Greenwood aim to make it easier for users to participate in DeFi without having more extensive knowledge. We’re also seeing projects outside of DeFi like JPG, focused more on NFTs and describing itself as a registry-based curation protocol.
The last area where we’re seeing more primitive-like projects includes fixed lending and undercollateralized borrowing. An example of this is Spectral Finance, which is also using on-chain transaction history. On-chain history is being considered more often to establish your financial and social history and will be considered in your future interactions with new projects.
2. Cross-chain and L2s continue to gain momentum
In other networks, there were comments that complimented networks like Celo, calling it “a dark horse for a thriving DeFi ecosystem”. We also saw a lot of excitement at an event for the Algorand ecosystem co-hosted by Borderless Capital. This excitement was rooted by the number of traditional operators and investors that are entering the space and trying to understand how to participate.
3. Solana steals the spotlight
The one network we wanted to highlight is Solana. We have increasingly begun to hear more questions about and interest in Solana. Some community members are simply wondering what our take is, what projects are interesting vs others actively deploying capital into the ecosystem. A large part of what has brought interest to the Solana ecosystem has been the team over at FTX. FTX is one of the juggernauts of crypto through its exchange, and it’s expanding into acquisitions that include naming rights for the Miami Heat AmericanAirlines Arena and e-sports company, TSM.
However, there is a lot of noise, so let us know if you’re keeping up and what you’re watching.
If you’re reading this and saying “wow that’s a lot about other networks, but wasn’t this week about BTC?”. It seems to us that the event was more sparkle and dazzle, but Bitcoin also doesn’t need a booming and growing DeFi ecosystem to thrive.
Thank you for reading.
