Notes from «Ded» in Singapore. Day four. End of the TOKEN2049
Disclaimer: the views or opinions expressed in this material are the personal position of the author and may not coincide with the opinion of the Incrypted editorial team.
Token2049 is officially over… as are 656 side-events. There were only four days for all of this, which seems a bit short to me, but we’ll talk about the length a bit later. Up next, Solana Breakpoint… and 133 more side events. Then it’s two days on the road and home sweet home.
The main narratives that are in the air in Singapore during the conference:
- AI and all its possible combinations with Web3.
It looks like it’s with us for the long haul, also because with available APIs, Big Data and trainable models, things have gotten a lot easier to use. They can be bought as in a store - Memes, memepads, and everything related to that. By the way, later I will tell about memecoin, which was created at the TRON stand.
- The TON ecosystem — and it’s not just tap game and mini-apps. It’s also lending protocols, Curve on TON, and so on. The tools that every ecosystem needs to fully develop.
- Interoperability, crosschain, and that’s about it. Most liquidity is on Ethereum, and bridges are an unreliable thing. It’s a mess.
- Abstractions for end-users and frameworks for developers. Anything that makes it easier to interact with complex technical stuff. Developers get the ability to create smart contracts and tokens in a conditional one click, and end-users get all those transaction confirmations, complex addresses and other things ‘under the hood’.
About the duration of Token2049. At first I thought that with so many stands, speakers, visitors and partners it would be possible to stretch the conference for 4–5 days. But then I came to the conclusion that the key word here is ‘stretch’.
If you have specific goals for the conference, you have done your homework, prepared lists, arranged meetings, then one day will be enough for you. And if you came just to go back and forth, then God is your judge — what difference does it make whether it lasts two days or five.
To continue the theme of the awesomeness of such events. Networking happens everywhere, because everywhere you look there are guys with Token2049 badges and bracelets. It’s inspiring because you realize you’re not part of a ‘PYRAMUD’ or ‘BLEH ON YOUR BITHOVEN’. You are part of a huge global community united by some common ideas. There are many of us, we’re all different, but we’re on the same page.
For example, during a dinner late at night in a restaurant, we saw the badges and got to talking. A team of young guys — a guy and a girl from Argentina and another guy from Colombia — flew 33 hours to Solana Breakpoint to set up a booth and talk about their project. They haven’t seen any money in their eyes yet, haven’t raided anything, but they flew halfway across the world to develop what they believe in.
Then in front of the entrance to the hotel is a guy from Germany, who is doing some incredibly complicated work to license his CEX|DEX in different jurisdictions from Germany and Lithuania to Malta and Latin America.
And someone has written down a meme or a tap game and is walking around looking important like Satoshi Nakamoto.
Do you remember when I told you about the meme that was being shared at the TRON stand? Well, it was Twiskers, and I looked to see what happened to it.
It didn’t really take off, at its peak it was only around 2-2.5x. But, apparently, there was nothing else besides shilling at the conference, because Twitter is dead with one post and 180 friends. This is just a sketch from the life of memecoins, no conclusions.
On a cheerful note, yesterday we came to another event. It was supposed to be a VC event. At the entrance, they don’t ask for tickets, we go up to the roof, and there are a lot of strange people, a guy in a bear mask and somehow a low IQ level, average for a ruffian. It turns out that I have a low IQ, because the location is right, we’ve come to the right place, but our event is tomorrow. Ram.
Today is the first day of Solana Breakpoint, where I would like to learn more about Solana phone, because there are a lot of questions and few answers. I need to understand what is happening in the Solana ecosystem, what are the moods, narratives, and perspectives, and I will talk about this tomorrow.
P.S. Shocking content about Singapore: chewing gum is not sold anywhere here, and you can’t import it. The team also makes fun of me because I write water essays about nothing. I love you too, assholes.
