Crypto Conferences Wrap-Up: Insights from ETHDenver and the Mobile World Congress
As the first quarter of 2024 ends, the crypto industry has also seen the conclusion of major events, including ETHDenver. The 2018-launched mythical event has grown as the industry matures, becoming a crucial venue for founders and community members to observe new developments across the crypto ecosystem.
In addition, crypto and blockchain took center stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The event, which took place last week, hosted over 100,000 attendees from over 200 countries and 2,700 exhibitors from different tech sectors.
We sat down with Claudia Richoux, Founder and CEO of Banyan, and Sheraz Ahmed, Managing Partner at STORM, to discuss these conferences and get a behind-the-scenes look at the trends and key topics for the industry now and in the future. This is what they told us:
ETHDenver: A Chat With Filecoin-Based Banyan Founder Claudia Richoux
Claudia Richoux founded Banyan on top of the Filecoin network to empower users and give them control over their data. In that sense, the project is an alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS), as it pushes for data sovereignty and price optimization for startups and companies.
Q: What do you think about ETHDenver? What’s the sentiment and overall vibe at the conference, and what are people talking about behind the scenes?
Claudia:
(…) people have been talking a lot about crypto and AI stuff and decentralized compute because that’s really, really exciting. A lot of things like Filecoin (…) we’ve all built storage and so now it’s time to figure out compute; computes really exciting, (it’s) like 60% of most AWS bills that you’re going to see from startups.
So, being able to undercut the prices there and open up more freedom to compute on different platforms is super exciting. That’s something that I’ve seen a lot of the Filecoin stuff. And then at the Ethereum stuff, I’ve seen a lot of re-staking stuff. I went to some ZK (Zero Knowledge) and scaling events that were really interesting as well, and there were a lot of cool toolkits coming out.
Q: Why is data storage and cloud storage so important and why would they be important in the future? And maybe you can talk a little bit about Banyan and what you guys do?
Claudia:
Yeah, for sure. So I mean, a lot of people come at decentralization from the angle of, “oh, it’s so important that we can’t get censored.” And that’s important. However, it’s not important to 90% of the market because most startups are not worried they’re going to get censored. Most large enterprises are not worried that they’re going to get censored. What they are worried about coming from AWS is that AWS is just going to charge them in the same amount of money. Their business will be incredibly dependent on that, (and) there’s nothing they can do and they’re just kind of stuck and they’re (spending) a huge amount of their runway is going into the pocket of AWS.
So I think decentralization is really interesting. Less for the censorship angle, more for the idea of competition. So yeah, if you have 10 different service providers, all of which you can trust because of some combination of cryptographic incentives
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