Closing Ceremony

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you all for coming. Thank you for supporting us. This is DEPCON 2025.

And yeah, I would also like to, of course, thank our sponsors who made this possible, and especially also thanking Amman for organizing this and all the team on the ground. So let's give them a round of applause. So we have been doing now DEPCON for a while, actually started in 2018. And I thought like maybe it's time to look back and like explain again why we actually started this. So notice, as some of you might know, like we started as a part of Consensus, building decentralized applications.

And actually Consensus itself also had this goal, like Ethereum Foundation is building the core infrastructure layer and Consensus is building the application layer on top. That was basically the idea why Consensus was started. And well, we were there from the very beginning and in 2018, well when we looked around, there were actually not that many applications. There was already a lot of infrastructure, but not many apps. And we always, for us it was always very clear like infrastructure has to be built for a purpose.

It has to serve someone. And just building infrastructure for the sake of building infrastructure is not making sense. Someone has to build these applications. And also we saw it as a big opportunity. If you're building applications, users will interface with the applications.

And if you're building applications, you are owning the user. There's big value capture there. And that was also one of the reasons why we started Safe, by the way, or previously the North Multisig. Not purely as a public good, but also because it's an opportunity. And yeah, surprisingly, I took a screenshot using the web archive.

This was the state of dApps in 2018 when we did the first dAppCon. And you see like the top application in this case was something called Hypersnakes. It had 4,000 users. That was the absolutely top application. We had the exchanges.

Uniswap was not there yet. So we had like other exchanges like IDEX. It was the number one exchange with 1,000 users per day. NFC started to be sort of relevant. The CryptoPunks had 7 users in the last 24 hours.

There was even already OpenSea. But yeah, it was kind of one of the top applications with like 141 users. And so yeah, it was very obvious like there's not a lot happening yet on the dApp layer. We see that kind of the first seeds were planted, but there were not many users. And we saw by creating dAppCon, we are putting in focus on application building, try to get builders together to understand what can be built in order to make the infrastructure more used and useful.

And yeah, that was kind of the initial idea of dAppCon. We have done it almost every year with one exception during COVID. And yeah, I think now jumping ahead, where are we today? Then surprisingly, I would say there's still a very strong focus on infrastructure. Like this year, it's now dAppRadar again, but from yesterday.

And we see like the number of users in the last 24 hours. It's basically mostly Uniswap. And then OneInch, and I think somewhere there's Cowswap as well, number 10. And then there's something called BananaGun. And then if you look at the infrastructure layer, meanwhile, there's L2B, the platform that lists all the Layer 2s, as you know.

There are 73 Layer 2s that are currently being operational, and there's 82 more in the development. And this is all like all people and funding being applied to create even more box space that frankly nobody needs. And it's a misallocation of capital in the industry. And it's kind of a bit sad to see this, to be honest, because ultimately, what we do is we're building a lot of infrastructure, but we do not serve enough users to actually justify this investment. And that's also one of the reasons why we try to kind of still focus on many things that are really where the user stance is in the focus, and where we hope we can actually create a more vibrant ecosystem for people to actually do stuff that are not necessarily speculative.

As mentioned, two Gnosis projects, GnosisPay and Circles, have been created with this intention in mind. But there are also others that are quite exciting, like FireWords. They're also here. They're building basically a kind of Google Docs, but in a decentralized way, integrating a lot of the crypto primitives, which make it a unique experience. So that's kind of where we are right now.

Now, that's also not the full truth, because there are successful parties that are benefiting from all of this, and that is companies like Coinbase. There's also, again, from the same time stamp from yesterday, how many people are actually operating on Layer 2 that are the most successful. In this case, Base is right now the most successful Layer 2, and we have about 20 times more users on Base compared to Ethereum today. And, well, it is problematic, because obviously those are basically networks driven by centralized exchanges that are not necessarily value aligned with what we had in mind. And I think that was just something that has happened recently.

Coinbase started sponsoring basically the parade of the US Army, and that's how this photo came about. And I think it cannot be more obvious that this is not a credibly neutral platform, like Ethereum intends to be. At the same time, there's an American company that hugely benefits from the research and development, literally billions of dollars spent on basically creating the underlying infrastructure that now they can benefit from. And to have another graph that kind of underlines this here is from the wallet report by dune.com, they are tracking, in this case, their self-custodial wallets.

And there are two charts here that I picked out. One is just the pure transfers that were done via this wallet. Again, they are all like self-custody wallets. And, well, one big spike at the end is basically Binance. Binance changing their strategy to be doing things more on-chain again.

And, of course, they own distribution, they own the users, they can decide how infrastructure is being centralized, and that's why we have this insane spike at the very end. But also, if you would remove Binance from this, basically the market is mostly divided by centralized exchanges, which are directing the users to now use more self-custody solutions, which are obviously also mostly operational on their own networks. The second chart also underlines this, which is basically the volume that's being traded. You see here MetaMask by ConsenSys. That was a really dominating wallet over the years.

It's now declining comparatively compared to basically the wallets promoted by centralized exchanges. So here we are, centralized exchanges are eating our lunch, and we have to do something, because otherwise we end up in a world where basically entire retail is basically owned by a few parties, which are not really aligned with our own values. And just to explain kind of an overview of what are the centralized exchanges currently doing, we have Coinbase, obviously a building base, based on optimism. Same like Binance, Binance Smart Chain has a fork of initially Guess and Eragon. And yeah, basically all of the bigger centralized exchanges that have enough resources, they are able to piggyback on the technology that we built and basically have the value capture because they own the distribution.

So now, I think Vitalik wrote a year ago or two years ago this post in terms of what do we need to do in order to get ready for mass adoption. And yeah, he lists scalability at this point. As we saw, we have basically unlimited block base available, so we can consider this being solved. User experience has drastically improved through account abstraction, also fine. Security, I think we made major improvements.

If North Korea is coming after you, it should be pretty fine. Privacy is still something that we are working on, but there are also many solutions which are being worked on, which will become viable. One thing that we kind of completely neglected is distribution, and that is obviously ultimately what matters if you want to be successful and actually also define, frankly, like how the future will be. And that's why I encourage every one of us to really think about how do we do distribution. There's not a silver bullet of how we do this.

And honestly, it's also different, obviously, to compete with someone like Coinbase or Binance. And that's why you have to basically pick your battles, and you have to understand how can you be different from the competition, how can you do something that is better and fundamentally adds more value to your users than what Binance and Coinbase are trying to do, which is not easy because they're actually pretty good at building products, but it is possible, and that's what we're trying to do with Nosis Pay and Circus as well. We try to understand, okay, what are the pain points of our users, where can we go, and of course, like if you compete with someone who can operate globally, you basically have to go locally. You have to understand what can you do on a smaller scale, better than everyone else, and kind of go bottom-up in order to be relevant. Yeah, that is concluding my presentation today.

I hope it is, again, like it's something where I hope we can be, let's say, optimistic about the future, but we also have to realize what the problems are, we have to realize what we have to tackle on, because otherwise we give it to Binance and Coinbase, and that's really not what I would like to do. So I encourage everyone thinking about distribution. There are a lot of people that are pitching ideas to me, and my first question is usually like, okay, this sounds all great, but it will be commoditized, and how do you distribute it? And I think that has to be almost the first question that we have to ask ourselves, how do we distribute what we build, because otherwise someone else is going to benefit from it. Thank you.