Franklin @ ETH Denver 2023 Recap

This year marked Franklin’s first ETHDenver event, and in our case, the most important part was getting to spend time together as a mostly remote team. But we definitely saw some cool projects, met frens IRL, and renewed our love of all things web3.

Our takeaways from all of the amazing projects and conversations:

2023 feels like the year of the zkEVM. A bunch of great projects showed up:

• Matter Labs aka era: https://matter-labs.io/

• Risc Zero https://www.risczero.com/

• Scroll: https://scroll.io/

• Polygon zkEVM: https://www.polygon.technology/polygon-zkevm

• Taiko: https://taiko.xyz/

zkEVMs will increase Ethereum network scalability as well as build the foundation for zero-knowledge enables dApps.

Another hot topic during the conference were wallets. The inaugural WalletCon conference did not disappoint! With the surprise announcement of account abstraction available on ethereum mainnet — a whole new world of potential UX experiences is waiting to be built. Check out ERC-4337 to learn more.

Uniswap announced their own wallet now available on test flight. The move to mobile for crypto wallet clients has been a difficult one, with the Apple app store limiting their listing ability.

Perhaps the most stylish wallet client who has Issey Miyake swag in their store, Disco.xyz, takes a more identity driven approach to the concept of wallets, bringing in offchain information that can be selectively shared with other applications.

And then there was gaming. There was a weird dissonance walking through the main floor of the venue. It smelled vaguely of the cattle that we heard were the standard attendees of events at the National Western Complex. But after rounding a corner on the main floor there was a large futuristic arcade that gaming projects set up to showcase their tech. We counted at least 8 gaming projects in with games available to play around with at the main venue.

Pickleball Tournament

The competition at the Pickleball tournament we hosted with CMT Digital was fierce. We ended up having 10 teams enter and some people hanging out casually hitting the ball around. Honorable mentions go out to the Palm Tree Crew, JJ from Soul Wallet, Matt from Taiko, but the ultimate prize went to the team from Index Coop, who from the moment they entered said they were there to win.

Congrats to crews.eth and c-squared.eth on your epic win. See you next year!

To learn more about how to pay your teams in cash and crypto in a tax compliant way, hit us up!