Ethereal Summit 2019: Exclusive Overview and Coverage

Hundreds of events taking place during Blockchain NYC week, with thousands of people around the world gathering for the latest cryptocurrency and blockchain projects and developments. Among them Ethereal Summit is a lynchpin event of NY Blockchain Week 2019.

Every year hundreds of participants gather in Brooklyn to partake in Ethereal.

It’s a much more relaxed and good vibes event, than more formal ones, such as Fluidity or Consensus. The colorful shirts, hair and relaxed clothing abound, the Ethereal summit kicked off on Friday with a line up full of ethereum related projects.

Talks of scalability, interoperability and Ai were part of the big discussion. On the panel of “Smart Contract War is Coming” Ryan Selkis of Mesari, makes a point that Ethereum is still far from internet 3.0, and Ethereum can be satisfied if it captures Decentralized finance (Defi). The event was supercharged with number of great panels and speakers. We picked some of the more memorable ones for you.

Here are some quotes from various speakers that encompass the feel of the event. Many of the speakers were bullish on development and evolution of the space.

“Any crypto wallet will be able to hold all of the world assets, all assets will be tokenized”

Chris Burniske partner

Placeholder VC

“There is no reason you don’t get paid every minute with smart contracts, while government gets its taxes… it will transform the way we do things”

Aaron Wright, CEO

Openlaw

“In the next ten years legal agreements will be all in software with Ai analyzing them”

Charley Moore, CEO

Rocket lawyer

“This year in ethereal there are better projects architecture, more advanced bridges for institutions… the best people of this generation are moving to blockchain space”

Mike Novogratz, CEO

Galaxy Digital

The two day event had also a number of hands on projects looking to solve problems across the industries. From ai, to finance or art there were various applications on blockchain targeting artificial intelligence.

Projects such ArtProject.io that plans to foster art creation in the blockchain while creating a bridge between artist and developers. Their participation in an Ethereal Summit auction, with an Ai created art exhibit, fetching a $7,000 price at the auction.

Ai on the blockchain seems to be a new direction where you will find projects like Ronin Ai, a crypto AI prediction platform, giving you oracle like analytics on cryptocurrency movement or Singularity, a global AI network project that joins Ai creators and lets them share and monetize their services in scale.

Scalability was another big part of the discussion, with timeline for pos roll out for Ethereum apparently still up in the air. According to Joseph Lubin “Certainly, sometime this year”. While sharding and other level 2 scaling solutions seem to be slates for 18–24 month from now.

There were “spring” feelings in the air and the crowd feel was of hope and growth, after the crypto winter of last year, you could feel the energy coming back to the space.

Ethereal Summit 2019: Exclusive Overview and Coverage was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.