My belated ETHDenver takeaways off the top of my head:

-To start, I had a great time. Regardless of the doomer gloomer noise on Twitter, the IRL energy I experienced was overall high and positive.
- Once again, many of the smartest and most motivated builders in the space converged for an extended week of activities highlighting the diversity of the ethereum community and beyond
- Seeing the growth of friends in the space was a personal highlight for me and I enjoyed the many serendipitous catchups

Protocol @holographxyz | Previously foundation / optimism / consensys / songtrust

- It’s not just worldclass UX we need to bring a billion people onchain, it’s actual novel and exciting things that can only be done on permissionless blockchain systems
- Cross-app composibility and onchain identity are two major features that can create bridge the gap
- @base is building amazing developer tooling and have really pushed ethereum UX forward
- I wished there was a bigger @farcaster presence
- Web3 is out! Crypto is back in!
- I’ve said in the past (and even given a talk on ~2 years ago for @holograph), the number of chains is going to be infinite. Every app will have its own chain for the same reason tradfi doesn’t run on Meta's servers
- App specific blockspace makes sense!
- @unichain is going to be key to keeping defi decentralized
- I'm excited to see what @syndicate does with appchains for communities
- Interop is the most important thing to solve for ethereum’s success right now because of the things mentioned above

- Memecoins are here to stay, but people are over the scams and scammers. Luckily I think and hope we are past the peak of it (this cycle anyways).
- AI was a major theme, but not as much in the crypto x ai way I was expecting because of the over saturation of slop
- Instead, AI is helping developers be more productive than ever. I had lots of convos with fellow devs discussing the rapidly advancing tooling and models.
- @eigenlayer and @elizaos-ai put together a really amazing hacker house with people building exciting things
- ZK was big this year. Next year everyone will be talking about ZK. All rollups will become ZK rollups. Teams like @SuccinctLabs among others are really pushing the limits here.
- Refraction still throws the best party every year. Maybe next year I'll make it to the @boysclub one

- Denver has really impressive food in a variety of categories (vietnamese, indian, bbq, pizza, etc)
- Lyft is significantly cheaper to get around during the conference for some reason
- The public transport is also super easy and not enough people take advantage of it
- The dryness of the air and sun still kills me every year despite the weather being overall pretty great

Until next time :)

- That said, the event has become very confused and fractured
- Ethereum has a fragmentation problem and the conference plus a million side events demonstrated this perfectly
- The main conference did a really poor job of highlighting speakers and developers (the main stage was in a dark room all the way at the back of the venue and all the auxiliary stages throughout were removed this year)
- Despite significant improvements in infra there were still virtually no compelling apps on display
- There's a lot more shill than show and that's a shame
- Web2 network effects are too strong for clones to attract the mainstream public