Consensus 2023: The Adults Are In the Room

More than 15,000 people attended Consensus in Austin at the end of April, Elementus team members being some of them. This all comes despite quite the wild ride in 2022, with bankruptcies, fraud, and regulatory struggles around cryptocurrency adoption. With that in mind, you’d be surprised to hear how optimistic we were at the end of the conference. Here are three key takeaways from our week at Consensus.

Big Players No Longer On the Sidelines

There’s no doubt that the industry has been through a lot, especially in the last 12-months. But with those hurdles, we’ve brought the adults into the room, and that was something that felt different at Consensus this year. Unlike prior years, there was less retail at the conference, and large players were no longer on the sidelines. Bloomberg, CME Group, S&P, Google, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, KPMG all had booths or sponsored events. Also encouraging was that while the majority of stages/talks were lightly attended (similar to most conferences), you couldn’t find an open seat at the stage dedicated to Policy. 

Large Focus On Responsible Regulation 

To us, this signals a deep appreciation of the technology and bringing it to market efficiently and appropriately. The leaders in the space are no longer able to stand on the sidelines while the tech is being targeted by policy. This is important not only for the existing companies that are trying to bring more products and innovations to market, but to new companies trying to decide whether to build in the US or elsewhere. 

While the large events were fun, we found the smaller events to be the most impactful. The leaders in the space won't only be the large organizations throwing events at the nightclub, it’s going to be the smaller companies that are hyper-focused on their mission of pushing blockchain technology forward with innovation.

A Clear Opportunity for Sophisticated Tooling 

After speaking with several players across the ecosystem, there was a clear demand for tooling that enabled seamless access to blockchain data. Data accessibility continues to be a pain point across the industry, and conversations with multiple layer 1 solutions highlighted that this friction is holding back demand on their respective ecosystems. Simply put, web3 is eager to see new products that help address this issue. Not only will this help existing web3 companies make better sense of blockchain data, but this will also usher in the next era of web3 companies, companies currently sitting on the sidelines due to the lack of sophistication in the space.  

Want to connect and learn more about the trends we’re seeing across web3? Interested in hearing how Elementus is helping promote large-scale adoption of blockchain technology? Reach out to our team—we’d love to connect! Reach out at hello@elementus.io