What happened at Consensus 2019?

Did you miss out on Consensus 2019? If so, don’t worry. I braved the crowds and rain in New York to bring you the latest updates on current crypto trends.

Number of Attendees

Even though it was announced that thousands of people participated in this year’s conference, the number of attendees was still less than the number of those who attended last year. The huge fall of the crypto market last year lessened the noise and weeded out many low-grade projects. The hotel price during this year’s conference was less expensive than last year, which suggests that projects may have less capital and are more budget-conscious.

DeFi and Stablecoins

If you’ve been keeping tabs on the crypto industry, chances are you have come across the term “DeFi,” (decentralized finance), which includes lending, derivatives, exchanges, and more recently, stablecoins. Stablecoins have become a hot topic in the last year as a potential solution to avoid token price fluctuations. With big corporate giants such as JP Morgan and Facebook reported to be building their own stablecoins, projects such as Paxos, TrustToken, Circle (Coinbase), and Gemini may face stiff competition.

Payment

One of blockchain’s most applicable use cases lies in payments. After the Bitcoin payment hype in bullish 2017 market, many merchants have pulled back from crypto payments in 2018. However, with the current small bull market, crypto payment options have started to make a comeback. BitPay, currently one of the biggest payment service provider, added multi-coin (BCH) support on its network. One of its direct competitors, Flexa, a crypto digital platform that enables instant point-of-sales payments, has added support for many merchants including Starbucks, Nordstorm, and more. The rise of such projects may see increased usage of stablecoins to compete with Bitcoin as potential payment solutions.

CEX and DEX

Even though some projects are still building centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges are growing in popularity. The benefits of a DEX are obvious --- transparent orderbooks, 100% uptime, and most importantly, increased security. More and more projects are coming up with ways to build robust and high-performance DEX network with support for on-chain transaction and order matching. Since this trend is still fairly new, we may see DEX projects working with CEX or other DEXes as a way to acquire users.

Layer 2

To solve the blockchain scalability problem, some layer 2 projects have started in the last year. Many of them attended the ETH NY Hackthon that happened last weekend. Currently, most, if not all, of the layer 2 solutions are built on the Ethereum platform. But scalability is a problem for almost all public chains. Layer 2 will be built upon other major chains soon.

What to expect for Consensus 2020?

Crypto ETF: Regulation is always a hot topic on any US crypto conference. As the regulatory bodies continue to develop the legal framework to moderate cryptocurrencies, the next big question is when and how will crypto become legalized in asset management.

Cross-chain: As many public chains are being developed, cross-chain asset transactions will be a problem. Currently, neither the custodian gateway nor atomic swap solutions are mature. Cross-chain gateways are still partially-centralized and atomic swaps do not support cross-chain asset transfers. The perfect solution would allow for the cross-chain transfer of assets in a decentralized manner.

Real-world use case: At the moment, the biggest hurdle blockchain technology faces is mass adoption. We saw some interesting use cases for social impact last year. However, in order to fully drive mainstream adoption of blockchain technology, large-scale enterprise or consortium solutions may be the answer.