The post Web3 Watch: EthCC attendees ask: “Where are the apps?” appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This week, crypto descended on Brussels for EthCC. Given that Ethereum popularized smart contracts and was the home of NFTs during the space’s 2021 craze, it seems like consumer applications could have been prominently featured at the yearly Ethereum gathering. But some attendees felt that apps were too muted at the conference — and that crypto’s infrastructure era has overstayed its welcome. The social lead of the Milk Road newsletter wrote that it “[f]eels like we’ve come to a consensus that we don’t need more infra. We just need usable apps.” 2077 Collective director Emmanuel Awosika said “one of those things I’m excited about is people finally (!) acknowledging consumer apps are necessary.” Arbitrum developer Offchain Labs’ A.J. Warner said he “heard 10x the number of interoperability/crosschain proving ideas compared to novel user applications” at the conference. Crypto may still be lacking in compelling consumer apps, but EthCC exit reviews definitely showed that the desire is there. This wishful thinking has shown up in other places too: The Arbitrum DAO notably is aiming to pour $215 million into crypto gaming projects. Source: EthCC Read more: The crypto infrastructure is here, but where are the apps? This week, Electric Capital general partner Maria Shen released a “market map” categorizing over 1,500 crypto projects. Interestingly, more than one-third of the projects were labeled as apps.  There’s also a case to be made that insisting on more apps might be putting the cart before the horse. Celestia Labs CEO Mustafa Al-Bassam said that crypto should focus on mastering its original use case of payments before it moves on to more complex applications. Read more: Helio upgrades its Solana Pay plugin for Shopify There are also crypto apps with real users, even if they don’t currently compete with the titans of Web2. Telegram has…

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Filed under: News - @ July 13, 2024 4:26 pm