the first time i got to an avalanche summit was in 2022, and it was the first summit
it was in Barcelona, where ava labs would recreate a ‘defi kingdom’ very much in tone with the DeFi Kingdom L1 that was just about to launch
it was a crazy time, a lot of shiny gaming L1s had either launched or were about to
avalanche has changed a lot since then, much like the entire industry
everything is more serious, structured, institutionalized: but that doesn’t mean we’re stuck here
it’s just that we have new challenges which are outside of our comfort zone
i remember how excited i was when in 2022 i gave a talk to a room full of people about what it meant to run a multi-chain, multi-VM explorer building it from scratch and just uncovering issues as we went by
now many of the issues the industry had back then are solved or we know plenty of how to solve them - we thought we were solving problems tradfi would envy us
the reality was, we were just building our own future: a future where crypto is a way to make finance composable, and blockchain is a new type of backend that fits very well with an AI-based world
avalanche has always been among the first, if not the first, to understand and execute on this
so this doesn’t mean that crypto is dying: it needs to EVOLVE, via network upgrades big and small and cultural and political change that generate value accrual, now that scale has been certainly achieved
and this is what’s going to happen at this summit, in september: i feel it’s going to be different. it’s not going to be a defi kingdom, but a financial metropolis, and i believe that’s exactly why it’s in new york - it’s the financial capital of the world, and you really can’t operate better anywhere else if you want to bring the financial world onchain
there’s gonna be some suits, but also the dev and community builders we know and love, and a new wave of stakeholders that we need to onboard, talk to, connect with and have them know us
because we’re the ones that built the future, they’re now coming there to use it
I’M GOING TO SUMMIT
if you haven’t already, get your ticket for the summit here:
go.team1.network/summit