Canada’s largest Web3 event convened last week in Toronto. The Blockchain Futurist Conference featured an NFT art gallery, blockchain bootcamps, and even helicopter rides. Speakers who represented different blockchains and cryptocurrencies introduced roadmaps for their current and future projects. This article will examine three emerging trends highlighted at the conference.

Ethereum after the merge

The auditorium was packed when Ethereum founder Vitalek Buterin took the stage. Buterin spoke about the future plans for Ethereum after the merge takes place next month. The founder told attendees that Ethereum’s focus will be on scalability once the merge is complete in September.

He laid out several plans for the Ethereum core development process. 

1. Proto-danksharding: 

   • A process that creates data transactions which have data blocks. 

   • These data blocks will increase the capacity of the Ethereum chain to hold a much larger amount of data.

2. Rollup data compression

   • The network will be able to pack more transactions together in a smaller space.

   • By restructuring the network to PoS, more transactions will be able to be processed at scale without having to spend more on external resources to achieve the same outcome. 

3. Cheaper gas fees

   • Currently, the average gas (transaction) fee is between $1–$20; with roll-up data that will be reduced to $0.002–0.05 per transaction. 

   • Buterin explained that this is crucial for global adoption in countries like Zambia where the average daily income is $4.

4. Energy consumption

   • By discarding PoW, Ethereum expects to reduce energy consumption by 99.9%.

5. Bringing back crypto payments

   • By increasing the number of transactions and simultaneously decreasing the gas fees, the adoption of crypto as a form of payment will be much more practical. 

Buterin also took a shot at the Ethereum-based Bored Apes Yacht Club, stating that his original hope for blockchains and cryptocurrencies was for social change and freedom. Instead, he said, what we ended up with was people saying “Hey, look, it’s a monkey!” Despite the dig, Buterin also reiterated his enthusiasm for NFTs and their potential for utility. 

Broadening crypto adoption

Another major topic at the conference was about expanding the adoption of crypto into many different sectors, industries, technologies, and payment systems worldwide. 

Tyler Spalding is the co-founder and CEO of Flexa, an open crypto network accessible from any kind of wallet. The co-founder spoke about Flexa’s roadmap and what’s ahead for its native token, $AMP.

Further, Spalding detailed how AMP will be able to be used in all sorts of financial vehicles such as loyalty points and reward tokens. Flexa is looking to expand into all types of payment systems around the world while facing regulatory challenges in several countries. 

Furthermore, the ambitious roadmap includes integrating AMP into mobile apps so that the token can be used to pay for airline tickets, e-commerce products, and more. 

Web3 browsing

Brave is a web3 browser that boasts many features not available on other popular browsers. Clayton Hartford is the Director of Brave Software and spoke about the need for web3 in web browsing.

In true web3 fashion Brave rewards users with Basic Attention Tokens (BAT). With BAT, users can opt to have Brave Private Ads appear in a non-invasive format. The user can even choose how many ads they want to have shown per hour (up to five). The ads are 

Users can earn crypto, cash-value gift cards, and frequent flyer points which are distributed each month. They can also tip content creators with some of the crypto they earn each month.

Brave also brings to life what other browsers only claim to fully provide – true privacy. Protections from invasive ads, malware and data tracking all promised to be a part of popular browsers but are in fact not as robust as advertised or completely nonexistent.

Its partnership with the nonprofit Tor Project, Brave allows users to hide all of their data, browsing patterns and location from everyone – including Brave itself. 

Web3 market adoption

It still remains to be seen which parts of web3 will be most adopted by the market. But with enthusiastic attendees showing up to events like Blockchain Futurist Conference, we can be certain that we are reaching the end of web2’s dominance. 

We are truly turning away from the current static form of information consumption and even digital currency usage, to a much more fluid and efficient form.