GuShiio.com People who once prioritized trends and narratives are now pushing projects to increase revenue and expenses.
Author: Mason Nystrom, Pentera Investor
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
ETHDenver 2025 will be held from February 27 to March 2 at the National West Complex in Denver, Colorado, USA. After talking with builders and investors for a week, Pentera investor Mason Nystrom posted a post on the X platform to reflect on the key points and feelings of the meeting. The following are the details of the content.
The market is not as bad as it looks
The sentiment on CT (Encrypted Twitter) is relatively pessimistic, but it is not very representative. Speculators in Memecoin are frustrated, and the overall investor consensus is short-term bearish. This is not financial advice, investors can make mistakes.
However, everyone should be aware of the current situation: the regulatory environment is becoming more positive, legal stablecoins are growing, and more RWAs and Tradfi are moving onto the chain. In the long run, people are still very excited and optimistic about the market landscape.
However, the next catalyst is still unknown. Keep moving.
What are people building? What do investors see?
AI -Many builders are still excited about the impact of AI, various Agencies and DeFAIs. There is a lot of “noise” in the market, and it is difficult to find high-quality projects.
DePIN /Robot-Related to AI, but different enough. Many companies are building hardware or data-collection networks for robots, and DePIN seems to capture this narrative. Energy DePIN has also been attracting people’s attention, and new typical DePIN projects have opportunities to emerge.
DeFi -A large number of DeFi applications are still being built. More types of lending agreements, new stablecoins, Uni Hooks, more DeFi interfaces. PayFi and DeFAI also overlap in some aspects.
zkTLS (note: a new technology that combines zero-knowledge proof and transport layer security protocols)-provides a real use case, but what matters is release and commercialization, not the actual technical implementation.
stablecoins-Although there is less discussion on CT, every investor is paying attention to and investing in this track, most of which are equity transactions, so the attention is not high. Many companies will be built based on the market opportunities of stablecoins.
Three Dragons: Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana
Bitcoin: Many Bitcoin L2s are coming online and will compete for Bitcoin deposits. Bitcoin’s yields will get higher and higher. Bitcoin lending will improve. Bitcoin is no longer a “pet stone”.
Ethereum: Price sentiment aside, many builders continue to work on building on Ethereum. People remain optimistic about the high-throughput ETH chain. Base is still the foundation. FlashBlocksTM is about to be launched and there is a lot of hype at the conference. Unichain is ignored by many people. More chains are coming.
Solana: Despite being ETHDenver, there are still many Solana events, founders and small meetings. Even after the memecoin market correction, many people are still excited about Solana. The DePIN narrative continues to evolve on Solana. More SVMs are being rolled out, which means interoperability “ducks” between SVM chains are needed.
About Venture Capital
For many investors, pre-seed and seed-stage project investment feels that the return is slow. Higher expected valuations of projects on the open market have led some funds to choose to wait and see without investing. Most investments are concentrated in liquidity and Series A financings. In addition, the Series B funding market seems to be better than it was six months ago. Please note that the analysis here is only based on market sentiment and hearing and is not supported by data.
The issuance of some tokens has performed poorly in recent market adjustments, and the valuation mentality has been corrected again. Like a clock, people who once prioritized trends and narratives are now pushing projects to increase revenue and expenses. Building beliefs is more important than ever.
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