ETHDenver was a whirlwind.
I wanted to give a quick recap of how things went from a business standpoint and explain why I’m so wildly excited for Avail’s future.
To start off ETHDenver, Avail announced its $27M fundraise, a Seed round led by some of the most prominent and well respected investors in the space such as Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Dragonfly Capital, Figment Capital, SevenX, Nomad Capital, and an amazing list of Angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, Sunny Agarwal, and many more.
At the same time, Avail unveiled its new roadmap, the Avail Trinity, which paves a path for Avail to take on some of web3’s toughest challenges, such as cross-chain UX fragmentation and multi-token shared security. All of this will be powered by Avail’s robust data availability base layer.
I saw first hand in Denver how excited people were about Avail’s future and the conversations we had throughout the week left me with a sense of pride, sincere fulfillment, and left me full of energy. I feel grateful to be part of this journey and play even a small part in Avail’s path forward.
In Denver, the business team was firing on all cylinders with over 75 in person business meetings, including over 20 chains, 7 Raas (Roll up as a Service) providers, 5 web3 wallets, and numerous important connections that are helping cement Avail as one of the most important projects in the web3 space. In those meetings, the Avail team secured several commitments from chains to build on Avail, closed multiple wallets to integrate Avail and enable people around the world to participate after Avail’s mainnet launch, and we forged many deep relationships that will help ensure Avail’s success both in the short and long term.
In short, it was a pretty solid week.
As for where the ecosystem is as a whole, as opposed to last year’s ETHDenver themes seeming to revolve almost exclusively around zk tech and L1s/L2s, this year I’d say that the themes were resoundingly ZK (zero knowledge) tech, modularity, app chains, data availability, and unlocking BTC via L2s. For every single one of those, Avail will play a key part, helping this industry push forward, helping blockchains scale, helping to decrease cross-chain UX (user experience fragmentation), and ensuring the web3 space continues to grow to a larger amount of adoption across the globe.
Though I was mentally and physically exhausted after the week (and missed my wife and kids!), my brain grew smarter and my heart was filled with excitement, all thanks to the all-star team at Avail, the bright and innovative builders across the web3 space, and - just as importantly as anything else - all of you in the Avail community.
It’s going to be an incredible year, everyone. Things are just getting warmed up.