It was extremely hot in Brooklyn during Permissionless, and Industry City was far from people's offices, so attendees tried to limit their back-and-forth travel between side events and the main event. Despite this, the vibes were still exciting: New York is back, and some people decided they're skipping Cannes for EthCC—because why leave New York? This is the Crypto Capital.
As Bitcoin builders, there's a lot to take from the event, here are my three main takeaways:
There was a lot of discussion around the Blockworks Token Transparency framework.
A score is given to tokens from 0-40, and a high score indicates that the project has fully disclosed its revenue streams, equity to token holder rights, advisory service providers, and executive team personnel. Its token supply and allocation are characterized by transparent, on-chain vesting with fair, well-documented distributions that align incentives between insiders and retail investors, and commits to reporting regularly.
This framework was seen as a step in the right direction for the industry to be more transparent and self-govern, but there were questions from people I spoke with regarding the burden of routine reporting on small projects. Would a social thread linked to a blog on project details be enough for reporting? What if investors in projects want to stay anonymous? Which entities in the ecosystem would require this? Exchanges are already doing their own due diligence on tokens—would they eventually adopt this framework? There are a lot of details to sort through, but it was an overall positive conversation.
Bitcoin and Bitcoin DeFi had its own separate track this year.
Debates centered on how to scale and which innovations would lead to the most adoption of Bitcoin. Investors are really interested in where yield is coming from and how secure it is, thus each Bitcoin L2 founder made their case for how their protocol would incentivize the behaviors they want to attract to their ecosystems. One of my favorite talks was with Meltem Demirors and Michael Buccella on Bitcoin & The Energy to Compute Value Chain, where they discussed how AI and decentralized compute is a place where big tech is investing today, and it could be a completely new economic model and use case for crypto.
Beautiful user experiences and more cross-chain infrastructure are being built to remove friction for everyday use.
From stablecoin to cross-chain yield applications, I met interesting teams from places like Reveel and Yield.xyz building for mainstream adoption. Tokenization has brought a new lens to traditional financial actors to also focus on building better user experiences for non-traditional investors, bridging the gap. Crypto and traditional financial technology were merging at this conference, and it was clear that we're not in two separate worlds anymore.
Until Next Time
Permissionless found its footing again in NYC, and despite the heat it felt like the energy to build was ever present. At Trust Machines, we have believe in Bitcoin layers as the next logical step to unlocking onchain applications for all users. From Leather, to Granite, the safest protocol for borrowing against your BTC -- Trust Machines is at the forefront of growing the Bitcoin economy.
