Rapture #278: The East is the Immediate Future of Crypto
I just got back from ETHTokyo and ETHTaipei, which were amazing events. I waa blown away by the amount of talented technical professionals I met during this time. As someone who likes to get into the weeds of the technical changes crypto seeks to advance, without a doubt the conversations I had in Taipei and Tokyo were by far the most robust out of any conference I have attended.
Additionally, the content at each of these conferences went far beyond the general marketing fluff that I see dominate at the Western conferences. No "how will DeFi change the world" or "why DAOs are the future." Instead, the the topics discussed ranged from "The History of Gamma Trading in DeFi" to "Account Abstraction Workshops."
The presentations were not only more in depth but significantly more coherent than any conference I have been to in Europe or the US. I saw a presentation on account abstraction presented by David Kim, a Senior Solidity Engineer at Trust Wallet that was the best technical presentation I have seen over my 7 years in the space.
Overall, while the quirky crypto culture still exists in the East, most of the people I met were far more serious about the projects they were working on and how they intended to capture value.
With the improving regulatory environment in places like Hong Kong and the extreme focus of the crypto community in places like Taiwan, I cannot stress enough that Asia will likely lead this bull market.
If you are an executive at a crypto company and don't have someone focusing full-time on Asia, you are doing it wrong.
While I found many presentations interesting over the course of my trip, the most interesting were the ones on EIP-4337 and how account abstraction will dramatically change the wallet UX throughout the Ethereum ecosystem.
ERC-4337: preparing wallets for mainstream adoption
The most interesting technical insight I gained on my trip was about ERC-4337, a recently passed EIP that overall enhances the functionality and user friendliness of utilizing wallets.
ERC-4337 changes many aspects of Ethereum, including allowing dApp developers to partially or fully pay for users' transaction fees, enabling users to pay for gas fees in any ERC-20 not just ETH, and supporting aggregated signatures. Furthermore, ERC-4337 allows the bundling of multiple transactions in order to save time and lower transaction fee costs.
Additionally, via the account abstraction feature, users will no longer need a seed phrase in order to create a backup of their crypto wallet. In fact, a crypto wallet's private key can now be stored on a smartphone's standard security module. This feature should dramatically improve the on-boarding experience for new users into the ecosystem.
Will take time to implement
While it is extremely exciting that ERC-4337 is live, it will take some time for the current wallet infrastructure to implement the technology. ERC-4337 requires entirely new mem pools, amongst many other changes. Smart contract developers I spoke with think implementation will take at least a year, and developers are usually overly ambitious in their timelines.
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