Day 3 of Permissionless Conference: What happens next?

Author: Andrew Thurman, blockworks, translator: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

As attendees piled into the Permissionless conference in Austin, luggage piled up, it seemed like everyone was asking, "What happens next?"

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin attended virtually while traveling in East Asia and served as the day's main opening guest. He answered some questions about the most promising and undervalued avenues for further crypto development.

He focuses on various forms of public goods funding, including DeSci and more privacy-focused zero-knowledge proofs, as well as more powerful, high-security oracles and DeFi models. Buterin also speculated on the continued growth of decentralized social media, specifically mentioning Farcaster and Lens.

In addition to use cases that require further development, multiple conversations focused on whether cryptocurrencies can be expected to follow the "four-year cycle" bull/bear market pattern that has been developing steadily since Bitcoin's inception.

In the “Who’s Still Investing in Crypto” panel, Framework’s Vance Spencer and Alliance DAO’s Qiao Wang discussed the topic, with Wang arguing that due to the size of cryptocurrency, it is now more connected to global markets.

To explore this further, I caught up with Framework’s Michael Anderson in a booth at the conference. Anderson believes that by the end of next year, at the end of May and early June, we will determine that prices have begun to rebound and a new cycle has begun.

But what if higher sustained interest rates crash the overall economy, bringing cryptocurrencies into the mix, and cripple the start of a new cycle?

“Either way,” Anderson said, pointing to the popularity of tokenized treasury yields — investors can still sit on high yields even if we don’t go through another cycle.

For the development of the industry, there are also some high-potential use cases that may quietly bring in a large number of users. Anderson points to the social and gaming sectors - two areas that have been around and talked about for the better part of a decade but haven't really seen the light of day due to structural challenges such as the time and talent it takes to make a good game. He recommends focusing on AI Arena and Illuvium.

Personally, I like Superstate founder Robert Leshner’s take: By June 2024, exactly four years after Compound’s COMP governance token fueled the DeFi summer, we will know whether cryptocurrencies will have a new spring, Or will we survive several years of freezing winters?