Back from Brussels: Squid's EthCC Week
Squid @ EthCC
After a jam-packed week, the Squid team is back from Brussels invigorated by the growing consensus throughout the community that empowering application development is the most essential focus.
We kicked off the week with our friends in interoperability and chain abstracted UX at UX/acc day. After years of building with this focus, we’re thrilled to have so many peers sharing our passion for giving application users simple ways to interact onchain no matter what chains may be involved under the hood.
Later Monday evening we gathered for sunset views with our pals at Chainflip, EYWA, and Eden Block, sipping cocktails and diving into conversations about the possibilities and improvements to be made in cross-chain DeFi.
On Tuesday, our fearless leader Christina addressed a crowd at the main event on how we can bring the moon math and nerd sniping back down to earth to Get Concrete About Cross-Chain Abstraction. From cross-chain transactions to intents to chain abstraction, she broke down what’s useful, what’s not, and how Squid harnesses the synergies of both the cutting-edge and the tried-and-true technologies to simplify anything down to one click for the end user.
We rounded out the week at Nebular Summit. On day 1, Fig spoke on Modular Abstraction, the next frontier for ensuring that builders can assemble their perfect stacks and create the best applications possible. He urged everyone to get past the gut reaction that the fragmentation resulting from every layer of blockchains becoming modular is a problem begging for standardization and consolidation. The beauty of modularity, he argued, is precisely that we’re free from the platform lock-in and stagnation that comes with consolidation. We also got everyone buzzing about Squid Summer Camp at our Squid booth!
On day 2, Fig joined the panel “Interoperability & Abstraction: These Are the Same Picture” and offered perspectives on meeting user needs and why there’s a race to the bottom on cross-chain messaging infrastructure that will likely never end.
All in all, we had a wonderful time in Brussels. We felt there was a noticeably more authentic, human atmosphere without as much shilling pollution as is sometimes the case. There was also a kind of chaotic energy moving through the community. Attention spans seemed to be strained with narratives cycling faster and faster. Nevertheless, everyone seemed to be facing down this fatigue, galvanized to demonstrate the value of Web3 technologies to the mainstream with compelling apps.