With contributions from Walter Teng

Between ETH climbing, memecoins soaring, and BTC surpassing $90,000 last week, the crypto crowd was euphoric at Devcon. But inside the event, developer conversations prompted important questions at what felt like a pivotal moment for the Ethereum ecosystem

The CoinFund team is back from Devcon, one of the most tenured Ethereum community conferences targeted towards ecosystem developers. Following 2022’s event in Bogotá, the seventh edition of Devcon headed to Southeast Asia for a week-long event in Bangkok. The most recent large-scale Asia-based crypto conference was September’s annual TOKEN2049 event with attendees primarily focused on crypto’s burgeoning retail use-cases. We found Devcon-goers to be deeper in the weeds and more cryptonative. While Ethereum developers drove the themes of the main event, there were a number of marketing agencies, consultancies, and investors in attendance, pushing through Bangkok traffic to spend the majority of their time at side events including the ether.fi and Certora party, the World (formerly Worldcoin) brunch, and the DeAI Alliance’s happy hour, co-hosted by CoinFund, HackVC and Fabric VC.

Unpacking Ethereum’s Roadmap

One of the most notable moments during the main event was Ethereum researcher Justin Drake’s keynote, introducing his proposal to create a reimagined network consensus layer called Beam Chain. Coming two years after the network’s merge from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, this new framework introduces ZK proofs and expands staking access by lowering the requirement from 32 ETH to 1 ETH. While new to Ethereum, a number of layer 2 networks like zkSync already utilize proofs, and layer 1 competitor Solana’s staking requirement sits below $1. But what stunned listeners most was the proposal’s roadmap for completing Beam Chain’s integration by 2030 — an extended timeline compared to other layer 1 ecosystems, but plausible for Ethereum’s decentralized approach.

While some attendees felt the talk was controversial, it sparked a number of important — and overdue — conversations amongst attendees. Its reception served as the right time for the Ethereum Foundation to restate its priorities within the community to work further towards solving problems like layer 2 fragmentation and ecosystem alignment. And while five years feels like decades in web3, the architecture of the Beam Chain is poised to offer important long-term improvements to the network — which can only be achieved if the short-term roadblocks are adequately addressed.

DeSci & AI

Crypto Twitter went into a frenzy when former Binance CEO CZ posted a picture with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at a DeSci meet-up. DeSci — decentralized science — is a blockchain-based approach to scientific research, using tokenization and DAOs to democratize traditional academic processes. While DeSci is not new to web3 and has been driven by organizations like Pump Science and VitaDAO, the event sparked a resurgence of interest to build community-driven research.

Of course, there was room in the spotlight for AI — specifically agents. Like Truth Terminal’s creation of $GOAT, or ai16z — an automated DAO-based VC firm with its own token — AI agents working in tandem with memecoins dominated conversation. In the days since the event, new agents and tokens have taken over timelines, including $LUNA, $ZEROBRO, $LUCE and $LUM, as well as automated marketplaces VVaifu and Hat. The convergence of web3 and AI is happening before our eyes, and agents are beginning to take a strong hold on the crypto space.

While Devcon was an important moment for CoinFund to show up in Asia and spend time with founders in the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond, it also served as an important moment to reassess where the industry’s focus lies. Heading into the new year, there are specific web3 sectors that are well poised for growth — as founders believe in our recent 2025 Founder Forecast survey. Ethereum’s long-term trajectory will help fuel adoption in these areas, and as the network continues to support the thousands of applications in its ecosystem, now is a critical time for developers to unite to solve the most pressing challenges the ecosystem faces.

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