At the Ethereum-focused conference EthCC in Paris last week, the mood was elated with more than double the attendees compared to the previous year and over 250 side events. The sunny summer weather and Ripple’s recent partial win in its case against the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) further boosted the positive sentiment in the digital-asset sector.
The past few weeks have also seen announcements of applications for Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETF) from some of the world’s largest asset managers – not really related to the Ethereum blockchain per se, but an important and encouraging development for the digital-asset sector, said one attendee.
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) was another hot topic at the event, with multiple talks and side events organized on the topic. Most investors and founders discussed the intersection of the two fields, with some seeing the more immediate, practical applications of AI into crypto markets and communities as the best use case.
Zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) were also a major focus, as they could be applied to machine learning to verify what model has been used to yield a given result in a mashup known as ZKML, or perhaps what datasets were used in the training of data.
Blockchains are especially good at social coordination, and ZKs are a privacy technology, which is not necessarily what machine learning needs, said Eli Ben-Sasson, Co-Founder and President of StarkWare.
Overall, the conference left attendees optimistic for the future of crypto and AI.