A Look at the Current State of Crypto in the West from the Consensus Conference: Zcash Becomes a New Consensus, Monad and MegaETH Are Comparable to Sui/Aptos, Solana Loses Its Way...

Author: Dov , Founder of Mango Labs

I attended the Consensus conference in Miami, and there were almost no Chinese people there. Here's the current situation in Crypto Western:

Where is the consensus?

Zcash is the new consensus in the US, with Naval, a16z, and Multicoin all betting on it. I'll dedicate a separate post/video to explaining why, and I doubt it will end anytime soon.

public blockchain

Monad / MegaETH : They are being compared to the Sui / Aptos duo of yesteryear, both with plenty of money, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
Canton : Lots of money, but a tough circle to navigate – because it’s not really the crypto circle, it’s all Wall Street.
Upbit L2 : There's been a lot of discussion lately, but expectations are generally low.
Tempo : While Paradigm remains relatively quiet in the crypto world, it's already playing a much higher-dimensional game.
Solana : Looking for direction, but it seems like I haven't found a particularly suitable one yet.

Perp DEX

Hyperliquid : The promotions are still going strong, but there aren't many HYPE dealers around. There's currently a lot of disagreement about HYPE pricing in the US; I'll discuss that in a separate post later.
Perp DEXs are springing up everywhere : now everyone has one – every exchange, every stablecoin, every chain, and every MM wants to create a Perp DEX.

Old-school CEX

Coinbase : I have a lot of money in my account, but I don't play Degen games, nor do I need to. I don't care about this amount of money.
Kraken : He's very good at playing and keeps up quickly. Nado will definitely be good too.
OKX, Bybit, and Bitget are all working hard to achieve compliance in the US market. Bitget's CEO even brings bodyguards to his speeches—a symbol of status in American culture.

New variant of exchange (Trading Terminal / Trading Front-end)

Various variations of trading terminals and AI trading have emerged: Genius, Vergex, TPlus, Liquid, etc.
Perp is about to become compliant in the US, which is actually a huge opportunity. Can you imagine? Previously, Americans couldn't leverage their cryptocurrency trading or short sell.

DAT

Strategy is heavily involved in ecosystem projects, while BTC is still in the early stages of leveraging. For example: @saturn_credit .

RWA

The most important trend over the next 1-2 years is the recent surge in RWA assets, led by various stock PERPs and startup PERPs.

VC

Asian VCs : Completely dead. Yzi is still actively investing (but Yzi can't really be considered an Asian VC), his Demo Day went very well, and there are still quite a few projects. You can see some very good projects, like @renaissxyz .
Western Crypto VCs : They face immense fundraising pressure. a16z made a big splash because they are a16z.
Other Western VCs : each died in their own way—some died because they didn't know how to play the altcoin game in this cycle at all, and some died because they randomly invested in secondary markets and DAT.

MM (Market Maker)

Active MM games have also spread to the West, but the founders face the risk of imprisonment, and due to trust issues, progress has been slow.
Many compliant passive market makers are turning their attention to market prediction.