Here’s an EthCC recap for those who couldn’t make it to Paris this year

• Ethereum
  • Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, dove into the history of account abstraction and how developers have been working on it, even before the layer-1 blockchain network launched. Buterin discussed the latest Ethereum Improvement Proposal, a change that could allow users to create non-custodial wallets as programmable smart contracts. If successful, this upgrade could potentially improve global web3 adoption by making crypto wallets as easy to use as an email account.
• a16z
  • Web3 has the potential to fix social media and consumer applications, Sriram Krishnan, general partner of a16z crypto, said during a keynote presentation. He believes now is the time to build “large-scale crypto consumer social media marketplace applications.”
  • Chris Lyons, general partner of web3 media at a16z, talked about “hiding the wires” and how that can be the biggest opportunity in crypto to grow to 100 million users.
• Reddit
  • Mirela Spasova, Reddit’s senior engineer manager for collectible avatars, shared the platform’s primary mission to onboard millions of users into digital collectibles, like it did last year. Today Reddit has onboarded more than 8 million users to its wallets and digital collectibles and made over $1 million in revenue for 30 to 100 creators, she noted.
• Chainlink
  • Sergey Nazarov, Chainlink co-founder, discussed Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), which recently launched on mainnet on the Avalanche, Ethereum, Optimism and Polygon blockchains. The launch of CCIP aims to focus on creating a “secure and reliable internet of contracts,” Nazarov noted. “The better the applications you build, the more attractive this whole blockchain thing will be, for all the people with money whether they’re big banks, individuals or asset managers.”
• Coinbase’s Base
  • Jesse Pollak, lead for Base and head of protocols at Coinbase, talked about the layer-2 blockchain’s plan to become decentralized. “If you look at the pre-internet area, if you were a developer you had a hard time building products for the world.” Then the internet came around and opened up the ability to build applications, Pollak said. The online era will be replaced by the onchain worlds through blockchain technology, Pollak believes. “Now we’re on the precipice of that changing with us moving from an online platform to an onchain platform.”
  • Also next week, Optimism, an Ethereum-focused layer-2 project, will release an “open neutrality framework” with a focus on decentralization guidelines, Pollak said, and Base will follow it, too. The framework plans to provide principles for networks that aim to be decentralized.
• Aave
  • Stani Kulechov, CEO of Aave Companies, announced the launch of Lens Protocol V2, an upgrade to the web3 product aimed at creating a decentralized social networking ecosystem. The new iteration will have upgrades like “open actions” that connect onchain elements to social content so web3 experiences can become social ones, Kulechov noted. “Effectively we’ll have an internet that benefits all and people-powered social networks where you’ll have a say in how the network will evolve in the future.”