5 Insights from Devconnect 2025, the largest Ethereum event

Source: PortaldoBitcoin Original Title: 5 Insights from Devconnect 2025, the largest Ethereum event Original Link: Between November 16 and 23, Buenos Aires was invaded by crypto natives from around the world for Devconnect, the largest Ethereum conference of the year, which had around 15,000 attendees.

The Research team produced a report with the five main insights brought forth in the lectures and panels of the Devconnect 2025 conference.

Invincible

The first and most important insight is simple and straightforward:

“Crypto is becoming invincible because it is becoming invisible.”

The phrase comes from Camila Russo, during the DeFi Day Del Sur conference on November 19.

Camila is a reference in the crypto segment, both with her work in one of the largest newsletters and sources in the space, The Defiant, and through her investigative work on the history of Ethereum.

The idea is that the abstraction of the complexity of the crypto universe accelerates adoption and facilitates the onboarding of billions of people to blockchains.

Nowadays we use the internet and credit card payments that we don't even understand how they work, as long as their technological complexities are sufficiently abstracted and allow the user to simply enjoy the result.

The idea is that this will happen with blockchains in the coming years, with more and more transactions being settled on them, without the end user realizing it, gradually swallowing this and other use cases.

We have seen several applications today that can achieve levels of abstraction similar to those of the traditional web, such as Digital Fixed Income tokens, which are registered and settled on-chain but traded via a platform, providing an experience similar to that of the traditional web. Another example is Hyperliquid, a blockchain that provides trading tools very similar to those of traditional web platforms.

We strongly believe that the path of abstraction is the most powerful for scaling adoption and we prioritize projects that have implemented or have in their roadmap improvements related to user experience.

2 – AI agents will revolutionize the financial market

One of the largest pavilions at the event was solely dedicated to the artificial intelligence segment and its applications in crypto, with several projects such as ElizaOS, 0G, and Virtuals being present.

In addition, we mapped the use of payment technologies and identity of AI agents, which we believe are the prelude to the emergence of an agent capable of solving real-world problems. This killer agent has the potential to create an even stronger trend than email or Excel, the already known killer apps of the traditional web.

3 - Crypto ecosystem in Argentina – When crypto really solves problems

Just like in Brazil, Argentinians have a natural curiosity about crypto, but there, in addition, there is an additional spice for the adoption of our market: Argentina has been in a complex financial position in recent decades and years, with high inflation in the Peso and increasing default risks.

This, combined with restrictions on access to dollars, has caused the adoption of crypto to soar in the country in recent years, being an easy, fast, and convenient way to access stablecoins and, as a consequence, the dollar, without the restrictions imposed by local authorities.

A movement has emerged to encourage commerce to accept crypto assets as payment, as well as a decentralized identification system and even a workspace and coworking space dedicated to the web3 community, accelerating connections and expanding the ecosystem's potential.

At this point, the Argentinians are far ahead of us, but we can use this as a lesson and inspiration to further advance the web3 community in Brazil.

4 – DeFi will swallow the financial market

We are increasingly seeing the famous TradFi (traditional finance, such as large banks and asset managers) entering crypto, which became clear in the last year with the launch of several BTC and ETH ETFs on the American stock exchange, as well as the same product on various exchanges around the world.

This year we witnessed the explosion of the DATs, companies with treasury in bitcoin and other digital assets, led by Michael Saylor's Strategy. These more than 350 entities, including public companies, private companies, and governments, already hold millions of units of the main crypto asset and still have plans to accumulate even more.

In this same wave, we also see more and more companies productizing DeFi, either as a final product, such as the yield of stablecoins (passive income in dollars), or using them as infrastructure, as in the tokenization of digital fixed income.

We believe that the use will become increasingly common and we will see an explosion in the adoption of DeFi ( in an abstracted way ) being used by billions of people around the globe, in a decentralized manner.

5 – ZkVMs are the future of Ethereum

For our more technical readers, I prepared this last insight. Vitalik Buterin, at the opening ceremony, spoke about the history of Ethereum, but also discussed a specific topic from the roadmap, related to the scalability and decentralization of the network.

In summary, zero-knowledge proofs are a technology that allows for the creation of a cryptographic proof (computational ) of certain information, and this can be used to provide scalability or privacy to a network or application.

This can serve as a private digital identification, or it can be used to package transactions in a compact way without revealing the involved addresses.

Now, Vitalik and others propose that the virtual machine itself, that is, the “computer” within Ethereum, has native support for this type of technology. It has the potential to allow entire nodes of the network to run on mobile phones relatively quickly, representing almost the Holy Grail of decentralization.

How much of this theory will actually be put into practice? It's hard to know, but the technology is growing at a rapid pace. Three years ago we didn't have zero-knowledge rollups and today there are already more than dozens of them.

Perhaps the zkVM will come sooner than planned, perhaps later, but without a doubt, if it meets all expectations, it will be revolutionary in terms of scalability and privacy, representing an unprecedented leap in the history of public blockchains.