Avalanche Summit New York was excellent.
Here a few of my initial takeaways:
A lot of suits in the room this year. That's a tell. Avalanche, and this industry, is maturing fast. The institutions have arrived. This week alone: New York Life brought its first tokenized fund onchain through Centrifuge. Janus Henderson became a validator. Aave is launching an RWA lending market with Tether's USAT. NYSE's parent ICE is deep in evaluation for a 24/7 onchain trading platform. Tokenized U.S. stocks are coming to Avalanche through Pharaoh. And plenty more.
The signal-to-noise ratio was genuinely high. Real value across the conversations, panels, and breakout discussions this week.
Validators as a business, on current terms, face real structural challenges
long term. This surfaced repeatedly in conversations and on panels. It's a problem worth taking seriously. The good news: that's exactly the problem our research agenda is designed to address. Measure, Capture, Distribute isn't theory anymore. The work is well underway.
One of the best parts of this week was meeting the community in person. The quality of the conversations, the questions being asked, and the people showing up, it's a reminder of what this ecosystem is actually built on. One thing that stuck with me: the community already understands the hard problems. They're not waiting for answers, they're helping find them.
Massive credit to Ava Labs for pulling off a genuinely strong Summit, and to Team1 for the community side events. The organization, the speakers, the energy, well done to everyone involved.
The institutions have arrived. Our economics research agenda is moving. The community is engaged.
What comes next is the part I'm most looking forward to.
Vamos! 🔺