Crypto Reckoning? Industry Vets Strike Humble Tone in San Francisco

Veteran investor and AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant told conference goers on Monday the last "Hype cycle" was a "Coming of age" for many cryptocurrencies such as ethereum, the second largest crypto by market cap.

Perhaps no project encapsulates the scaling and sustainability challenges faced by crypto more than ethereum.

Since most of the projects that fundraised through initial coin offerings over the past year rely on ethereum, which is taking a different approach to scaling than the bitcoin community, all eyes are on ethereum's evolving governance model.

"It's going to take Vitalik time to convince everyone," Zamfir said, referring to ethereum creator and sharding proponent Vitalik Buterin.

His teammate Alexander Skidanov, founder of the ethereum competitor Near Protocol, told CoinDesk he is concerned about the lack of documentation and proven experiments that clarify this scaling approach.

Even though Skidanov expects it will take years for ethereum's updated model to be ready to support consumer applications, litecoin creator Charlie Lee said on Monday that ethereum is actually moving too fast and relying on a small number of businesses to run nodes as demand increases.

"Ethereum nodes are being run by corporations and miners, which is a bit more centralized than bitcoin," Lee said.

"Ethereum sacrificed decentralization in order to get that scaling."

Monahan, previously a co-founder of MyEtherWallet, is still bullish on ethereum, believing the influx of fresh blood will help the network mature, regardless of the recent price rout.

"One of the reasons we've been successful with ethereum is we are emotionally invested in this community."