On September 4-5, 2024, NERO Chain participated in BTCON 2024 and Core Alliance Day. The event was held alongside Korea Blockchain Week and was organized by L2IV, a renowned investor in early stage blockchain infrastructure projects.

The Impact of U.S. SEC Approval of Bitcoin ETFs

With the SEC’s approval of the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, the focus on digital assets is intensifying. While crypto ETFs are not yet permitted in the Japanese market, these approvals have captured the industry's attention. Unlike traditional equity instruments, Bitcoin lacks protective measures like circuit breakers to control drastic price changes, but ETFs managed by professional investors are expected to bring some stability to the asset class. Nonetheless, the high volatility risk remains. SEC Chair Gary Gensler commented, “While we approved the listing and trading of certain spot bitcoin ETP shares today, we did not approve or endorse bitcoin. Investors should remain cautious about the myriad risks associated with bitcoin and products whose value is tied to crypto (SEC.GOV).”

Highlights from BTCON 2024: Supporting the Bitcoin Ecosystem

BTCON 2024 was held on Sevit Island, which served as the main venue. The event was hosted by Digital Asset and L2IV, with participation from licensed Korean exchanges, including Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, and Korbit. It featured panel discussions focused on the Asian market, exploring current and future trends in Bitcoin scaling solutions, including Layer 1, Layer 2, and projects expected to drive digital asset adoption.

The panels covered the latest regulatory updates and frameworks in Korea, with particular interest in Japanese regulations as a neighboring country. European regulatory frameworks were also discussed, highlighting the need for broader public education on digital assets. Experts shared insights into how digital assets are being utilized across Asia, alongside perspectives from venture capitalists who have invested in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

From left to right: Kevin Lee (Moderator, L2 Iterative Ventures (L2IV)), Luke Pearson (Polychain Capital), BMAN (ABCDE), Forest Bai (Foresight Ventures), Albert Liang (Bitcoin Startup Lab)

From left to right: Dr. Jong Goo Yi (Moderator, Kim & Chang), Anna Liu (Hashkey Group), Taiki Narita (Web3 Business Development Lead, Sumitomo Corporation Group), Dr. Kablae Kim (Korea Capital Market Institute), Moses Lee (Anchorage Digital) 

Core Alliance Day DEMO Day

The following day, Core Alliance Day attracted over 500 attendees and partnered with major gaming companies such as Blocore, Krafton, Nexon, Netmarble, NC Soft, Bandai Namco, SEGA, KONAMI, SNK, Lilith Games, and 2K. 

The event served as a valuable networking space, where innovative Web3 projects showcased their visions and technologies to investors and industry leaders. A total of 18 projects, including Polyhedra, Nubit, Taiko, ZkPass, B^2 Network, Mezo, Chainsight, Codatta, Inverter, Aori, Xverse, Seraph, Avarik Saga, Sonic, NERO Chain, Space Nation, Gomble, and Neuphoria, presented their updates and innovations.

NERO Chain Presents New Value for Web3 Applications with “Your Users, Your Rules”

During this event, NERO Chain was invited to BTCON 2024 and took the stage at Core Alliance Day. CEO Jake Stolarski introduced a new concept called “Blockspace 2.0,” which tackles the challenges Web3 applications face, such as on-chain limitations, token liquidity, and price volatility—issues which were highlighted in game project presentations. Stolarski emphasized the message “Your Users, Your Rules,” underscoring the need for user-centric rule-making at the application layer to support the development of sustainable and adaptable application-layer fees.

Whilst also introducing the 'Goldilocks fee problem,' highlighting the issue of an unbalanced market—either too volatile or too stagnant—current Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks often face challenges with gas fee volatility, which heavily affects the viability of businesses at the application layer. NERO Chain addresses these issues by optimizing fees and prioritizing modularity within the application layer, tackling concerns such as limited token utility and long-term security.

Set to launch in late October, NERO’s Paymaster interface will enable applications to build unique revenue models and drive sustainable token demand. In addition, NERO Chain offers user-friendly features such as social logins and account recovery, addressing common issues with traditional EOAs, and enhancing the overall value of the Web3 ecosystem.

Transcript of the presentation can be found below: 

Thanks, everyone. I know it's a little late in the day, and we've heard a lot of presentations, but I'm here to talk about NERO and what we're building. NERO is creating a radically different 3D empire, introducing a new concept called Blockspace 2.0. Since I'm in the middle of the gaming discussion, I'll talk more about how it's relevant to games and other applications.

NERO is a blockchain that gives power back to the applications. We focus on modularity, specifically in the application layer. Think of NERO as a fee orchestration layer with a protocol underneath, and this fee orchestration layer can be portable to other chains. The dilemma we're solving is that fees are currently very one-dimensional, with no price discovery. Applications have no input into what fees are when deciding which chain to build on. This results in many tokens in the ecosystem that don't have any utility or reason to exist. Chains that optimize for the lowest fees often trade off long-term security by subsidizing inflationary rewards to validators.

It becomes difficult for applications to decide which chain to develop on, as it's hard to predict if the fees seen today will remain consistent long-term. This uncertainty makes it challenging to run a predictable business. Even on rollups you get up to 50% variability within several blocks, which is problematic for anyone building any EVM chain setting to Ethereum. And as we zoom out, we can see both ends of the fee spectrum, where we have the high fees (a problem we are all familiar with) which excludes many participants — but we also see that when we optimize for the lowest fees possible, a whole new set of problems emerge with economic sustainability. We think of this as a "Goldilocks fee problem"—on NERO we focus on offering the ability to set fees that are not too high or too low but just right.

Many blockchains aren't accommodating to users beyond DeFi applications, and this approach can lead to long-term security implications due to unsustainable revenues. At NERO, we give back pricing power to the application, finding a sweet spot in fee optimization that allows for flexibility, customization, and optimization, which we call Blockspace 2.0.

Every application is empowered with what's called Paymaster, an interface where application deployers can set their gas tokens, even stablecoins. This allows for fee markup, sponsored gas, and marketing campaigns, enabling various freemium models, such as offering the first ten transactions for free. This setup helps applications solve their specific priorities, and customize their tradeoff.

NERO also includes a bundler that can be application-specific, reducing MEV by about 95% and providing benefits that—all within the same network without switching. We aim to create utility and demand for all applications, especially those with large communities and successful track records but still lacking token use cases beyond speculation.

By setting their paymaster and gas token, applications can increase demand and price, creating new revenue streams. NERO shares in this success by splitting fees, allowing both the network and the application to thrive together. For instance, if Uniswap had used its token for gas over the last four years, it could have seen about a 4x growth due to increased demand.

In summary, our breakthroughs include parametric pricing, fee sharing, and eliminating the overhead of building an AppChain. Applications don't need to worry about validators and other development overhead; they get all the benefits just by using the NERO Paymaster instead. We also offer user-friendly features such as social logins, account recovery, and addressing the challenges of EOAs, adhering to the principle of "Your users, your rules." Thank you.

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