Last week at @EthCC [9] in Cannes was brutal. Here are 5 takeaways: 1. 90-95% of projects are still vaporware. Bear market vibes weeded out the worst of it, so it felt a tiny bit better than @token2049 last year. But I still saw way too many marginal copies or tiny improvements on stuff that already exists and most of the "real" projects I saw I would never actually use. 2. @Elata_Bio stood out the most. Multiple people told me it was the coolest project they saw all week. I ended up doing a live demo (Muse brain device + webcam HR tracking integrated into an early Elata protocol app built with our SDK) 25+ times straight from my laptop. Several times people literally stopped and went “wait… you can actually do that?” And a few said it completely shifted what they thought was possible onchain and with their own bodies. That felt pretty encouraging. 3. The Biggest Themes were: DeFi, prediction markets, and AI. Most AI projects were wishful thinking and hype with very little substance and no one really knew how to make crypto x AI useful at this stage. 4. Clear tension between DeFi and TradFi. Institutions coming in means we’ll probably have to compromise somewhat on pure sovereignty/privacy to reach the next level in the space. 5. Networking was a big battle. 2-5 events a day + meetings + drinks = almost no time to eat (& events barely serving real food, but just tiny canapés didn't help). Survived on snacks most days, so alcohol hit way too fast. By day 4 I finally figured out a system but my @ouraring still showed the damage with my stress levels spiking 2.5x compared to my average and my HRV tanking. Glad I went. Elata got a lot of attention and it reinforced that shipping something real stands out more than anything else

damn @Meta just decoded full sentences from brain activity without any surgery or implant & they open sourced the whole thing this used to be scifi but now it's a repo anyone can access neurotech is accelerating fast the only thing left is getting it off a big scanner almost no one would wear and onto hardware people actually own and use daily make it so anyone can optimize their own mind with just the webcam on their phone or computer with that, we're all gonna be enhancing our own minds soon how does that not break your brain a little bit?

u don't have a discipline problem half ur day ur brain already checked out and ur just forcing it & grinding hours that were never gonna end anywhere then u call urself lazy for it but u've just never been able to see when ur actually on vs not what if u suddenly could?

Everyone's losing it over Fable and yeah it's cool and all but why is AI getting massive upgrades while we get none? we're running the same unmeasured, untracked brain as last year while the models compound every quarter we benchmark every new model within hours but nobody's ever benchmarked their own head that's gonna look completely insane in hindsight

some days i think we're building the future some days it feels like we're way too early today a guy tried it and said: "this is one of the coolest things i've ever experienced u can literally capture your heart rate from your webcam on @Elata_Bio wtf" so i guess today we're building the future

got stressed before an important meeting a few days ago could clearly feel my heart rate climbing so i opened a breathwork app on the @Elata_Bio app store and did 5 min of guided box breathing then my @ouraring logged it as restorative time and my HR dropped right in the middle of a stressful afternoon and i walked into the meeting calm and stayed calm the whole way through that's the whole point you know something's wrong, and instead of just knowing, you get guided through the one thing that fixes it what if you could just open an app and it told you exactly what your body needs in the moment based on your real-time state?

most healthtech platforms need you to either give up your raw data or stay generic we do neither instead your data stays on your device & your biological profile gets more accurate every time anyone in the network uses an app federated learning is the privacy-preserving architecture of the future

tokens should be earned through real usage rather than assumed on @Elata_Bio anyone can ship useful biometric apps to drive real revenue, get access to users, and unlock platform support + distribution as traction flourishes this is how sustainable value actually gets created

incremental then exponential DAUs went from single digits in early april, WAUs barely existed, and now visitors and pageviews are up 1.3K%+ all within 1 month of launching the closed beta of the @Elata_Bio app store session time already sitting at 13 minutes something turned on out of the blue closed beta invites started going out in april and people started forwarding them faster than we sent them interestingly enough, the points and faucet pages are getting more traffic than the homepage from anyone who isn't landing on it for the first time people want engagement, people want ELTA, people want leaderboards, people want gamification we didn't pay for any of this opening up more waitlist spots this week. tell me why you should get one

What if your webcam could tell if you're too stressed to trade? That's Trade Lock - one of the first apps built with the @Elata_Bio SDK Sit down, camera on, & it reads your HR in real time Move out of the frame and it stops Contactless biofeedback straight in your browser No wearable needed & no raw data leaving your device Pretty cool to see v1 of the Elata SDK working this well If you want early access to the first apps built with the SDK or want to build with it, let me know & I'll onboard you personally

btw thanks for helping with the beautiful sketch of the brain @dayanxyz 🖌️