This introduced me to IPFS. I was already aware of Matrix, which had a lot of very cool work done on it, which very much sold it to many of us as "what XMPP should have been." Although XMPP is still a very viable protocol...

OTOH, I've heard a lot of dodgy things about Etherium, particularly from the currency side, and just the security in general.

IPFS is exciting, looking very much like Freenet from a publishing perspective, but without making anybody who want to see that data download a very cumbersome program (and the security, of course). The history system is also interesting. However, the single client and server implementation concerns me. Especially because it's written in Go. I don't make judgements about code quality by language (plenty of good programmers hack in Node and other JS environments), but if we're going to use this thing as the distributed platform of the future, it had better be cross-platform. And Go has a... Less than exellent track record for being easily ported (I won't go so far as to say that Golang Is Trash, but that post alone speaks volumes about the porting experience, and there have been plenty of others). Plenty of organizations run on BSD, Solaris, Illumos, or another Unix. If the future is coming, I'd rather they be part of it, and even if Go runs for them, I'd rather not make it any harder on then than necessary.