The Finite Garden: ETHDenver 2024 was a Solarpunk University
Three Things #110: March 10, 2024
I’ve written about my impression of ETHDenver several times before, including after the very first event. It’s that sort of event, and it always leaves an impression me. But ETHDenver this year was quite literally bigger and better than ever before. I was so overwhelmed by the scale of the event, which included not only a three-day megaconference that would’ve been massive in its own right but an entire week of preliminary content and talks, plus around 500 (!) side events during the course of the week. Last year’s event was overwhelming in a less positive way, but this year it was different and somehow more structured and the overall experience was more positive.
Usually after a conference I write about major themes. There were definitely a bunch of big themes at ETHDenver this year—crypto x AI, Farcaster, and of course market insanity, to name just a few. Others have covered these well, and I may write more about them soon. I put some preliminary notes here. But I want to try something different this year.
What struck me the most about ETHDenver this year—more than the size, scale, and scope of the event, more than the number of people and the number of events and amount of content—was the feeling that we’ve reached critical mass. When you put enough like minded, values aligned people into the same space for a few days a phase shift occurs and something magic happens. The only way I can describe the feeling, the closest I can get, is that it reminds me of university. Which means that ETHDenver 2024 was quite possibly the ideal conference week. ETHDenver 2024 may be the final form of the evolved Ethereum conference. I say this as someone who has attended hundreds of such events over the years and I don’t say this lightly!
I’ve written a bit about digital spaces; this week I want to write about physical spaces.
Thing #1: Space 🏛️
In my mind a university is several things. First of all it’s big. I was fortunate to attend a university with one of the most beautiful campuses in the world, UC Berkeley. Even after several years of exploring the grounds I still hadn’t seen everything. There are always more things to discover: more buildings, more labs, more libraries, more corners hidden and tucked away inside gardens and forest groves, even creepy basements, tunnels, and hidden passageways! A university is a place for exploration, both of the campus and, metaphorically, of the world of the mind.
Second of all, it’s storied. A university has a past, often a very long past. For most of us the university is the institution we’ll interact with, other than the government, that has the longest and most interesting history. The university is built on lore, from its fabled founders to stories of famous pursuits and shenanigans of famous students to, in the case of UC Berkeley, movements that ultimately changed the national culture such as the Free Speech Movement.
Third, a university campus is beautiful. Simply walking around and admiring the gardens, the lawns, the buildings, the statues, etc. should make one feel inspired. A well-designed university campus or building should invoke awe of the past and of achievements of alumni, faculty, and great thinkers in general. It should make one feel awed by the sciences, by the power of the intellect, and by the potential of human achievement.
My first exposure to an idyllic campus came not in person at university but a few years earlier in virtual, fictional form. Surprisingly the university is not a particularly common setting in sci-fi and fantasy, maybe because epic things tend not to happen there (relative to, say, an imperial court, a warship, or a desert planet). But I can think of an exception. At the risk of both dating myself and outing myself as a huge gaming nerd, there’s a campus setting from one of my favorite video games that stands out strongly in my mind even after nearly 25 years. The scene is of Balamb Garden, a university in Final Fantasy VIII where several of the main characters studied and trained.
The term we’d use to describe Balamb Garden today is solarpunk though the term didn’t exist at the time. It’s a beautiful, verdant, multi-tiered floating campus that includes a central atrium, a cafeteria, a library, a training ground, dormitories, etc. (It also happens to fly but that’s beside the point!)
Something about that campus scene has lingered in my memory. There’s something idyllic and idealized about it. The characters wander around and explore the university while current students are setting up for an annual festival. They chat with the students and encounter many world class experts.
Of course reality isn’t so ideal but the thing that appeals to me most about the university, the unique combination of breadth and limit, exists in both the real and the fictional. On the one hand the university is incredibly expansive in terms of what it contains, especially the intellectual and social potential. One can spend countless hours, days, weeks, even years deep in study and research within its bounds and never run out of new questions. But on the other hand it also exists within a defined space in the world, a space that’s safe and knowable and manageable and navigable, and a space that has structure. What’s more, the time that one spends at university is typically also quite limited.
This is how ETHDenver felt to me this year. It wasn’t quite solarpunk—Denver has both beautiful and ugly corners, and both were on display this year—but it was close and some of the event spaces really had this vibe. Like a real university the event is simultaneously huge but also manageable.
When I say huge, I mean huge! There were tens of thousands of square feet to explore at the main event, over three enormous floors in two enormous stadium-sized buildings, plus dozens of other venues hosting hundreds of other events. There was the main floor, the “BuidlHub” hacker space with additional stages for technical content, the Zen Zone with local artisans offering medical herbs, art, massages and sound therapy, the “Spork Whale” VIP lounge, the game dungeon downstairs, the crowded main stage area, the area outside the main venue where people congregated, food trucks, a DJ chill zone, an art space, a video game arcade, a childcare center, and a maker space—all at the main venue!—plus all of the other venues, happy hours, side conferences, and hacker houses and warehouses. There was a popular bar with a mini golf course, and I visited an enormous mansion, taken over by a couple of projects for the week, that somehow had a massive dance floor and bar hidden in its attic.
But in spite of the scale, the event still felt manageable. Denver is an excellent host city! Everything is either walking distance or a short scooter or bike ride away, it’s nearly impossible to spend more than $10 per ride getting around, and everything happens within two neighborhoods in Denver that are next to each other over the span of one week.
Like the fantastic Balamb Garden ETHDenver had a festival atmosphere, and you could wander around pretty much anywhere within the extended “campus” at pretty much any time of day or night and run into frens and other interesting people. I wrote about this feeling of awe, wonder, and discovery that I experienced at the very first ETHDenver; that feeling is significantly stronger with a correspondingly large increase in the scale of the event.
Neither ETHDenver nor a university campus can be built intentionally, all at once. Things this grand cannot be artificially constructed. Real universities, like real cities, grow organically over time, in many directions and through the work of many hands. ETHDenver has been growing in this fashion for seven years already and it shows. These things take time. The founders create a space, provide resources, set an intent, and then stay out of the way. This also says a great deal about how great, lasting, impactful institutions are created. There are many parallels here to Burning Man, which I’ll get into in a moment.
Thing #2: Subject 📓
Spaces are important but they still need to be animated by a sense of purpose. That purpose—the object of inquiry—also differentiates the university from other types of spaces. In this respect the university is unique in two ways.
First, because the subject matter is serious. There are lots of settings in which people gather, sometimes over many years, and in most the participants are focused on non-serious things like fun, or on nothing in particular. This is the norm: think of communities, clubs, neighborhoods, festivals, all the places and ways in which people usually congregate. What sets a university apart is its structured, serious focus on truth-seeking.
The other unique thing about the university is its breadth of coverage. At even a medium sized university there’s more going on than any person can possibly stay on top of. I grew up in a small town and attended a small high school, then went to a big university, and I remember feeling utterly and completely overwhelmed the first few days and weeks. It seemed like there was a whole universe to explore around every corner: study and fellowship opportunities, travel and study abroad opportunities, hundreds of clubs, sports, religious organizations, newspapers, fraternities, social justice organizations, campus jobs, musical groups, student life committees, you name it—and all of that was just the on campus opportunities. I had almost none of this in high school. I did have the Internet, but the Internet was tiny and nascent when I was in high school (for the kids in the room: imagine the Internet but at very slow speeds and without social media).
I did the only sensible thing as a freshman, the same thing I’m sure every overwhelmed freshman does: I signed up for everything, way more than I could possibly commit to, and spent my first year running around like a chicken with his head cut off until I learned how to focus and learned what I really wanted to do. One definition of a university is a place that keeps you busy, and a place you go to be busy all the time.
Each of these subjects, each of these clubs and affinity groups, is a deep, dark rabbit hole. At university you can go deep down one of these rabbit holes and meet like minded individuals and be totally immersed, totally intellectually and socially satisfied, and have absolutely no idea what’s going on next door for years. Burning man is also like this. You can participate 100 times and take 100 radically different paths and have 100 radically different experiences.
ETHDenver is like a university in both of these ways: serious subject matter and breadth of coverage. People attend the event for serious reasons: to learn, to hack, to network, to get deals done, to trade, etc. That’s not to say that people don’t have fun or that some people aren’t there primarily to have fun—to be clear the same is true of university—but this is the exception that proves the rule and the primary function of ETHDenver is serious (serious, but not too serious!). As a result, like at a good school and like at Burning Man, the majority of attendees are values aligned. ETHDenver is clear about what it stands for, its values have been well preserved, transmitted, and articulated over the years, and as a result the attendees are a self-selecting group that’s quite different than the audience at other superficially related events like Coindesk Consensus, Messari Mainnet, or Token 2049.
And the breadth of subject matters, events, and pursuits is endless and each is a deep rabbit hole. Like university, like Burning Man, you can experience ETHDenver a hundred times and have a hundred radically different experiences: attending different side events, hanging out with different people, spending time in different physical spaces, focused on different pursuits. There are literally millions of permutations of how you could spend your time during the week of ETHDenver, and it strikes me that there are lots of people at this year’s ETHDenver that attended the same days I did but that saw and experienced none of the same content or events I did and had a radically different experience than I did. That’s by design.
There’s something here for everyone. In addition to all of the physical spaces described above there were hundreds of side events this year. The topics included (just glancing at my own calendar) AI x blockchain, zero knowledge proofs and advanced cryptography, gaming, DeFi, NFTs, stable coins, governance, EVM parallelization, alternative VMs, the modular stack, rollup architecture, investment opportunities, security audits, orchestration, running validators, DePIN, scaling, running and workouts, Asia-based communities, DAOs, chain abstraction, account abstraction and wallets, Web3 onboarding UX, network states, radical life extension, futuristic cities, insurance, real world assets, infrastructure including Filecoin and libp2p, private layer one protocols, Ethereum governance and EIPs, shared sequencers, Bitcoin layer twos, ZK-compatible programming languages, coding challenges, Farcaster and decentralized social, “cultivating coherent community” and “social oneness” (whatever those mean), pop-up cities and social experiments, deep conversation in a hot tub or over golf, and all sorts of crazy parties. And again, that’s just a cross-section of ETHDenver, from my own, biased calendar—I’m sure there were dozens of other topics that I completely missed.
Then there’s KnifeCon. KnifeCon is to ETHDenver and its events as memecoins are to serious projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum. KnifeCon is what happens when you overwhelm a bunch of OGs with hundreds of events full of people they don’t know, causing them to retreat into smaller, more comfortable spaces full of familiar faces. KnifeCon is what happens when your weekly calendar gets so ridiculously crowded that you choose to ignore literally everything else that’s going on and yolo into something different and spontaneous. KnifeCon is what happens when too many projects raise too much money and spend it on big, fancy events that all begin to look and feel the same. I won’t say a whole lot more about KnifeCon, which is after all the first rule of KnifeCon, but I did tweet some alpha about it and I promise that KnifeCon will be back again soon. (If KnifeCon makes no sense whatsoever, remember why we started in Ethereum: to build fun things with dear frens, and to not take ourselves too seriously in the process.)
I hope it’s clear from all of this that ETHDenver is big. It’s big, and fun, and serious, but not too serious. It’s like an ephemeral university that pops up for a week each year. Like Burning Man I wish it scaled, but it doesn’t, and that’s okay because it makes it all the more special during that week each year.
Thing #3: Society 🦹♂️
A space alone is just a pretty picture. A space animated by subject and a sense of purpose is high potential but it’s human beings that give the space and the subject the spark of life. Human society animates the subject of inquiry and makes it real and important.
Reflecting on my university experience, the thing I enjoyed most was the people. Yes, the campus was beautiful and inspirational, as I mentioned. Yes, I found the endless breadth and depth of the subjects captivating and I went quite deep down a few rabbit holes. But it was the people that really changed my life. I met people from around the world and from all walks of life: professors, programmers, administrators, researchers, librarians, activists, athletes, politicians, singers, actors and street performers to name but a few. These people were all quite different but everyone at the university had one thing in common: abundant curiosity and a love of learning.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of surrounding yourself throughout your life with people that inspire you. I believe that people are inherently good and that everyone has a story worth listening to, but most people do not inspire. Most people consume your energy and give off negative vibes.
A small number of people, however, do the opposite. A few people impress you and inspire you to achieve great things. A few people ask very difficult questions and make you question your most basic assumptions. A few people are thoughtful and diligent and patient and curious and show you all the things you can be and can do if only you focus your mind and work hard. I haven’t met too many of those people in my life, but the greatest concentration of them was definitely at university.
To me this is another defining characteristic of the university: raw, unbridled human possibility and potential in its purest form. This is what initially attracted me to the Ethereum community and what’s kept me there all these years: that extraordinarily rare combination of people who are capable of doing great things, who are motivated to work hard and actually do great things, and who have the right values and want to do great things for the right reasons. And most of all, people who are taking action to actually solve problems and build things rather than just talk.
All of that was on full display this year at ETHDenver. I attended a couple dozen events and was impressed again and again with both the caliber of the speakers and quality of the overall content, and with how well run the events were. It almost didn’t matter which event I attended or what the subject was. This too reminded me of university: yes, at school there were particular professors and classes that were more popular, but in general it didn’t matter which course or section I took because the overall quality of instruction was quite high across the board. And I can say with confidence that this is not the case at many or even most events I’ve attended in the past. It’s even more impressive when you consider how decentralized ETHDenver is! The process of curating content for the main event is in the hands of a big group, and of course projects are free to host whatever peripheral events they choose. It’s thus a strong, positive, self-reinforcing, self-selection bias.
The same was also true of the most important track of all, the hallway track. ETHDenver has always been heavy on builders and light on shillers and investors, but it’s remarkable that that’s remained largely true while the event has grown so large and the markets have gone so crazy. It’s a testament to the culture and values that undergird the event and to the thoughtful work that’s gone into maintaining and conveying that culture and those values over time.
Yes, there were plenty of investors floating around representing funds I’d never heard of and I had plenty of generic conversations, but 80-90% of the conversations I had were nevertheless high quality and eye-opening. There was a certain energy and excitement in the air; people seemed to realize that we’ve turned the corner, that the bear market has finally come to an end and that we’ve made it through the winter, and that infrastructure has matured a lot since the last cycle. People were throwing out numbers and ambitions bigger than I’d heard in years.
These people think they can actually change the world, and they just might be right. It’s taken longer than we thought or hoped but some of these ideas, including privacy, verifiable credentials, digital provenance and ownership, and of course non-state money have begun to take off in a big way far beyond crypto circles. For the first time ever I can say with confidence that these trends are unstoppable and that our success feels inevitable.
In conclusion, this is where and how I want to spend my time, and these are the people I want to spend time with. I choose to be around people who inspire me to be my best and to do great things in spite of enormous obstacles. I want to say that ETHDenver and the global Ethereum community more generally are an innovative model for a huge, new global university that’s continuous in space and time, that doesn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, isn’t exclusively gated, isn’t captured by a woke mind virus, and is more focused on discovering and building practical solutions to some of our biggest social issues. To some extent this is certainly true. But as I wrote about Burning Man after my experience there last year, I know that it doesn’t scale in time or in space. Our garden is thus finite: beautiful, but fragile and tragically finite.
Nevertheless we’re fortunate that something like this happens a few times a year in the Ethereum space. That’s more than most people and most communities get. (Seriously, have you ever attended a normie trade show? 🤮) And it says a lot more about Ethereum’s enduring success than money or vanity metrics like transactions per second or total value locked. It’s subtle and you have to really immerse yourself in this community in person to experience and understand it. It takes years to build this sort of network, but once you do, it’s truly magical. It’s something to behold: something out of a utopian, solarpunk, Final Fantasy version of the future. And I don’t want it to end.
This is how you scale and sustain culture.