Three Things #7: Feb. 27, 2022
More ETHDenver Love ❤️⛰️
🇺🇦 Quick note: Like many of you, I’ve been watching the events unfold in Ukraine this week in a mix of horror, fascination, and disbelief. It’s all a little too fresh to make “press time” this week, but my heart goes out to everyone suffering on the ground and to those directly and indirectly impacted Russia’s attack. Consider donating to a reputable charitable initiative such as Ukraine DAO or Unchain Ukraine. 🇺🇦
I joked that I’d need a week to recover from ETHDenver—little did I know how right I was! I’ve been in recovery mode all week, but I’m happy to report that I’m more or less back to normal (and I hope you are, too!). In the meantime I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on the events, and aftermath, of Denver. Here are some more thoughts on it all while they’re still fresh.
Thing #1: Scale
Denver in February might seem an unlikely time and place for the world’s biggest, best Ethereum ecosystem event, but that didn’t stop lots of Ethereans from attending last week from all over the world.
The scale of this year’s ETHDenver was off the charts by any measure. There were well over 10,000 people there—and to put things in perspective, the next largest Ethereum event I’ve been to (DevCon IV in 2018) had around 4,000 people. I noticed not only crypto friends but also friends from all walks of life, including some I haven’t spoken to in years, who have no background whatsoever in crypto or Web3, aping in last minute. This speaks to the degree to which Ethereum and crypto more generally have gone mainstream over the past year or two.
The amount of content was also massive. Five venues, seven stages, hundreds of speakers, mentors, judges, sponsors, talks, panels, workshops, etc. Take a look at the list of recordings on YouTube. Look at the diversity of speakers, topics, composition of panels, formats, etc. It took me an hour just to go through the list and earmark the ones I want to watch. ETHDenver punches way above its weight in terms of both the quantity and quality of content. I honestly can’t remember another event with half as much good content—and I’ve been to probably 100 conferences by now. It’s even more impressive when you consider that the conference is community organized and the content is 100% volunteer-led. I don’t know how they pulled it off, but I’m grateful to the volunteers for their hard work (and especially for getting the content onto YouTube so quickly!).
Also: the number of sponsors was unprecedented. I don’t know the final number but there were over 100. The total money given out to builders, including prizes, bounties, grants, and investments, was over $2.5M. There were dozens and dozens of good side events spanning at least two weeks, including talks, panels, workshops, lunches, dinners, parties, and chill out events.
The lines were also long. Some attendees had to wait hours to finish their covid tests and check in, and once the main venue reached capacity, people had to wait outside for hours to get in. As much as I love the venue and have fond memories there from previous ETHDenvers, it might be time to consider moving the main part of the event to a larger, more modern venue like a conference center. Conference centers are kind of drab and soulless, but they’re the only places to safely and conveniently host 10,000+ people for an event. (And surely we could find a way to decorate the hell out of a drab conference center and own it for a few days! DevCon did it.)
Figuring out how to scale an event like ETHDenver and make it more accessible to more people without sacrificing the things that make it special is of course challenging. The event organizers have risen to the challenge so far, and the fact that it’s community-organized and run as a DAO will help. The first ETHDenver was one of my first touchpoints to the Ethereum community and left me with a very positive impression. I hope it can continue to be the same for many generations of Ethereans to come.
For more: Read some other takes, learnings, and some history on the event. Join SporkDAO. Attend next year, or better yet, volunteer to help out. Reply to this email or DM me and I’m happy to get you connected.
Thing #2: Art
Crypto events have always involved art, but it’s usually an afterthought and plays second fiddle to the technical content. These events usually have a small space somewhere near the entrance where some NFTs are displayed, or there’s an art space in the venue basement, or there’s a gallery down the road. But this year’s ETHDenver was the first event I attended where art took center stage (figuratively speaking: there wasn’t much art-related content on the actual main stage, but there was an “art stage”!).
Art was everywhere at the event, and not all of it was digital or virtual. There was a large art space near the main venue entrance, as in years past. There was also a large art and maker space at the very top of the venue (which I wrote about after the original ETHDenver in 2018). It was much bigger than in previous years, and the size of the installations there had grown considerably: several were room-scale. There was art on the walls throughout the venue, including in the hacker spaces. The chill-out zones—I counted at least five, some of them absolutely massive—were themselves works of art. Then there were the crazy, high-crypto-fashion outfits, many of them from MetaFactory: jackets, hats, shoes, socks, bags, you name it. There were creative costumes. The swag game was truly epic this year. And there was a lot of micro art, too, in the form of POAPs, stickers, pins, and badges.
This isn’t terribly surprising given the role that NFTs have played in the mainstream adoption of Ethereum and other blockchains over the past year, and the fact that the vast majority of those NFTs are still art (though I expect this won’t be the case forever). But it’s significant in a way that I’m just beginning to appreciate.
This community especially celebrates creators, the people who design and engineer software and other projects, products, and services. It even goes so far as to give them a special term of endearment, definitively putting them at the top of the food chart: buidlers.
Ultimately, though, what we’re creating isn’t software. Software has a role to play, of course, but it’s a tool, a means to an end, and that end is culture. What we’re really trying to do here is build a richer, fairer, more open, more permissionless society. And art is the purest manifestation of society and culture. Increasingly, I see that art is not merely a tool we can use to promote mainstream adoption of something else, it’s actually the final product, the thing we’re all working towards. When more crypto painters, authors, singers, and dancers emerge, then we’ll really know we’ve made it. And if crypto does nothing more than enable one million new artists to thrive and share their creativity with the world, I will consider this whole experiment to have been wildly successful.
Without art, we’re ngmi. With it, we’re beyond wagmi: we’re unstoppable.
For more: Acquire some NFTs. Support some artists like Android Jones. Try your hand at creating art!
Thing #3: The D Word
Sadly, it’s become really difficult to talk about diversity. The word is so overused and so misused that it’s on the verge of losing any coherent meaning at all. I feel like I have to recognize this even though I’m not interested in the politics of the term, at least not for the purposes of this article.
In any case the diversity of ETHDenver attendees this year left a strong enough impression on me that I want to talk about it anyway. This year’s ETHDenver was by far the most diverse crypto event I’ve ever attended. I don’t have hard numbers, but my perception is that around 25% of attendees were female. That’s a far cry from the near-zero numbers I was used to seeing a few years ago. I met teams from all over the world, including quite a few from developing world Africa and Latin America. While judging the hackathon participants and speaking to a maybe-representative sample of teams, I heard all sorts of accents coming from men and women (and a few in-betweeners) of all colors.
I think this is partly a natural result of crypto having gone more mainstream over the past few years. But it’s also in large part due to the efforts of the event’s organizers and some teams, like Harmony, that sponsored a diverse set of participants, especially women, from around the world.
While I don’t think diversity is the only important thing we should be concerned with, nor probably even the most important, it is nonetheless important and very much in line with the ethos that the tools we’re building exist for all humans, not just for the paranoid white men who originally conceived of them. Seeing so many young faces, students, folks from the developing world, strong, smart women, and people who look and sound and think differently than I do, was a highlight of the trip for me. So far, ideas like DAOs and NFTs do seem to appeal to a pretty broad subset of humanity, although as the message spreads and the community grows those ideas will continue to evolve in unexpected ways, which is part of the plan. Keep it up, Denver, and keep it weird.
For more: Check out and support initiatives like H.E.R. DAO and the Harmony Africa DAO that are promoting diversity in the Web3 space.