Home🦄 Reflections On ETHDenver — Issue No. 84
Last weekend, from February 14th through 16th, several thousand enthusiasts gathered in Colorado's capital for the third annual ETHDenver conference and hackathon. I was in attendance, so in a slight departure from my usual outside-in commentary, I'd like to give you a little taste of what it was like to be on the ground.
In this week's edition, I'll also give you a brief summary of some of the projects built during the hackathon, including my own team's work. I'll close with my big picture takeaway discussing what the event demonstrates about Ethereum's community.
The Vibe
ETHDenver was held in a sprawling, six story building with a factory-like, industrial feel. The dark rubberized floors, which were adorned by thick strips of bright colored tape, tilt into ramps— rather than stairs— as you ascend from level to level. That tape had a purpose beyond mere decoration. It provided a guide to the various presentation stages, break rooms, maker spaces, game rooms, and hackathon work areas set up throughout the building. Link.
The unique venue was appropriate for the diverse group that gathered there. It really was a fascinating mix of folks, but with hardly any exceptions, I enjoyed the dozens of conversations I had with the people I met. If you'll forgive me a moment of sappiness, I just have to say it: the Ethereum community I encountered last weekend was open, welcoming, curious, and passionate. I really enjoyed my time.
The Hackathon
Despite telling myself I wouldn't, I stayed up all night to work on a hackathon submission. I was surprised to see how many other teams did as well. There were literally hundreds of developers hacking away at 4 AM. Over a hundred teams participated and 80+ submitted final projects.
DeFi, DAOs, and infrastructure seemed to be the dominant themes.
- The winning submission allowed you to take leveraged positions on the price of DAI (Link)
- Another DeFi project allowed the creation of decentralized options markets (Link)
- I was intrigued by one project which aimed to address inheritance planning for cryptoassets (Link)
- Our neighbors during the hackathon built something neat: a bot that monitors transactions sent from your address and will frontrun any would-be thefts attempted in the event your keys are compromised (Link)
I'm pretty proud of what we ended up hacking together, despite it being coded up during a caffeine fueled all nighter. I probably learned more during that 36 hours than I would in a month of normal work at home.
The Values
Longtime readers of this newsletter know that I eschew labels like Etherean or Bitcoiner. There are a couple reasons for this. For one, I'm a fan of a number of networks, and I believe there is room for multiple complementary projects to flourish. More fundamentally, I don't see any upside to these tribal identities. They bias our judgement, and if we cling too tightly to them, we risk taking our eye off the prize: the ability to cooperate freely with people across the globe, but without ceding power to massive centralized entities. This is why decentralized cryptonetworks matter regardless of which ones end up "winning".With that said, there's no doubt the various communities tend to develop their own sets of values. As someone who traverses multiple communities, and has to navigate these differences, I went into ETHDenver with an explicit goal to try to understand better what makes the Ethereum community tick. I was delighted, therefore, when Vitalik Buterin himself discussed a nuanced distinction between Ethereum values and Bitcoin values as he sees them. Link.
Vitalik conjectured that while Bitcoin has an "every man for himself" ethos, the Ethereum community tends to focus on developing new kinds of organizations which are uniquely made possible by blockchain networks. Examples of this include DAOs, DAICOs, DeFi protocols, on-chain markets, quadratic grants, and decentralized oracles.
This point really resonated with me, and was reinforced throughout the weekend. Bitcoin is an incredible tool, and I'm a huge proponent of it, but I'm not sure "be your own bank" is as powerful a pitch as many of its hardcore fans think. Beyond a certain number of people who value individualism above all else, most people probably find the prospect of being their own bank intimidating.
Humans are social creatures. We like to work together, and our ability to do so is our greatest asset as a species. Smart contract platforms allow us to create new mechanisms for enabling this human collaboration. While any smart contract platform could do this in theory, there is no denying that Ethereum is leading the way. That's because Ethereum has attracted a community of builders. This small army of tinkerers is an engine for finding new ways for humans to coordinate with one another. This was on full display at ETHDenver.