Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Anett Rolikova, David Hoffmann, Joseph Schweitzer & Nick Johnson: Devcon 6 Recap – Live From Bogota

Episode Date: October 22, 2022

After a 2 year hiatus, Devcon was back for its 6th and best year so far, this time in Bogota, Colombia. As things wrapped up we grabbed a few of the Ethereum community's most prominent names for a recap on the conference. Hear as we chat to Nick Johnson from ENS, Anett Rolikova from Nethermind, David Hoffmann from Bankless, and Joseph Schweitzer from the Ethereum Foundation, about their particular standouts of the event, the LatAm and wider Ethereum community, and what they see coming next for Devcon 7 and beyond.Topics covered in this episode:Introductions and a look back over the conferenceThe LatAm Ethereum communityFavourite talks from the conferenceHaving a booth at DevconWhat's in store for Devcon7 next yearThe future vision for the eventEpisode links: DevconDevcon 4 recap from PragueSponsors: Omni: Access all of Web3 in one easy-to-use wallet! Earn and manage assets at once with Omni's built-in staking, yield vaults, bridges, swaps and NFT support.https://omni.app/ This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/465

This is Epicenter. Episode 465, DefCon Recap 2022, with guests Nick Johnson, Annette Rodlykova, David Hoffman and Joseph Schweitzer. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Friedrich Erndt, I'm here with a whole host of people, live from DefCon 2020. My guests today are Nick Johnson from E&S, Annette Rollicover, from Nethermine, David Hoffman. from Bankless and Joseph Schweitzer from the Theorem Foundation. And we will talk about DefCon 22, which is just finishing up today. But before we do that, let me tell you about our sponsor this week.

Our sponsor this week is Omni. Omni is your new favorite multi-chain mobile wallet that puts the power of Web 3 at your fingertips. In just three tabs, you can stake and manage your assets. it's over 22 built-in protocols, including all major EVMs, layer 2s, and non-EVMs like Cosma, Solana, Nia and more. Omni abstracts away all complexity while being fully self-custodial, meaning getting yield on your crypto, has never been this easy and secure. Omni also has a multi-chain NFT support, so you can view all of your NFTs in one place,

and you can flex your cleaners' NFT by setting it as your app background. Don't forget to check out the Explore section in the app for your data, fix of the hottest dab skills and news across chains. On September 7, Omni upgraded its app to provide you with even more functionality. Want to highlight their transformation, they rename from StakeWallet to Omni. And if you want to get in on that now, join thousands of users on this next generation wallet by downloading it today on iOS or Android at Omni. app.

And on another note, we as Epicenter are hiring. We are looking for a community manager to help grow our audience and take epicenter to the next level. If you are passionate about crypto and creating great content, we want to hear from you. Full details can be found in the link on the show notes. And please also share with anyone who you think might be a great fit for this. And without further delay, let's go to the panel. Hi, this is Federica. Coming to you from Bogota on the fourth and final day of DefCon,

DevCon 6, that is. I am here with Joseph from the Ethereum Foundation, and that from Nethermind, Nick from E&S and David from Bankless. Cool. Thank you guys for joining. This has been a pleasure. Maybe let's talk the big picture first. How have you been enjoying the conference?

Joseph, as the person who's been wearing the hat of organizing this, I'll give you dips on the answer. I would say I'm very glad to see how much the focus has been on the substance. As an organizer, it's, first of all, giant shout out to Skylar Reaver and the whole devcon team, who, thanks to multiple years of COVID, sat through three years of organizing and trying to improve from one year to the next to the next to the next. But conferences, I think, tend to break down on lines of either hyper substance. And as something grows larger, you know, from where it was at 50 people in 2014 to over 6,000, it's hard to hold on to providing value to an ecosystem at a conference.

So when you see lines outside of every talk hall and side stage waiting to get into the next sessions rather than lines for the next party, although I'm sure those were there too, it's always hard to see the people are making productive movement on Ethereum ecosystem growth. I'm very happy actually that DefCon turned out very educational. I was not expecting to be like this very much like builder focused and very much like technical talks. I'm definitely impressed by all the high level and like high educational talks by like whether that's like such a so many talks on like ZK, EVM and MIV. Which I'm really impressed like how the technology grew up since like DevCcun. on in Osaka when we've been like the topics were like a little bit less technical and now as that is like the whole block train and the research and all that progress so much so it's very very cool to see like how the talks are being like different and how much more technical and

even like almost academic like talks were on the schedule as well and it's very cool that those stouts were even full and people enjoy these not only the low level or like the social talks as well. Yeah, I've been having a great time. There's so many talks that I haven't made it to because I keep running into people in the halls and people I haven't met in three plus years and talking to them and catching up, which I kind of view is the right way to do a conference almost because the talks are recorded the people aren't. And so, you know, it's been great. And I've also been super impressed with how well-organized everything is, how there's a great mix of technical talks and like breakout spaces and workshops and panels. And it's, you know, there's opportunities to like go somewhere and decompress a bit. There's opportunities to find somewhere quiet to chat with people.

It's been really good. So this is actually my first DevCon. And the thing that's really sticking out to me the most is that if you call DevCon a tech conference, you're kind of missing it. And there's a reason why DevCon goes to all of these weird cities rather than just like San Francisco or New York. We're in Bogota, Columbia. And I think that's a part because Ethereum is one part technology, but also one part culture. And so we have to find these different communities all around the world that you wouldn't otherwise find in the typical conference city like New York or San Francisco.

Because Ethereum is a social technology. And so DevCon is a social conference. And so it's just not about the tech. It's all about just the ways that Ethereum and local cultures all around the world integrate with each other. And we've just been having a fantastic time connecting with everyone that hasn't been able to connect in the last three years because DevCon hasn't happened since 2019. And so just seeing the soul and the spirit kind of emerge out of this conference has been just a fantastic thing to observe. I would definitely second that.

I know the Ethereum Foundation has come under a lot of flag for the choice of location. I know a couple of people who deliberately didn't come because they had security concerns and so on. But I think it's been a fantastic choice of location in terms of accessibility. I mean, in South America, right? So basically everything's far away from where most people are in South America, but Bogota is by quite a stretch one of the more accessible cities. The vibe is fantastic. So I think the Latin American community has been strong from the get-go.

And usually it's them making the 13-hour flights, except for Nick. Nick's always on 13-hour flights. But everyone else sometimes gets to do this on their home turf. And this is never the case for South American. So I think this has been a fantastic signal. I am locally obsessed with the venue. I think this is the best venue yet.

I love the venue. Basically, you see how many people there are, but it's still, it doesn't feel crowded. Because I think the way they've done this architecturally with like this really high open space in the middle, absolutely fantastic. And I love the bathrooms. I know that this is a really weird thing to compliment, but I absolutely love the bathrooms. This is the first time that any epicenter listener will have heard bathroom-related. comments in the 400 some odd episode history of Epicenter. So I can lend a little bit of context to this because there's a question about, you know,

what the Ethereum ecosystem is, what it, you know, what it couldn't be, could be, should be, coming off of, also coming off of the last DevCon, there are these funny things about it where it's known and almost revered for the things that go wrong, you know. That's a and this time we tried to go. Ideology was probably up there tied at a number one with making sure that things just work. So, you know, was there catering? Was it accessible from the airport? Was it accessible to a downtown into a city? Could people get around the city fairly easily? But skipping over the venue things for the most part, the ecosystem is big. Ethereum, as David often said,

says is people all the way down. But who are those people? So we have this very large community in, say, Berlin or in Denver, San Francisco or New York, and in Buenos Aires. And what will make it all relatively unstoppable, unkillable, and whatever else, is these communities continuing to grow and pop up and create new supercells kind of everywhere. And if we only hit where they have already existed, then we failed to kind of foster that growth. Now, there's a line, right? We're in Bogota, and that means that there are a lot of people from Venezuela that can come over, be at the conference in a way that they would have never been able to experience

elsewhere. But, of course, we can't cross that line and go over there because of political concern, right? So where can you get where you might want to, where can you go, where you might want to create impact and further growth? because regionally it's in an area that might be a great fit. You know, we've seen there's Eith Medell next week in Panama the week after and Kito was last week. And so you can maybe start to create a supercell in the northern half of South America, just like there is one in eight hours south by plane in Buenos Aires and six hours north by plane in New York City.

And once you kind of have people building from everywhere and for everywhere, it really starts to become the worldwide community that we want it to be. So I hope that that's something that comes from this. There's also, and then I'll be quiet, but there's something to be said for bringing all of these people that might have had misconceptions and preconceptions about South America and seeing how that's changed in a four-day span, you referenced people who I'm coming with security or something,

you know, or not going at all. And I've been around people who in the first day said, I'm not okay leaving this hotel, but by day two, they're at the street markets and by day four they kind of like get to know a neighborhood and it's it's quite nice and then i think somebody said to me i wouldn't have ever come to this region let alone the city if the event didn't bring me here and i'm used to it being in places that i know so i hope that's something that we can learn from actually what you just said i feel like that's why conferences are being even organized or hosted like i feel like that like the whole

ETHERM community is like a full of digital nomads that basically just travel from a conference to conference and it just allows us to explore the world and opens up possibilities and options to like where to travel or like visit new places, getting new cultures. And I love the vibrance of the Latin American community, especially as they've been like getting ready for this for like two years, three years. seeing the progress and the energy of the Latin American community and the Spanish people at DefCon, it's very interesting. And especially, like, the people that are around or, like, translating notes or, like,

you know, even, like, talking to your Spanish or, like, doing a bunch of, like, Spanish programs. I love that, especially as Spanish language in general. So many people speak in Spanish. So it's kind of cool to see Ethereum itself transforming into more of a bilingual, bilingual, yeah, bilingual, like a world where people don't need to know only English in order to navigate through the Web3 ecosystem, but also the Spanish as well. And I'm very grateful for everybody who puts any sort of work into bringing the to Latin America and I'm very excited about the growth and the energy that

DefCon and the whole community is especially like people travel to DefCon to Bogota from all around the world and now seeing all these like energies and different cultures at one spot creating like a huge synergy of like that connects like the technology the Ethereum itself connects us all together and now we are making something more like bigger and like connecting together and like thinking how to like help the ecosystem and how to like grow it even more and how to make it more decentralized and especially as Latin American countries have troubles with their own like banking systems and seeing blockchain help with that is very very useful and very cool and I'm very grateful that even the Ethereum Foundation

whoever else decided to host DefCon in Bogota. And this is amazing venue and I'm very grateful to be a part of DefCon as well. Yeah, you said earlier that Nick always has to travel 13 hours, but the sad truth is it's more like 30. And if I have to travel 30 hours to somewhere, it's nice that it's somewhere new and interesting that I haven't been before where I can experience new cultures and stuff, at least the time when I'm not at the conference center.

And yeah, it's been a really fun location to have it in. and I've had a great time. I think the thing that stuck out that most of me about this conference so far is that not even the Ethereum app layer has too much focus here. We're beneath the app layer with a lot of the content and the talks here. That's layer two's. There's post-merged Ethereum, EIP 4844, Danksharding, staking infrastructure. Like, NFTs and DFI don't really have too much of exposure here.

And I think that's kind of emblematic of where we are in the Ethereum world and what DevCon really is to Ethereum is it's this very deep in the stack conference. And I haven't been to any other devcounts before, but I've heard stories. I've listened to the other epicenter post-devCon episodes just to get the recap. And it seems to be that this DevCon also seems to be emblematic of where Ethereum is at large, where early DevCon were small and chaotic and, you know, a little bit of needed some polishing. And so was Ethereum in those early days. And now we're at this DevCon.

where the city was, while there were some concerns about danger, I don't really think anything, anything has actually happened. And I think if you just put on your common sense hat, you actually don't really feel exposure to any danger in the city. And then it's been the perfect intersection of the culture of Colombia, the culture of Bogota, but also the very polished and well-crafted conference center and organized event. And so, you know, Vitalik said that post-merged Ethereum is like 50 to 60% done, but also that we're good at shipping now. We're good at coordinating. The developers are coordinated.

And it seems to be that that is also expressed in DevCon as well. Cool. Yeah. Let's dig into the content. What has, what have you, have you, I mean, I assume most of you haven't gone to that many talks because there's tons of people here and basically you just kind of know which talks you want to catch up with later on YouTube. So which kind of talks would that be for you?

So for any listeners that have or haven't read some of these published books on the history of Ethereum, what's interesting about them is they tend to mark their timelines by going DevCon to DevCon. So it was DevCon too, the DDOS attack is underway, you know, all the crazy things that kind of happened from one to another. We're in Prague, it's DevCon for, all of the core developers call an emergency meeting on state rent where they come to believe that you know statelessness is no longer or that the state bloat could become a huge issue in time and what should we do about it and there are things that came up here too that are quite interesting you've got Carl did his presentation on something that I hadn't heard of previously which was this whole

randomness ceremony that they're working on while we were here one of the major organizations behind a layer two solution obtained a major client team. So that was kind of interesting. And I guess it's one of those things where I saw a tweet yesterday and it might have been yours. It might not have it. It's a walking the halls of DevCon is like being in crypto Twitter. And it's it's there, you know, FCC is great at Denver is great. There are all the events that you know, the community organizes that are thousands of people are cool. But it's it's interesting how it's this event has some gravity around it and it's fun to see.

I feel like this DevCon is way more like proof of stake has been a huge thing, especially as merch happened like a month ago. So now seeing like all these like post-merge talks and like the technical talks like how Ethereum can work in like post-mage word or like how Ethereum can run even on like proof of stake and what kind of devs we can like build on proof of stake and even like improve of and even like improvements in like EVM ecosystem or like solidity improvements or like a bunch of like ZK knowledge that's like whole new world that emerged recently. I feel like the whole like ZK and the layer tools which has been like blowing off as well pretty much. And also just the fact of like how we are connecting that with whole like the cultural vibe as well as downstream.

there's on the bottom floor, we have the community hubs, which is kind of cool to see like different communities as well, taking apart and bringing like a different vibe to like the whole like developer, nerdy kind of builder-ish vibe. It's very cool to see all that emerging and like sort of like even like, you know, putting like puzzling together and creating this like whole new ecosystem. Yeah. I think, you know, probably the talk I've seen that I like the most, which is, I guess, easy because I only saw one, but it is an excellent talk is Eric Wall's talk about social coordination around slashing, censoring validators. And I think that sort of thing is going to be a really interesting conversation to have because, you know, we decide our social norms and the best time to decide the social norms is before the disaster happens, not while it's happening. You know, the reason the Dow was contentious is because we hadn't had that.

conversation beforehand of what will we do with something like this happened. And so I think it's amazing that people are bringing up topics like this at DevCon so that we can really get that conversation kick started. What I'm looking forward to watching afterwards is all of the talks about base layer EVM improvements and components like ZK Snarks and stuff like that and how we can evolve the base layer to better support them because Ethereum ultimately survives by being the best infrastructure for a variety of applications rather than trying to build the applications in. And then also just reading about some of the,

listening to some of the projects that are being built on those sort of improvements. You know, so Dark Forest is near and dear to my heart. I think it's an amazing game. I love that it's not, you know, pay to earn and play to, you know, it's just a game that's fun, legitimately good. It happens to be built in an entirely decentralized fashion. And I love seeing those sort of things evolving, like the non-financial cases on top of Ethereum and on top of new improvements we can build to the EVM and so forth. The talk that's now living rent-free in my brain is definitely Carl Floresh's talk about Bedrock and the OP stack.

And Carl Floresh, first off, is a fantastic presenter. He's just exudes like this vitality and this energy and this optimism. And the, ha-ha, optimism. And Bedrock is all about this. What is like simply defined as like the ERC20 standard, but for layer two's. And so as Ethereum has become more modular, the layer two teams are also learning that layer two is also need to follow in Ethereum's first steps and also become modular as well. And so the OP stack and Bedrock is this infrastructure for, you know, plugging in different parts of what makes a blockchain. So like, what do you want?

You want an optimism fraud proof or do you want a ZK prover? Where do you want your data? You want to put your data on the Ethereum layer 1 or you want to the volidium. But it's like the skeleton to produce any layer 2s. But he connected it. The way that he presented it in the slides, that whoever made those slides knows Carl Floresh at a very personal level because they know how he presents and talks.

And this story that he tells where he talks about the first ideas of optimism to where we are now and how every single time, like, they all come together, they all realize that they don't know shit about what they were talking about six months ago. and actually had to go back to the drawing board over and over and over again. And this is something that all layer two teams are doing and also how Ethereum has done. And so the evolution of optimism and the philosophy, I think, of it, I think is really, really strong. Especially as 2021 was the year of cross-chain bridge hacks and what they're really building is a system without bridges and a single shared network of many, many chains. And so that has lived a run free in my brain.

I just had a comment on this and I'll pass back to Frederica, but this is one of the things that I think the Ethereum ecosystem does best, especially when they're all in one place, is they're allowed to throw stones at one another and at rapid speed. So whereas in a lot of other ecosystems, you end up with a bottleneck as there is somebody that is legitimately smart and doing legitimately good work, but we all wait to see on what the figure does next. In Ethereum world, you'll have, you know, Carl might disagree with Kelvin, might disagree with Proto, and that's just optimism. And then, you know, whatever the off-chain labs does and now prismatic with them, that's just optimistic roll-ups. And then there's the Matter Labs team, Starkware folks, whatever fuel is doing, and you've got the three different ZKVM projects going at it with one another. The rapid iteration and constant competition yields the best results in a way that simple competing roadmaps can't. And it's a really cool feature, not a bug, of real decentralization. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's totally also reflected in the booth space, right? So basically booths often, they are just, you know, tables, you know, swag dealers, essentially. Like, can I get a T-shirt inside them sort of thing? But there were so many outstanding conversations at the booths. And maybe I'll pass to Nick first, because Nick, you had one of the most popular booths, people queued up for longer than an hour

to actually engage with you, right? Yeah, it's been exciting. For those who don't know what we did, is we did this integration where you can come to the booth. We recommend people pre-register because we know not everyone brings a wallet. You prove your ENS name and you get this card that shows who you are visually,

but you can scan it with any phone, get a poet that says, I metnick.eath at DevCon 6 or whoever you are. And then we also put together a leaderboard showing who has met the most people at DevCon 6. And it's been wildly beyond our expectations popular. We got 2,000 cards and we were like, well, we'll use 1,000 for DevCon and we'll save 1,000 for the next event. No, day one, we went through like 1,100 cards, day 2, we used almost all the remaining ones. And by beginning of day 3, we were out. And I've been blown away by how it's gone. But I think, speaking, more generally, I really love the DevConSix approach to booths, which is, you know, most

conferences, being a sponsor buys you a booth, and then the booth is like Schillzone Central kind of thing, you know, whereas here the two are decoupled, and there's these booths, and there's the other ones upstairs, and they're rotating through the event, and it's a mixture of, you know, organizations like ours, you know, public goods, of companies and of, like, you know, grassroots projects and they're all bringing people in to talk about their projects. There's a lot of cross pollination. In some ways the most

valuable conversations we've had have been since we ran out of cards because then we have more than 20 seconds to speak to each person before we have to move them on to get the next card out. It's been really amazing. Yeah, Viteleck tweeted that at Vatican

it's two popes per square mile and at Def Kron 6 it's two pro-abs per square meter and I think this was just about right. So yeah, congrats on this, it's a super cool way of engaging with the community and getting them to use stuff. What about all of yours booth experience? So I know that, I mean, usually, I mean,

how did you select sponsors, right? I mean, so basically it seemed incredibly curated. So, you know, DevConnect taught us a lot of lessons. And the question when organizing that event was, what would it look like if you just called everybody to town to build with one another for a week? Because too often the events are sensory overload and it's harder to be productive. Also, the wrong groups can sometimes get featured. So we decided to forego sponsors altogether this year. There were two separate tracks.

One was impact hubs, which is what Nick did. I'll walk through that in a second. And the other was supporters, where there is a swag zone. And I'll explain why. We thought about foregoing this all together. But the supporter track was fairly simple. There's no real set of benefits. You brand the room.

You get the VIP stage, you know, after party for these people. It was more of, we just held a public goods round. So people could contribute toward Gitcoin, CLR fund, ETH Columbia, or, or, you know, was a Gitcoin around, there was one other. But Protocol Guild, of course. This is Trent's project and those funds go directly toward a lot of the core developers.

But we also wanted to keep the venue clean. So the folks that were aligned and that participated have a smaller space upstairs in which they can give away the swag, but it's not the same as the impact booths. This way at least, we've all been able to kind of pass through without kind of floors and piles of t-shirts. The impact hubs are, this is where you specifically go. This is the big area.

Meet the layer two teams. Meet the client teams. Meet the ecosystem leaders. Meet the solidity team, Ethereum.org. The people doing the educating, meet the grants folks. And it's meant to be in impact space and not just a shill space. I like the idea of a dedicated, you know, chill space on occasion because we all like to walk away with bags and bags of things.

But it shouldn't just be pay-for-play, and we tried to reflect some of that. Oh, actually, Snyder Mines has a booth as well. And this is my first time on a conference where actually I'm there with a company that has a booth. And it's been an amazing experience for me as we are in the Impact Hub as well, which is amazing to like see all the projects and all the like, yeah, like layers. Whether that's like, you know, Ethereum, Ethereum core protocol layers and all these companies that are key infrastructure projects that are supporting the Ethereum itself to be on one floor and where you can like you are able to like even sort of like collaborate together or like you know as there were two companies that at some point merged to one and had like one booths together sort of. And it's funny to like see these emerging.

But they also just like great to like see all the builders and like everybody to be focused on the impact hubs and on the core infrastructure projects. Rather than just focus on like a defy or like you know, under like commercial like projects. And it's it's great to like see that mainly those impact hub boots or like those like infrastructure projects. got the biggest like a light or biggest like highlight space where most of the people are hanging out and it's not only just to grab a swag but it's usually all these conversations that we had at the booth were very impactful and it was very educational and like people coming into us and asking us how to run like a mattermind client and like all these kind of technical questions which is very great that we are able to support defecan as well

on behalf of the Netherlands and like other projects. Actually, you haven't had much time at the booth, so I didn't have much of a booth experience. If I could just interject one more thing, going back to the whole benefits of being in Columbia and events in different locations, day one, morning of day one, we had a couple of the security staff of the venue approach us and say, the queue in front of your booth is too long. It's a fire hazard and, you know, it gets in the way. And we're like, no problem. We'll, you know, can we set a limit here?

we'll put a sign up, we'll turn people away. They're like, great, thank you. Morning of day three, they come back, and I'm like, what is it? And they're like, where can we get one of those cards? And we, Kevin showed them how to set up in Ethereum wallet, like, registered a couple of names for them, and we printed the cards off, and now they're walking around the venue with them. So, you know, local impact.

That is super sweet. Let's talk about the future. So obviously this was DefCon, 6, and DefCon has evolved a lot over the years. Can you leak some of it? Alpha about DevCon 7 because I heard Istanbul. Is that correct? So interestingly, there's always a favorite couple of cities that are Sheldhard online. We learned some lessons. Most of this is fairly public. Maybe this will also be Alpha. But in the past, we've undergone searches where you picked the city before we picked a venue. And that turned out

very poorly. When we then chose another city that, Again, this has been referenced in a book, but with some incorrect details, but I won't call folks out here. But essentially, you know, then just before announcing this, when you find out what a lot of people ended up criticizing in the talka had to do with distance of time from airport to venue or from venue to city. So then you pivot again, and that's kind of how we ended up with Prague. But we had two selections beforehand. So a lot of folks like Istanbul, a lot of people have started talking about Vietnam. I've been shilled on places in Greece and in Belgrade. Usually the way it works is, you've got to look at what you want to accomplish, whether it's impact work, you know, then there's venue availability and all the logistics that go into, you know, can women walk the street safely as safely as men can.

Is the government friendly and able to help or is it, you know, a dictatorial space or something that might not reflect what we're looking at, you know, what reflects the values of the Ethereum ecosystem. There's just a lot to consider. So the truth is TBD, but I think that I really enjoy the shilling personally because it's just great to see, you get to like imagine the possibilities of it all. I mean, for a lot of people that might listen, you know, to podcasts like Kepa Center may also be in the Maker Mafia of Buenos Aires. And, you know, there was also, this was a thing when a lot of people had to go look at cities like this in Buenos Aires and then talk about why and what should the event be and so on and so forth. By the way, they put on a great Ith Latam last month too. But yeah, I think it would start to shape up fairly quickly, but it's not there yet, so I don't have any spoilers for you.

But a lot of people hear, you know, you hear that ringing from the Vietnam folks and from the ITU, the university club out of Istanbul as well. They make a lot of good noise. I hope it's, yeah, DevCon is for historical purposes, tended to rotate eastward, but past isn't necessarily present. Also, you've got the whole Dev connecting in the mix, so we'll see what happens. Nick, one day we'll all come to New Zealand. It's like just to see you. Fantastic. So what in terms of size? So I mean, these events, they've kind of reflecting the community. They've grown. And I mean, obviously, demand has been much larger than actual space to accommodate attendees. Where do you think we're headed?

I would actually pass this question along to, you know, David knows the community better than most. I would pass it along to Nick who interacts with a lot of DAP users. And that is while you've been a community person for a long time. One of the first things that I said was as an event grows larger and larger and larger, it makes it a little bit more difficult to maintain its soul. And so I'm on a little bit of a listening tour. The, you know, DevConnect was an experiment, but that form factor could potentially grow to any size, because if you had a 50,000 person gathering in a town, people could very easily segment to one side of the street for newer users, to another for core research, to another for, you know, MEV things and another for DFI focus. everybody gets a stage, everybody gets to talk eventually.

DevCon is a very research conference, they said on the main stage, in the sense that you might have a 15, 20% approval rate for talks. You're bound to annoy some people, but then you're bound to have some side events around the city to make up for it, but not everybody can get to those things. So my question is, what would you guys like to see in a future DevCon? Should there be multiple events? Should the community own some?

Could it just keep growing to be, you know, know, whatever venue size will hold 10,000 or 20,000 because we deserve our Olympic opening ceremony or our Super Bowl or our World Cup final, and it doesn't have to be distributed. Would you like to see it distributed? So on and so forth. Curious about your thoughts. I think one of the reasons why this particular DevCon is so magical is a little bit about the timing.

Recently post-merged Ethereum. And so now we all feel like we're turning a page for Ethereum. And so now we all kind of need to look around. It's like, hey, what do we focus on next? What's the new thing to focus on? So this DefCon is cool because we just happened to go post-merge six weeks ago or however long it was. The other serendipity here is that we're at the bottom of a bear market. And so you don't really see any of, yeah, hopefully the bottom.

And that means that the right people are here because you don't get any of the fluff that you get at the top. I would hate to see DevCon, the first DevCon after three years of COVID, to be tainted by a bunch of people that are tourists that aren't here for the right reasons and are directing the conversation in ways that are unhelpful. And so this devcon is magical because of that. And so for future devcons, when it comes to size, I can't really predict what the markets will do, but I think all devcons that are in bear markets

are probably going to be more vibrant than the ones that are in bull markets, interestingly enough. However, the whole idea about Ethereum is to scale out to the whole entire world, but the way that Ethereum does this is through modularity. And so as Ethereum gets bigger and as DevCon gets bigger, I think we do have to lean into a modular design structure for the conference. What they are going to, Ethereum is going to produce ecosystems that people are going to care about one thing and not care about another thing.

And so there are people like Phil Diane who he's just going to only talk about MEV. And eventually, MEV is going to be an entire industry. And that is also going to be the same for layer two's because every layer two is also going to have its own network of chains on top of it. And that is going to produce entire industries. And I feel like I can say this on behalf of the entire Ethereum ecosystem, but we feel like we're on the cusp with so many technologies really hitting their maturity. And that is going to produce an industry for every single cohort, every single sector of Ethereum. And so I think the question is like, how do we not have a monolithic devcon where we scale out to 20,000 people and we lose its soul?

But how do we have compartmentalized devcons where they're all like, they're all at the same time, they're all in the same city, but they're more modular. specialized in different areas. And so we have the MEV, the layer two's, the proof of stake, and we get to be more precise about every single part, but we also get to have the large, large conference that Ethereum deserves. Well, we may even see Phil Dian host its own DefCon soon. But no, I mean, on behalf of Ethereum magicians,

we hosted the event at the DefConnect, which was very cool. And I feel like that was great as there was like one central way where everybody could connect, which was the co-working space and then it was like scattered all around the city. But I feel like even hearing from people, I feel like they were like, oh, but we are like confused. But also it was great on another side as there was many venues and many different communities. As for me, DevConnect felt like everybody, like every single community has its own like a hub in a certain, you know, like a part of the city itself, where all the like different communities

like vibe together and sort of like connect together. And then like, you know, you can like go to like one part of the city and have like a public goods. Then you can go to like another part of the city and have like let's say the MEV talks, then go to another city, have like the modular blockchain kind of conference and like even like give us space to like different blockchain communities. And then you can go to like another part and then you can have like the core development and then like everybody connects in the center the heart of the center at the co-working space but for defcons I mean it was great experience experiment with the DefCon that way but how we are going to scale the DefCon itself honestly I am I don't know but I enjoy that the DefCon itself is like

a developer focus conference and that it's very very niche in a sense that we are trying to focus on like impact like how like which country we should bring defcon to where we can like teach people more about defcon or like teach people more about like blockchain and like about Ethereum and how Ethereum can have a real impact on like the country itself or like the humanity even in the country itself and I would personally even love to see DefCon in countries like, I don't know, like Africa, in like a middle of Africa, why not? Especially I attended the Israel talk about public goods. And there were some people, I don't remember the name of the speaker,

but he was saying that they are basically bringing blockchain to farmers and helping like farmers and setting up the insurance for the farmers itself through DFI as their banks don't allow them, like, you know, issue, like any insurance on their, like, farming yields or, like, the farmers itself, like, the farmer workers, not, like, farmers, like, in the defy ecosystem. And I'm very excited to see, like, how DefCon will scale in that way. As specialist, DefCon are bringing together, like, very unique community and very unique vibe.

And sort of, like, decentralizing itself. but in a sense it's still being centralized it's one location and I really love the idea like how we are all the centralized like everybody like working on Ethereum is basically all around the world but then we like once a year we connect in like one location which is the DefCon itself. Yeah absolutely and I would second that basically

it's been a rotation of Europe, Asia and the Americas. Africa has been very notably left out as has Oceania But I mean, basically, you guys, you're small, right? So it's like small and far away. But I mean, yeah, I think it's time to actually have a devcon somewhere in Africa. Yeah, Nick, final comment, because we kind of have to wrap up. I guess I'd just say, first of all, I find hilarious the idea that a prerequisite for devcon would be like a 50% drop in the ether price. So we'd just be waiting, waiting, you know.

But I think it's worth saying, like also devcon is a pre-requent. each event and as long as there's one DevCon, there's going to be a lot of people who want to come because they want to be at the DevCon. And if we do modularize, then we provide events for everybody and everybody can come to the one that suits them, not just to the DevCon because they wanted to say they were at DevCon. Yeah, I hear that. I do actually like the crypto Twitter analogy, kind of roaming the halls of DevCon like being on live crypto Twitter. And I think maybe you can have it. I mean, maybe, maybe like in the midterm future, this will be true. But I think for now, we can still have like these monolithic events with like satellite events around it. And I hope

we see another fantastic edition next year. Let's keep DefCon, DefCon for now. Fantastic. Thank you guys for participating. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter, so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released.

If you want to interact with us, guests or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter. and please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps people find the show, and we're always happy to read them. So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week.