Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Bettina Boon Falleur, Griff Green & Jerome de Tychey: EthCC 5 – A Recap of This Year's Event

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

EthCC is over for another year and what a week it was! 6 stages, 2,000 attendees, over 200 speakers, 40 hours of talks and content, 40 sponsors, and 130 side events (and parties) all over Paris. The Ethereum France team pulled it off again with the fifth edition of the Ethereum Community Conference bringing the community together in the city of love.Keeping with tradition we did an EthCC recap panel and were joined by Ethereum France President Jerome de Tychey, EthCC Project Manager Bettina Boon Falleur, and Founder of Giveth Griff Green. We talk about the standout moments of this year's event, how the conference has grown over the years, NFT tickets, the European Ethereum community, and the future of EthCC.Episode links:EthCC 5Ethereum FranceGivethSponsors:ParaSwap: ParaSwap aggregates all major DEXs and makes sure you beat the market price at every single swap and with the lowest slippage - paraswap.io/epicenterThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/453

This is Epicenter, episode 453, and it's a special episode at ECC5 in Harris. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Friedrich Ernst, and I'm here with Felix Luch. And today we're speaking with Bettina and Jerome, who organized ECC and Griffgreen, who is an attendee. We'll get to you guys in a second. Before we talk about ECC, let me talk to you about our sponsor this week, that's parraswap. Paraswap is a multi-chain dex aggregator. This means that through paraswop, you can easily access the liquidity of various different decentralized exchanges. The protocol automatically finds the cheapest liquidity for you, so you can trade knowing that you're getting

the best price. Paraswap is also gas-friendly, helping you to keep your transaction costs low. And it's been pushing the boundaries of what is possible with DFI for years and just did it again by rolling out the first ever NFT peer-to-peer mobile trading apps on iOS. You can buy and sell NFTs with any token now. They have a secure

non-custodial wallet and you have a Fiat on ramp with zero fees. Find more at parraswop.io slash beta. Petina, Jerome, it's a pleasure to be here again. It's definitely a pleasure

to be here with you guys. Sorry, I kind of lost my voice during those last parties. But super exciting event, as always, thanks to everyone coming, including you. Hi, Frieda. It's so nice to have Epistenta come back to Edtysseer every year. I think it's the fifth time that we've seen you.

So this is great to kick off the end of It's Sissu with you. Cool. So before we dive into the content, give us the stats. So how many attendees, how many stages, how many speakers, how many sponsors? Bettis, I assume you're the right person to address for this, right? Yeah, so Edsiseu this year, it's six stages, 2010. these 280 speakers, over 40 hours of talks and content that will be accessible to everyone and anyone. We also have 40 sponsors this year of all types of sizes. So the community coming

down to Paris has been massive 130 side events to organize everywhere in Paris during this week. So this is not only what's happening in this building, but the entire city living on the rhythm of blockchain. Cool. And as a token attendee, we have here Griff Green. So, Griff, you've been on Epicenter before for Giveth, probably like three or four years ago. And would it be a mischaracterization if I declared you one of the de facto community managers of Ethereum? I mean, maybe now these days, because honestly, I feel like Bettina and Jerome and the other organizers of conferences end up really stewarding the community more than I. In 2016, yes, right, because of the Dow and all of those things. but at this point, projects are on the sidelines

and conferences really bring everybody together in the community. Cool. So tell us about your favorite talks, your favorite moments at ECC. Oh, man. You know, ECC's become kind of a shelling point for Ethereum Summer. You know, anyone who wants to make a big announcement, they like hold it back or push it forward so they can make it at ECC.

And Polygons ZK EVM was huge. I mean, this is the holy grail of scaling, being open source. So much work can be built off of that. There's also just a lot of amazing side events, like they said. You know, it's really hard to get a ticket to ECC this year. And that was like an opportunity for everyone, for all the projects to kind of take advantage of that and create like that. There's a really awesome cello connect events or something. I can't remember what it's called, but I ended up going there all the time. It's just across the street. I don't know if you guys help them get all these venues next door, but man, it's like, this is why ECC is a shelling point because it's like all this connection, all this, you know, without communication, everyone kind of just brought new events next door so all the people who couldn't get in can just go to these other events. And then it ends up pulling people who can get in to have fun. So it's been awesome. And the food has been fantastic. So many nice desserts, like little little, little trusses. treats everywhere. You just walk by and you're like, oh, grab, grab and go, you know. It's been

really fun. This is obviously the fifth year of Ethereum ECC conference. I think it's basically like the inofficial biggest conference after DefCon. And I guess I would be interested to hear how it has changed over the years, I guess compared now maybe to the last year, which one was your favorite year so far? So technically we've been organizing this conference for the sixth because we were, Aetian France was initially involved in a headcon in Paris back in 2017. When we heard that Aetcon was moving and not just staying in Europe, we felt like we should have a recurring conference in France. That's what was the starting point.

And back in Cancun, DevCountry, I was just bumping into speakers of DevCon and be like, hey, you want to go to Paris again in March? Let's do something. So that was my best memory of it, like just a... asking lots of people how you want to come and then oh now we have an event to organize so people just showed up in Paris and it was really uh yeah bootstrapped from the from the very beginning and then we started to get better organized and for us as a as a non-profit organization it's the the highlight of the year like this is what we prepare for every year and we watch this this scene grow we've been through different cycles where like 2017 in the ICU craze people everybody was like yeah let's go let's go let's go

no worries. And then 2018, we had some more trouble. It led us to think about how we can better support the ecosystem by connecting them with different parties. So we organized the ETH VC track to have the startup be able to meet VCs that actually care about blockchain or kind of understand about blockchain and don't want us to get on the call to educate themselves. We wanted to help the ecosystem finance itself and find a long-term partner in that respect. So we saw also the change in how the rest of the industry recognized us. We have attendees from traditional finance now, a lot of them, traditional industries as well, and also really big VCs coming up to hear what's going on from all over the place.

What has changed on our end is the amount of demand that we get for this conference and that poses a lot of questions on what we should do next year, we should continue to evolve. We have also, as you mentioned, Griff, a lot of side events going around, which is great to see and to see pop up and how we can continue to nurture that without threatening them with a bigger event

or a longer event and so on. And for us, it's amazing to hear that it's a great conference, good memories, good stuff to tell my friends when I come back home from ATC, but also trying our best to continue to make that accessible to everyone. That's the kind of challenge we're facing now. I think to add on Jerome's point, at some point when you manage to pass the bar as an event where people actually want to come and you need to stop begging them but start filtering them, it's an incredible moment to be at.

But it's also a very important moment to be sure that you don't get arrogant. You don't lay on what you have. You need to ensure that you get better at production next year. People's expectations go higher and higher and higher every year. yeah, I don't know if you can remember when we used to be in another venue, sponsors were happy with tables and pieces of the ceiling falling over their head. Now sponsors send us their own production companies being like, yeah, I want my booth to be like this and that.

And so we need to ensure to bring that whilst maintaining, as Jerome mentioned, this kind of very low-key, easy feeling. What has definitely changed is getting emails from PR companies. Like, hey, I represent XYZ and he or she is a great panel moderator. Do you want him to come? Like, well, no. Seriously, we make very, very few exceptions, but there are no panels at ETC.

It's a company where people come to present their work and what they are doing or what they are caring about. We are now in the summer because of COVID moved the agenda and we usually do scheduling for March. Now we do scheduling for July. But what you come out of ECCC, as you mentioned, Betina is the 48 hours more talks that a huge video dump that you can watch, enjoy during your summer.

Take vacation, look at what's going on elsewhere. Yeah, look at what the Ethereum ecosystem is building. So you get a picture of what's going on on the research side, on the community side, putting things to production side. And if you've been able to come to Paris and meet people there, you also come back with a lot of memory and t-shirts for the next decades and stickers for the next decade. And yeah, good memories to tell.

No, I think you managed to kind of preserve that community conference feel really well. And you've also kept ticket prices really low compared to many other events, right? So basically now there's events where you pay like way in excess of $1,000 for like a one or two day conference. And that's never been ECC. This time even you actually had to buy your tickets on chain, right? How did that work out for you? It was an interesting experience. The idea behind it was to make ourselves even more accountable to the community.

When you go through a Web2 process, you can start giving out tickets on the side and no one will ever see here. The locks are public, so you can see what happened. As always, both working with Web3 and working with startups, it's a lot of work and there's a lot of elements that need to be bettered every year. We have a very fond memory of the way some tickets were sculpted. That was an awesome night and an awesome times to go through. So it's trying to dog food. The conference is important. But at the same time, we need to make sure that next year it's a more seamless experience for everyone.

I mean, shout out to the unlock team for the work they've done and how they manage to deliver the ticket and check. people at the entrance. It's important for us to look back and look at how mature or immature in some way those ticketing systems are in purely Web3 approach. It's still hard to buy with credit cards something that's emitted on crypto. It's still hard to properly change the network to another network and do something. When we say it's your own community conference, do we accept people that don't have a wallet yet or are not really there yet? We got some critics, criticism about that.

Like people saying, hey, if they don't have any interim wallet, they shouldn't even go to the interim community conference. Well, yeah, that's debatable. It's not what I think, but it's still kind of harder. And when mentioning people that are trying to buy a lot of tickets at once, traditional systems have some protection about that and also ease of management for us. But yeah, keeping it accountable is very important.

Like we, as a non-profit organization, we publish our book every year and we publish a report on what we spend and how we get at ACC. One thing that I'm really looking forward is going to the next devcon because I love to meet people in different cities, but I want to make sure that everybody has a place they can go once a year where they know it's going to happen. So not having a devcon since Osaka was kind of tough for the ecosystem, and I'm glad that now things seem to be rolling for Bogota.

But in between, we really wanted to work double the time to make sure that we could have an ACC and we can have some things. going. We're glad that now financially we are in a much better shape than during big market pullbacks because we were cautious about what we spend and conscious about how we organize. Keeping the price of the tickets super low is a way for us to make sure that everybody can access it even if there's super high demand and sometimes you're just queuing and cannot get in. But there are a lot of people sticking in and that's kind of fine. we're just trying to be able to organize this event every year.

That's what matters for us. Griff just took off his untake-offable wristband. Tell us about the person who bought 200 tickets, Jerome. Yeah, so it's in the press. You can read the article on the block crypto, I think, or on rex.com. So the way the tickets were sold was the tickets are NFTs with specific metadata, and those metadata are computed after you've. fill a form. So technically you could spam the contract emitting the tickets, but you wouldn't get

anything out of the metadata from the computation of the form because you wouldn't have been able to fill the form in the first place. The tickets were non-transferable because we wanted to retain complete control about the transfer of the tickets in order to avoid people just making money out of it or auctioning them and so on. And so someone created 200 also NOSIS safes and tried to purchase 200 tickets at the same time, triggering 200 transactions from those 200 NOSIS-safe. Very good piece of software, by the way, NOSIS-Safe. Since the JonasSafe's control is transferable, the ID was, I think, to put the non-transolable NFTs on a NOSISF that is transferable and then we sold them, which is, yeah, an okay walk around on something we were describing

as not authorized by our terms and condition that we didn't want it to support. And from a business perspective, those was legitimate sales of something that was useless. And so, yeah, it happened and we had to handle that. And that's one of the hiccups you meet when you are trying to go full decentralized. like you expose yourself to other ways of using your product and you would initially have thought in various ways. But now it's done and it's behind us and it's giving us more information and more know-how

about how to do next year and how to perform better next year. And we don't know who these persons are, personal persons are. So he funded their accounts with Coinbase. We're not trying to look or anything. But that's definitely detrimental to the, the rest of the community so hopefully nobody tried to do that next year well we are officially in a bear market although here does not feel like that Felix would you would you agree yeah definitely I think I mean it's always been the case that I think in

the real community conferences the people that come there don't really care like the builders if it's a bear or a bull market so I think generally speaking that ECC kind of stands for that for me a lot where, yeah, if you talk to people, yeah, no one is talking about prices or flirting. I think that's really important. And right, in the bear market, we know, like, some of the best products get built. I think also like a lot of the noise gets filtered out. So I think we're seeing that too, right, like some of the big announcement, as Chris said,

like people wait for ECC and, yeah, the ZKEVM, for example, you can just see like building continues. I'm super glad to see that and yeah I guess ticket price is low so it's also affordable then that's great I think it helps that a lot of the side events were also organized before the bear kind of hit right so I mean there's so many events on boats or rooftop terraces there was a pony out in front tell us tell us about the yeah who brought the pony Do you guys know? So we had to refuse the Lamborghini owner club that wanted to do a demonstration in front of the company.

So I guess maybe they brought a pony, I don't know. Yeah, no clue who wore the pony. I was just alerted yesterday that there was a horse in front of the Misson La Mutualty. I was like, okay, this is happening. I don't know what, I don't know who, but I hope it was a great moment for everyone. So it's about bringing people and bringing purpose to this conference. That's what it is.

beer market or no beer market now it's this time of the year and this time of getting together in the same place it's important for the people we meet for the for the sponsor we talk to as they all talk about like we are going to meet this team that we are doing a partnership with we are going to meet those guys that we are trying to build this with we are going to try to recruit a couple of people here and there it's important to have that on your agenda and as time goes by now we are in most of the agendas so that's great. Even as you mentioned, grief, people are like pushing to have the release there. And sometimes for some company that we met, the very, very ETC date was the date that they tried to do their product release. So they work all the year for the thing. That's amazing.

When I mentioned EGC, one of the things we were cautious of was that during the previous law of the cycle, it was hard for us to find sponsor. It was hard for us to finalize the budget. people that got a race during the during evC they will think about coming coming next year as a sponsor or something and we are super grateful for the sponsor that are recurringly coming and recurringly supporting us so that's important for them to to be present and to continue organizing stuff now organizing an event when you are from abroad and say like hey i want a place next to this venue and i want this and i want that and outsourcing that to uh to an agency definitely has a cost there are a lot of boats parked around the venue so you can rent those.

And I think the situation between euro and dollar kind of helped because a lot of the U.S. companies were coming in thinking like, wow, Paris is on sale. That's great. And that can help on my end. I run a company which is a sponsor this year and we rented the boats in January thinking that, oh, that's great. We're going to do some product release and we are going to invite our friends on our boat during the week.

would we have changed that if we had the option to? I don't think so. But yeah, that's definitely something to consider. Now, as I was saying, if we have a lot of demand for the tickets and we create a frustration on not being able to attend the conference, this frustration will find other ways to express itself and find side events to go to. So when people feel like 2,000 people at the event,

okay, there's no more, but we could have easily, I think, opened the venue to 5,000, maybe 10,000. So there is a lot of presence to be tapped in for the side events. And that's also what's bringing people to do side events. In StarCware, for example, runs Starknet CC. Yeah, so they know that not everybody that's interested in this technology will be able to go there. Polygon run a Polygon day on Monday, I think, and a lot of people went there. So maybe as we keep the same size of events, there will be more and more side events because people will want to come around.

But that's tough questions for the years to come for us. Yeah, I mean, even before coming here, booked the tickets a while ago to get a good Airbnb near the venue, you know. And I made sure that I had a few days before and a few days after because I know there's going to be conferences, other conferences. There's like a Metaverse summit, and then there's a sustainable blockchain summit. And then there's probably countless other side events that are really awesome, actually. And it's like ETHC is kind of the general purpose, you know, like everything to do with Ethereum. You can see the advances of all the teams. And then they each almost have their two favorite conferences that they are all part of, you know.

And it's pretty cool. It's a pretty interesting thing. I'm kind of interested also, I guess, in Paris or France as a community or as a, kind of center maybe even for European Ethereum community. I guess Griff, maybe could you tell us like your impression. Did ECC kind of make Paris like a center for Ethereum or in general, how how do you see the community like in Europe? I recently got engaged. So it's really easy to bring. Yeah, thank you. But it's really easy to bring my fiancee to the city of love and, you know, I have all the romantic times. And I mean, that makes it one of my favorite.

conferences to go to. You can't, you know, it's, it's fun to go to Denver, but it's not really the city of love, right? So I think in Europe, Paris has pretty incredible crypto community, you know, it's like Berlin, Paris and Barcelona, they all have their different vibes. And I feel like those are pretty much the centers of where Ethereum hangs out. But you guys, and you guys built this. So I don't know, do you feel like there's a pretty incredible Parisian community? I mean, there's a pretty, pretty amazing French community, even more than Parisian. I'm Belgian and I know that the Parisians tend to think that all France is Paris, but it's not true. And there's a lot of great companies all over France.

And also, I think that the French government compared to other European governments, has been pretty proactive on trying to regulate blockchain and crypto. And that's pretty huge. I mean, we can see what the European Union is doing right now and it's not the greatest news for all of us. And so having this French ecosystem that is trying to drive it has helped us, I think, also organize it to see and manage to have great companies. I don't know. You, Jerome, as a new startup, what are your thoughts on the French ecosystem and regulation? So, yeah, I'm Luxembourgish and French, so I can tell, like, sometimes French people and specifically Parisian people are starting to think, like they are at the center of everything revolving around French language.

Well, yeah, French language. Let's start with that. Canadians sometimes speak French, and a lot of important Canadians in the Itium community speaks French. We start to have more and poor people coming from French-speaking countries in Africa or in the Maghreb. So also pretty cool to see happening. But more importantly, Paris is easy to reach. From anywhere you are in the world, in any major capital, there are flights to go there.

So it's making it easy. Not saying that going to Osaka or stuff or going to... going to Bogota was tough, but still it's easy to reach. What I love to hear is that people are coming here with their wife, with their kids, the film has to think. Christophian said, like, how I brought my 14-year-old. He'll say, like, it's a nerd conference, meeting friends and sharing what they are producing.

Great, yeah, that's basically it. Or you as a recently engagement, like maybe you can bring your wife to the south of France or enjoy the holiday around that. So we should get a subsidy because we are bringing new tourism in France. We've observed a shift in the mentality of our politicians in France about how they perceive crypto or how they perceive blockchain in general, from the money laundering and terrorism funding to, oh yeah, maybe it's an interesting tech that we should tap into. Generally speaking, I think there is a ethos in French engineering school about

open source development, software like VLC, where we created a, by a student project that like peer-to-peer, like open-sourceness and so on. And we have a few good cryptographer and good mathematicians that like algebra. So there's something going on in that front and that's helping us a lot. Now, what I like about France and Europe is our close relationship with the Germans and being able to do things with them and being able to ping pong between different conferences, between events and different startup organizations because we have a lot of, well, for example,

people at CoSwap, there are some that are living in Paris, there are some that are living in Germany, and it's great to see those kind of collaborations. And when we get together as pushing countries for Europe, there's nothing that can be stopped there. And overall, from a strategical perspective for the European Union, it's for me extremely important that we push this kind of technology, blockchain technology,

because it's open source and leveling the playing field for everyone. So there's an opportunity to break big tech monopolies that are mostly in the US and mostly exploiting our data in various ways. And pushing open source and blockchain is definitely something that they should have in mind. And we are starting to get organized around the community with lobbying parties that are being funded by French companies that are starting to be funded by other companies, in Europe and trying to push an agenda of being blockchain friendly in Europe.

I'm talking about ADAN, ADAN, in France, and they are now starting to have equivalent in Brussels and so on. So we are making good work here and I hope we'll have good things after the next two or three years of regulation. In Europe, Ardan has really done amazing work. So of all the organizations in Europe, I think Adana's the most professional and best at executing. So, yeah, totally, I'll tip my head to you guys on that. Griff, you said earlier that you went to Roddy's talk about the ZKEVM. I did too.

I assumed that you guys did also didn't. So I didn't actually go to all that many talks because there were so many people here. This continues to happen to me at ECC. I end up going to very few talks and basically I bookmarked them. You have a really good agenda this time. You can just instantly add them to your calendar. To me, this was a huge win. You click add to your calendar, and it just transports to your calendar.

It's fantastic. I love it. We need this for every conference. But, yeah, so basically all the ones that I meant to go to and did not make it, I would definitely watch them on YouTube, and they are open to everyone. And you've actually done an amazing job in kind of almost live streaming them, right? they were up, all of them were up immediately. This is, I mean, as someone who's also run a conference in the past,

this is no small feat. So that's fantastic. And I think we will all go back to watch the videos after the fact. So tell me not about the talks that you have attended, but the talks that you will rewatch later. There's all these morning talks that are really hard. Like, can we just start the conference at 11 next year? because it's so hard to miss.

I missed Kevin O'Waki's talk. It was before my talk, and I will rewatch it. I will watch it in the shower. If it takes two showers or three, I will watch that talk. I'm very excited to see the updates from him. I could make, luckily this morning, I could make another, a different Gitcoin talk that I'm excited about. Honestly, I'll probably miss Vitalik's talk today,

and I'll definitely rewatch that. I have two check your face away all the time. Oh, yeah. Well, maybe he'll rewatch his talk as well then. And there's some talks at side events, too, that I really, you know, I just couldn't make it because there's too many. It's like the coincidence of wants, you know, is difficult to make happen. Like, I want to be here. I want to be there.

Even team members, you know, that I work with on a daily basis there. On the other, the event wasn't that close, so I couldn't just make it, you know. So, like, Livia gave a great talk at a side event that I helped her with the slides and I could. couldn't go. What about you guys? I'm sure you guys missed a lot of talks. I missed every single one of them except mine. Yeah. Well, I had to meet a lot of people and to do a lot of thing around. So unfortunately, I couldn't go there. I heard the talk from the guys from Secoia was really good in terms of what you should expect from the market and what venture partners are thinking about the state of the market. I'm looking forward to what's all.

to talk about gaming, because that's the industry I'm in my right now. There are a few talk about blockchain economics that I want to watch, notably Barnaby Mono making sense of roll-up economics. So I'm just going to sit down and watch the talks in while commuting here and there. And that's the greatest thing about it here. And you have this big dump of 48 hours of talks. And you can just enjoy your summer and come back in September with lots of ideas and know how about what's coming on.

around the world. Same here. I think some people binge on Netflix. I plan on binging on Et C. As soon as I have a couple of days off. I really do appreciate during the conference when there's a problem in a room because then that allows me to go into the room and actually listen to a speaker for five minutes.

And I'm like, ooh, nice one. Putting it down, watching for later. The next thing on the agenda, I think that will need to update is to actually add to your own list so that you'll be able to watch it after. So that's when NCCC will become a decentralized Netflix as well. Just a shout out to our media partner, Kabuki Media, who has been with us since the very first ITCC, recording the sessions, and also editing them live.

So after the talk, everything is available. It's available live, so you can watch it for free. That's something we owe to all the community members that couldn't travel to Paris, couldn't have tickets and so on. They are able to follow whatever they want live. There is also a chat that you can use. to chat with your friend and react to what's going on live. And lastly, at the end of the day, you can watch the talk that you missed.

So yeah, shout out to Kabuki Media because they are doing tremendous work. Yeah, I can just repeat, I guess, like many people here that unfortunately missed a lot of content, but we'll rewatch it because, yeah, there's just a lot of people to meet, right? That's kind of the reason why we come here. And then you end up just talking to the people instead of looking at talks. but I think that's fine. I think many people expect that already. And then if you have a break or like get the lunch, you can go and watch something.

I also watched the ZK. Evm one because I was like, this is probably big news for Ethereum. And yeah, it turned out to be like that. So I'm, yeah, super excited for everything. And thanks so much for having us and for keeping the community going in Europe. I really appreciate it. It's a lot of work. And I think super happy to be part of it and have you here today, actually. steal you from the other rooms where everything is breaking right now, probably.

Yeah, if nothing is working with the reason. So obviously, so six years, ECC5, is there going to be an ECC next year? I think there is. I think there's going to be another ETC next year. We need to think about how and what and what we want to change, what we want to keep. but as I say 2023, Paris. I think July is a safe bet. We kind of loved the heat wave.

We don't know what's for next year. Two years of COVID, one year of heat wave. Just give it to us. We'll manage it next year. Yeah, as long as I will be breathing. And hopefully, after I'll be stopped breathing, they will continue to be in CCC. I think this will definitely outpace everyone in this organization

and everyone in the community. we will continue to have things in Paris. So definitely next year, COVID or not COVID, whatever is going on, we will host something. So do count on us to do something. Now in what form and what difference is compared to this year? It's still up in the air. Every attendants, attendees of the conference receive a feedback form.

Please give us feedback about what we should do, what we should not do. We are recognizing the problem of the demand. It's 2.5K people total. almost that with all the volunteers, all the speakers, all the real attendees and the attendees from the sponsors and so on. So how do we go from there? Like do we do an event over five days and create tracks that are mixed? Like, oh, it's the defy and blockchain for good. So that's day one.

Oh, that's the enterprise and any term layers. That's day two and so on. Should we do something over five days? Well, that's creating problems about like how we're going to Stifold, potentially, the side events. also like how do we mix those does it get us to not selling tickets for 100 per day or maybe 500 for the full week

like those kind of questions so that's still up in the air should we move to another venue like should we move to something bigger well if we move to something bigger we could lose the intimacy that ECC is bringing like everybody's at the same place

if we are in a big stadium with 100,000 people which probably going to happen next year how are you you are going to bump into the grief while working at the coffee booths. Like this thing tends not to happen. So also it poses financial threats on the nonprofit. Like if we engage yourself on a super big event and there is a big market downturn,

like will we be able to find enough sponsors to finance the event? We could also go exclusive. Like, hey, make Ethereum a Ethereum Community Conference a sponsor-only conference. Like, hey, everybody gets the tickets and you invite your friends and that's it. Like maybe that's a possibility, or maybe we should consider to have that alongside a student track, student selection track, and try to bring more students. So, well, if we go that route, maybe we should call us Ethic, It's an interim industry conference. Well, I don't know. It's still up in the air.

We're trying to figure out what's best for the community, for the longevity of this conference. But there is definitely a will and means to organize this conference again next year and the year after and so on and so forth. Yeah, and I think that's part of what makes ECC such a success is this mindset of like, we don't know what we're going to do next year. We're going to get feedback and respond to the feedback. And I've seen it every year that you guys just get, you know, you level up, you level up. You had problems with the old venue. You move to this venue.

It's great. You know, different areas used to be used for different things. And I see it improve and improve every year. I don't know how you fit 2,500 people in this place. You must have had some kind of industrial engineer like, really figure out exactly where all the flows will be. I love the arrows on the ground, by the way. That was really nice, especially when you get bumped into a million times, you know, trying to walk through a conference, giving out hugs. It's like, okay, where's that

pink arrow again? Okay. Follow it. Follow a pink arrow. I think that this mindset of being open to and being agile will really serve ECC well. So what's next for you guys? You are going on a very well-deserved holiday after tonight, I hope. Well, funnily enough, I am currently studying, so just after SSA, I'm flying back to the city of Luzan to go back to

my studies and planning on taking a holiday in December. I was offered tickets to go to the France Grand Prix this weekend, so going to drive tomorrow night to Le Custody in the south of France, and

hopefully with this victory of Lewis Hamilton, I hope. Let's see. And then I'll take some holiday in the South of France, settle down for one month, and play a lot of games. I'll try to figure out a new cool game to blockchainize with my company, Kameth.

And in September, just raise your work and so on and watch a lot of HCC videos. I mean, I feel like I'm on a vacation right now, so I don't know. This is my vacation before. I organize a Burning Man camp, well, two Burning Man camps. And like, we have an art car.

And we actually throw a conference as well. It's 60 hours of talks leveling you up. But it's an eight-day, you know, it's an eight-day event. So we can really do it a lot. But, yeah, so actually, for me, it's like, you know, getting back to work and organizing Burning Man and all the events that happen there. I will go to Berlin. So I live in Lisbon.

This wasn't mentioned earlier in the cities in Europe that have a vibe and community. No worries, no worries. establishing it slowly. And yeah, so just going to like go to Berlin, meet some people that were there or still there that didn't go to Lisbon, like in Rural Rican. And yeah, seeing what the community is up to there and then enjoying the European summer, which is always great, of course. Well, fantastic. What about me? Yeah, I go back to Rack. This does also feel, I mean, I've literally spoken with people nonstop for three days, but it's a super nice event. It does have this holiday feel because it's in this really nice scenery. So yeah, I go back to work. We're organizing a conference

also later in the year, DebCon. It kicks off East Berlin. I know, Griff, you're not going to make it because it collides with Burning Man. And I mean, you have, you got to have priorities. I grant you that. So, yeah, so it starts September 12, September 12th. September 12th. to 14th and it kicks off. But in Blockchain Week, we also have JuneCon, ZK. Huck, East Berlin and so on, lots of site events. So if you want to make it to Europe again, September's probably a good time to come to Berlin.

Cool. Thank you guys. It's been such a pleasure and see you all next year. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the a 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

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