Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - DevConnect 2025: Inside The Biggest Ethereum Event in History

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

“DevConnect 2025 was about touching and feeling Ethereum IRL”Nathan Sexer, lead of the DevConnect 2025 and Events team at the Ethereum Foundation, gives a peek into the largest iteration of Devconnect ever, with 20,000 attendees, and why the team pivoted to a "World's Fair" format, creating tangible districts for DeFi and Privacy to let attendees truly "touch and feel" the ecosystem.The conversation gets real about the friction of the physical world. He explained why Argentina’s crypto-native culture makes it the perfect host, how hyperinflation fueled bottom-up adoption, and even the venue-wide internet failure became an accidental "feature," breaking the on-screen silos and pushing genuine face-to-face connections.A massive geopolitical win was how the team worked with the government to issue 1,000+ visas for attendees from over 130 nationalities to make this event in the true spirit of borderless crypto.The Ethereum Foundation is heading to Mumbai in 2026! The goal for India is to unify a fragmented developer diaspora and bring regulatory attention to one of the world's most critical tech hubs.Topics00:00 Intro & Scale04:15 World's Fair Concept09:50 Why Argentina?14:30 Operational Challenges18:15 Internet Blackout22:00 Booth Renaissance28:30 Privacy Priority33:00 Devcon Mumbai37:40 Indian DevelopersLinksDevcon Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/EFDevconNathan Sexer on X: https://x.com/nethan_ethEthereum Foundation: https://ethereum.orgGnosis: https://gnosis.io/Sponsors: Gnosis: Gnosis has been building core decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015. With the launch of Gnosis Pay last year, we introduced the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Start leveraging its power today at http://gnosis.io

Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. Today we're here with Nathan's Xcel. My Chapin have been leading to Deaf Connect team this year, and I'm very, very excited to welcome you at DevConnor. We wanted to organize an event that could give a touch and fair experience of what Ethereum could feel like in the daily life. And again, there is no better play than Argentina to do that because people use crypto, stable coins and Ethereum on a daily basis. In Argentina, you can see people using crypto. We estimate that about 5 million people using on a daily basis and 20% in a country own crypto. So you can pay with crypto and everywhere in the venue with table coins or ETH.

It is the biggest event EF ever organized in terms of attendance. We've almost now reached 20,000 attendees. Hey, Nathan. What's going on? Good. How are you? Yeah, we're here at DefConnect. It's been a pretty insane week.

lots of announcements, lots of sort of like new directional focuses, I think, and narratives. What's your main takeaway from this week? What are the things that kind of struck you as most interesting and most surprising? All right. So I guess I'm biased towards the take of an event organizer deep down into the whiz of organizing an event. So I've been focusing on, well, organizing this event and making it as good as possible. So I'm less into, like I don't know so much about the side events, even though I know there are like a few hundreds happening. inside Boyle-Sarres. I've seen quite a lot of announcements, so I think there's a lot of great things happening currently these days, right? Like every day there's a big announcement

that I've seen Polygon, I think, trust less announced something, the privacy wallet by EF got released. I mean, there is a lot of new releases, a lot of new products coming out. So this is what I feel, but again, like I'm deep down into the weeds of Organizing DevConnect, which I think is a success for now, you tell me, but yeah, we are not. know, more than halfway through and, yeah, a few days left. This episode is brought to you by NOSIS, building the open internet one block at a time. NOSIS was founded in 2015, and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user-owned finance.

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can look like, start exploring at NOSIS. I.O. Can you give us an idea of this of the event because it's an absolutely massive venue. How many people are here? How many talks? What kind of percentage of Argentinians and so on? Okay. So it is the biggest event EF ever organized in terms of scale of what we've been doing, in terms of attendance, in terms of complexity,

and in terms of, I think, visibility in the country and in the area. In terms of scale of the events, so we're doing within the mail building, which is very central to Buenos Aires. We are doing 40 events in Paris, so we're coordinating between 40 different event organizers. We're organizing a few events ourselves, but most of the events are independently organized. We also have a co-work inside the main venue, indoor, outdoor,

and we organize a massive fair, the Ethereum World's Fair, where we have about 100 applications getting showcased, so it's been a lot of coordination with all the apps, the creation. And so we have three main points. Pavilion and again, a lot of things happening. So in terms of operations, it has been very big. In terms of attendance, we've almost now reached 20,000 attendees. Oh, wow.

Ticket claims. $2,000. $20,000. That came through the doors here at DefConnect. Tickets claimed. Yeah. And I think we are now more than 60, 70% on day four of attendance. So people that claim the ticket that showed up at the venue.

something that is cool is that every event that is happening inside a venue require a Def Connect ticket so it's also like you have a Def Connect ticket as a past to enjoy the fair to go to the fair, you enjoy the food you enjoy the free spaces, you go to the event some require additional sign-up

but most of them are free so the Deaf Connect ticket gives you things and we've been coordinating all the AV, the production and many things for these events so in addition of these events plus all the World's Fair with applications. We also have like a football pitch,

meeting rooms, a CMS stage, and many things happening in the video. So yeah, the biggest today. Walk me through the decision to kind of make this a world fair because kind of like that's a new format, right? I mean, we've had boosts before and we had talks before and panels and so on, but the world fair element is decidedly new. Right.

So there are a few things. I think for, in terms of timing, of the ecosystem, we felt that showcasing more apps, more applications of Ethereum, where this is the year where we had to showcase that. Last DevCon, I think there was the main, if not the only criticism we got out of the event, that we were missing applications, concrete stuff that people could use in their daily lives. And so it, of course, helped us to select Argentina. Maybe we can talk about this.

But also, this is what sparked the idea of the World's Fair, inspired by the first World Fair, Chicago, that demonstrated the use and the power of electricity. We wanted to organize an event that could give a touch and fair experience of what Ethereum could feel like in the daily life. And again, there is no better place than Argentina to do that because people use crypto, stable coins and Ethereum on a daily basis. So we felt, again, it was a great timing for the ecosystem

because we now have hundreds of apps live on Ethereum, but also in terms of applications ready and also in terms of doing it into Argentina, which is a great place to do it. What was some of the kind of reasons why Def Connect landed here in Argentina? So we've been scouting Argentina for many years. As a matter of fact, we almost organized it in Argentina in 2022. When we scouted South America, we went to Bogotiv, instead because at the time we wanted to organize DevCon.

I was not part of the team at the time, but we wanted to organize DevCon, which is more like a classic programming that EF owns and the classic talks and workshop format. And in Argentina, we did not find the venue, actually. It was a really matter of venue that could fit this style of event. So we went with the great venue at Bogota. But we visited La Rural.

Some people at the EF at the time, in 2020, I think, or 21, visited this place and wondered this is going to be one place for an event one day. And today is, I mean, this year is the year. And yeah, I think it's a good format for something that is more decentralized, more open air, more of like festival-ish vibe. And so I think this is, again, this is what led us to do to organize these kind of events. And compared to, say, organizing, you know, DevConnect in Amsterdam or like in European country, We organize an event here and there's a particular set of challenges

to organizing events in a place like Argentina where you're coming from Europe where there's language, there's culture, I found one of the things that was particularly complex was payments, which sort of led to stuff well to doing a crypto event here. How did you overcome those challenges? So Amsterdam for the record

was also organized right after COVID. So it was even possible to organize it in Amsterdam because, well, all the venues were super cheap and available. Like, no one crazy enough was going enough to organize an event right after COVID. And it was one of the first big event happening. And so the initial idea came out of DevConnet came out of COVID because we could not simply organize like a 5,000 people event. And so we decided to, the team at the time decided to set up a co-work and signal toward a place

and invite other event organizers and teams to organize their own events. Yeah. This is how it started. That was the genesis of Depp Connect. And then there was Istanbul. Then there was Istanbul where we sing all the same towards the city. We did a bit more ourselves. Like we had a bigger co-work.

We had more events inside the same building. We already had the idea of trying to do a bit more ourselves, like having one place where we centralize a bit more of the people and people could go from one event to another. So that was the first trial. And we took that to the next step with an even bigger venue and running 40 events in parallel and having even more events outside, like external parties organizing their own events aside the main building.

But yeah, this is the main spirit, the main idea. We added on top of 40 events the World's Fair, which is also very new. We experimented a little bit with that at DefCon, Bangkok, because we had the supporters spaces. You could walk in the hallways and see some projects, but now it's really about the apps. The focus was really to showcase applications. You could go at the booth, try and try the apps. And that was the idea of the event. But yes, so the shift changed a bit.

We're also doing much more ourselves. Istanbul and Amsterdam, it was more about side events and inviting people to go to visit the city. So we helped with bikes in the city. We help with guides and creating a map, etc. This year, it was really the focus was on the core events, as we call them internally, the core events inside the main building. and we've put a bigger focus on the venue and everything that's happening here because we're doing so much ourselves.

So it's also a question of focus. That's the main difference. Tell us about the attendees. What percentage of attendees are local and how many have flown in for this? We have about now 20,000 attendees and about 50% of them are locals. So we've put a lot of effort into inviting local attendees. And we're about 20, between 50 and 20 in the team. and we have five local people,

and so we've been working very hard involving local communities on all fronts, and we have someone full-time here, Cordela Fasano, who's been very, very active in onboarding all, again, the universities, the companies, the government officials, all the local communities that are very, very active in Argentina.

We can also talk about this, like Ephemerma, Argentina, Siddlatam, Iskipu, all these organizations that have been also that are organizing their own events here. like there is today an Ethereum, Argentina, Caton. Like, there are a lot of things happening. And so, yeah, so about 50% of attendees are local. We've also put a lot of discounts for locals, for students, as always.

But the locals could come very easily. It was very accessible. It was $20 for the tickets, and we did a lot of partnership with universities. So you can often see waves of students coming inside the venue, like out of school bus. So that's very cool to see. We had tracks of universities with 10 of the biggest universities of Argentina every day, twice a day. So content for newcomers happening always.

Also something we've done is that we've been able to set up a streamlined process with the Immigration Office of Argentina, directly in line with the government where we issued more than a southern visa to people all around the world that are normally blocked from attending these events. So you can see inside the venue a lot of people from India, from Nigeria, a lot of people from Africa, actually. And as a result, we also have more than 130 countries represented. Wow. So it's, I mean, we're only missing like, what, 60 countries? Like, all right, next step, we need to get them.

But, I mean, this is, this is amazing. And it is also far from a lot of places. I mean, some people flew for 45 hours doing three, four, five stops. Like, it was a concern that we had at some point. also let us double down on involving local communities in Argentina, also Latam. But we managed to get people from all around the world and it's very exciting to see.

So making the event as accessible as possible was a big, big focus and also involving local communities at the same time. I think it is always a focus of DevCon and DevConnect. That was the case also in Southeast Asia. This is why we're organizing DefCon and DevConnect in these places. We're going to places.

where others want. Others organize conferences in Europe. At CC is very big in France. I've been involved for many years with this event. Now you have like events in the US with the East Conf by East Global. Its Global is going on in a lot of places. East Global is also going to many places where it's been harder.

Like they're going to places like Africa, India, many different countries. But yeah, so this is a... about the diversity, we had a lot of it, and we were proud of it. Yeah, the visas thing is huge. I mean, that's a big undertaking, I think, to have, like, the government involved and making sure that, like, people can come as, yeah. I mean, even FIFA can't do this, right?

Like, apparently they can't get fast track for people to go to the FIFA World Cup. You know, people in crypto, there's this narrative about, like, South America being a very fertile place for crypto innovation because of people's monetization. solvenity because of the state of the payment rails and the financial system. And this has been something that, you know, we've been hearing for years in the, in the crypto community, like people, Camille Russo have talked about it extensively written about it. What's your sense of how impactful it was to have DefConnect here? And what are some of the really interesting kind of use cases that, you know, you've seen or

are you emerged here at DefConnect that validate this thesis? So there's a hard thing about what we do is that we often don't see the ripple effects of our events for many, many years. I can tell that our event in Bogota had side effects and impacts for many years. And now we're also harvesting the seas that we've planted in Bogota three years ago because a lot of the communities that are involved now all over Latam were born around Bogota. So it's hard to put numbers on the impact that such an event has,

but years later we can tell because, for example, in Bangkok last year, we had many communities coming from South America all the way to Bangkok because they saw DefCon, they went to DefCon, they saw the impact, and so they wanted to be part of it. So the impact is always hard to evaluate. we have a financial, direct financial impact with tourism, obviously, with all the money we put, but all the side events put, that the companies that will come here that will invest into the country,

that will hire local talents that will probably set base, like a con base is getting approval to, like, got approval to like financial regulated. They have like PSAV, PSAV, like a local, like a local, vast regulated entity to be able to deal with finances here. So people are going to companies are getting established. And you mentioned also a few use cases. Payments are definitely the biggest ones. I mean, in Argentina, you can see people using crypto.

We estimate that about 5 million people using on a daily basis and 20% in a country own crypto. 5 million using on a daily basis, it's 10% of the population. It's huge. And so they use crypto, obviously, for several reasons, but for payments because it's convenient. So when you pay a merchant, they often don't get the money into their bank for 20 days. It's very common here. And also, when they're paid into pesos, well, the money fluctuate, right?

Like, the inflation is very famous in Argentina, like infamous, I would say. and so the pesos have been crashing for the last many, many years. And even this year, like I was here earlier this year and now my dollar is 70% more powerful. So I lived it myself coming here three times this year. It's very like it's the need for crypto and Ethereum is obvious. You have the system of Kuevas. I'm not sure if you've experienced that,

but you send a message on Telegram or WhatsApp and you send a crypto transaction with USDT on Ethereum or other network. And the guy shows up with a bag of cash in front of your door. It's, I think, not really legal, but not really forbidden. Everyone is doing it. And it's that common. We've paid many service providers doing the same. Like, the guy sends you just an address.

You need to send $500 there and hope for the best. But then the thing happens and it's quite surprising. very common and it's happening with crypto because it's simply better and it's amazing to see and this is also why we're here. That's fascinating. And did you guys encounter any real issues with like currency fluctuations when organizing? Yes, yes, because we are planning this event for a year. I mean, we're working for more than a year on this event and so quotes vary.

we need to be careful about what currency do we use how split the payments in time so that it doesn't fluctuate too much we often had quotes getting plus 20% because of currency evaluation the biggest impact we well be the biggest sort of thing that

struck us was that contracts don't matter they want the money in the account and so we've had at least one service provider cancel our contract after a very short period time just several days because we hadn't made the made the payment and we didn't realize just how important it was for them to have payment. Then we sort of felt that throughout, you know, the entire process of working for service providers

is that they don't care until the money is in the bank. And you can understand. And you can understand that they've gone through top situations. They've gone through a situation where banks were closing their accounts, like where they could not access the money into their banks. And so, I mean, we've been talking about this, like, you know, censorship resistance in Europe and in U.S. And we talk about it, but we've never experienced.

there or so I mean I have never been bankless and so I don't understand the same way I don't understand or I don't feel it feel the same way as an Argentina that gone through the Coradito crisis in 2001 like feel about crypto like it's not

the same they've been through it and not all of them obviously now we have a lot of young people that are into it but their parents have lived through it and so they understand so yes they yeah cool

Maybe let's look back to the event. So we're almost, we're more than halfway through. It's a little bit early, but what are your preliminary take-home learning? So kind of like what worked well, what didn't go so well? What will we be seeing more of in the future? All right. I'll start with what did not go well. So the internet.

Right. I think that's the entire city of Buenos Aires. I mean, I've found the internet to be very shoddy everywhere. Right. Wi-Fi situation is not great in Argentina generally. Wi-Fi situation in this building, La Ruralal, is very well known to be catastrophic. And so what happened is that we built the whole system from scratch, and it was a huge endeavor. And on top of that, there were many, many things that we did not control, like cloud fare outage and other things, not blaming external factors, but it was a huge endeavor.

We hired some of the best companies, private companies, to set up the whole thing from scratch. I can send you the pictures of the 50 luggage that we brought, like huge luggage of material that we brought to build the whole thing from scratch. You will see all the setup everywhere, if you look. Now it's set up. It's back. It's working, but we had a rough time at the beginning. I think that was the main criticism, if not the only, that we received. probably coffee fixed

but in the end I think we have not received too much complaints cloud fair helps maybe a little bit but I think it was also a good occasion to disconnect so I think it was actually so kind of it was actually quite nice because kind of like we were planning kind of like on our noses booths

we were planning to kind of on board people and show them the things and none of that worked but it didn't just it didn't sorry about that no no it's all it's kind of like I'm drawing the silver lining here so kind of because it also didn't work for anyone else, people were forced to make conversation.

There you go. They kind of like they actually got talking about the things and kind of like, and I often, I think kind of like often we kind of jump in and say, let me just show you and then you show people and kind of like that kind of often lacks part of the narrative of why you're actually doing it.

And I think not having the app to show, if I could choose kind of like a future setup, these have. These have the Wi-Fi, but kind of like if the Wi-Fi doesn't work, it's not that everything doesn't work anymore. It's kind of like you find different levels to kind of connect with people on. It's interesting. So for us, it was like one of the biggest learning as an organizer

that we clearly understood the impact that no Wi-Fi means, like on the live streams, on the user experience generally, it's not great, on many, many items. The ripple effects were huge. But surprisingly, we have not received that many complaints. I mean, that was the main one. But we saw that, like, people connecting more. People, not so many people complained.

Surprisingly, we were like, for us, it was the end of the world. But at the end of the day, he was not too bad. And we fixed the situation. And so now it's okay. But, but, yeah, it won't happen again. That was the biggest challenge since day one, organizing this event as this venue. We knew it.

We took all. the measures that we could possibly take, but we knew some outage would happen and he happened, and we did our rest. We talked about the internet. The coffee and the tea bags, that was a little bit weird. Yeah, I saw. I kind of like the tea bags myself. There you go.

In the push for getting more people to drink Mardi, because the Mardi's church were out. So kind of like, I feel kind of like they were making the coffee deliberately shitty. So people would kind of try the thing they didn't get in all. That was not purpose. It's the kind of elements when you organize an event that, you know, it's the kind of details that you have to go into every detail and check, oh, you serve coffee at the space. How is the coffee? Show me the coffee. Show me it's not powder coffee that you put water into, right?

So it's also an earning. Like if you want high quality events, you need to check all the details. And also with the scale of what we're doing, it was sometimes hard to, to. go so precisely into other details but well we fixed it it's a good learning tell me about the boots and kind of the

fair element of this right because that's new and kind of if you go to talks it's actually a little bit sad because there's almost no one there but people love the booths all the boosts are crowded so kind of like it seems like you kind of like hit the nail on the head here

right so I guess the experience shifted a little. The idea of the World's Fair was to showcase the apps, so to have more of like concrete showcases. We put a lot of focus on that specifically. So we had eight districts. We like Defy AI, hardware and wallets, collectibles, layer twos, what am I missing, privacy gaming? So I think that was it. And we wanted to experiment with a new format, have a more concrete way for people to interact with the event. So I think people loved it. It's used.

for the EF especially like we usually we were like very like showcasing projects but in a plain neutral way and now we went into like full mode into selecting the best projects or some of the best projects including like the biggest international the biggest projects also the the best local ones so you can see the exchanges like Bello, Ripio, Lemon and you can experiment with them and we were also able to showcase some licensed one so you have on ramping stations with Repio where you can buy crypto on the ground. So that's also something else that we've done is that we've allowed and we've worked with merchants to have crypto payments.

So you can pay with crypto and everywhere in the venue with table coins or ease. We've also facilitated with the app a way for you to connect any external wallets. Or if you don't have a wallet with an email, create a wallet and get into the Olympic station or claim a peanut link so that you can have $2 to buy your coffee or something and that. So we really wanted to give a concrete experience of like what could the city living on Ethereum could be like? I will

not agree with you that's all that the rooms are IMT. You have some rooms like... No, I was I was exaggerating a bit. But there's one room that's absolutely massive. And I think it would take probably like 2,000 people at least kind of like put to actually fill it up. So we

organized a big room for the biggest events. Ethereum Day was really packed. We had the Yvescon, the massive event organized by all the local communities. Itham, Argentina, Silatam, Isquipu, with the mayor of Buenos Aires that came, Chiquitapia, the head of the football organization in Argentina that came. The room was packed from the beginning to the end. So yes, the events coming afterwards with smaller capacity, feel the difference, obviously. We're reducing a bit of the rooms, arranging the setup a little bit.

But yeah, but I invite you to go see some of the events with the hackathon that is completely full of hackers right now happening in the middle of the week. So I think kind of like talks is actually very specific thing, right? Because kind of like if you have a talk somewhere, it's mostly the endorsement that you can have the talk there. And I would always assume that kind of like 98% of people who watch my talk actually watch it later on YouTube. And so,

so, and I also take that, that stunts when I, I'm at an event, kind of like, I'd be prioritized going to talks because I know I can watch them on the way home. Yes.

So it's, and I think that's, that's generally kind of, uh, do you really do that though? Because everybody says they do that, but I don't actually watch them on the way out. We usually sleep on the plane.

100%. Yeah. So kind of, yeah, I need to, I need to maximize my plane time. I'm also, I don't know whether, kind of like,

We've known each other a long time. Don't know whether you know this, but also patience is not one of my virtues. So kind of like, and kind of feel to kind of fast forward someone on YouTube is way less offensive and saying, just speed it up. I think, so that's an interesting one. For years, we've been saying that the conference model is broken and no one is attending the talks. I still think that when you're passionate about the topic that you want to be the first one to see, attending a talk is different. Like going to see

obviously Vitalik or any person that you really enjoy, like you will sit here, you will not take your phone and you will listen to the talk and you have the experience and the immersion, like the same way you would go to a concert and enjoy the experience. That's a small fraction of the talks, right?

Probably, but I do think that when a topic matter. I think it's a personal question. If you really care about a topic and you like the speaker, you would go in the room and then speak to the person. I agree. It's a small fraction.

I think that's, I mean, we have to think about it as event organizers. Like, how do we manage this? The speakers still want a place on stage. They want to show you. 100%. I mean, I also gave a talk. And I'm happy I gave a talk because kind of like the curation is part of the service, right? So having the talk up later and kind of like linking it to kind of.

of give people in intro what you're doing. I think it's super valuable. So, I mean, nowadays, all the talks are so live stream and recorded. We see a lot of people in the live streams, actually. So even when the room is half full, you can, like you oftentimes have three, four, five times the people like watching in the stream. So I think we should be low ego as well as speakers and do not feel bad because the roomies have 100%. A hundred percent. But I think like one of the things that's really important to recognize as event organizers

is that, you know, your content is not just who's sitting in your room, but it's also the reach. And, you know, if you're marketing that content well, you're going to get lots of eyeballs on those ideas. And I think at the end of the day is what really matters. I do want to talk a little bit about like so of the main themes this week, not just here, but all the side events. and there's been a few that have struck me.

Obviously, like stable coins have been a massively important topic in the last few months, but also this year at DevConnect. But privacy seems to be the main thing. And yesterday we were talking to Peter Vind-Vulkenberg about this. And my question to him was, you know, is the interest in privacy driven by the market, or is the market reacting to the interest in privacy? It was sort of like a chicken and egg thing.

My question for you would be like, why do you think now Ethereum seems to be like taking privacy very seriously? And, you know, like the sunglasses of Italic would be like a meme that will live on forever. And I think like it's going to solidify this idea that Ethereum needs to be private. But like, why is it so important now? I think pragmatically, the Ethereum ecosystem has been solving one problem after the other. We've sold the merge, right? We've moved to proof of stake. We've solved scalability.

now transactions are like fast and cheap. We're solving fragmentation. We are solving UX. I think this is ongoing that has been ongoing for many years. What are the next big topics and privacy is one of them? 100%. If we want credibly neutral technology, permissionless technology, self-society-resistant technology, we need privacy.

And when you think about it, if we don't have this, if we don't have privacy, then you can identify the person or the network or the tool and just kill it. So privacy is just a need. It's a human rights. And I think, so that's on the tech side. If you don't have privacy, the tech is just simply limited. And you cannot fulfill the promise of what Ethereum aims at, you know, achieving.

So that's one on the tech side. And I think currently, like nowadays, with the rise of far right or like extreme parties in both, sides and nationalism and media control and things like that you need and just surveillance tools that have been widespread in a and for many years now but maybe increasing a bit we need even more privacy technology and private implementation of privacy generally when you see regulation like chat control potentially coming to europe i mean that was crazy i don't go into politics often but when I looked at that I shared that to my family like this is this is up I don't I'm not sure sorry if I cannot say them on the recording but there was

that way louder extremely concerning you know extremely concerning like having chat control would have caused signal to potentially stop operations like this is massive this is not only this is not only Ethereum or blockchain related this is like a society problem like it was crazy it was even considered and kind of like I mean so basically kind of like it's failed in the end, but kind of it failed because by just, so kind of like Germany was actually the deciding vote in the end and kind of like it failed because there were some concerns about how it was implement and I was like, what do you mean some concerns? So this is insane and and I think this is something that the Ethereum community also take, you know, like take very seriously and it makes me

proud to be working the Ethereum community that cares so much about privacy and that has some of the best cryptographic, you know, researchers and moving forward the needle of, I mean, yeah, moving forward the cryptography with decay tech and, and privacy tech in general, because I feel that this is also how our ecosystem can have a very strong impact in the world. Like when you, again, like when you promote censorship resistance, you need privacy and this is why I think it matters. This is why Ethereum Foundation even is working on a privacy wallet with other partners. This is why the topic. is so important today.

To answer your question also shortly, I think it's a matter of priority. We had to solve things before solving that, but now it looks like a big elephant in the room that if we don't solve, like it's just, we're not fulfilling the full, like the entire value prop of Ethereum and decentralized technologies. So we need to address it. Yeah, I think there's also another concern with privacy is that in order for Ethereum to be credible in the institutional space and for businesses, you need privacy. because like businesses have privacy

and they lobby for private I mean they have it and they want to keep it because I think you know there's sort of an adage that capitalism works

because you have individual privacy and you have businesses that can have privacy over their transactions and a business deal and so like constant arbitrage right? And a world where everything

is totally on chain is a world where so like the economy sort of comes to a halt right? And, but yeah, I do think that Ethereum sort of took this priority a bit late. Not saying like scaling and those things were not important, but they took a long time. And I think that privacy, just because of sort of the ethos of Ethereum and also like the risk that sort of people in crypto are generally, you know, so they exist in a space that's more risky to their like, their kind of financial freedom.

or they're in whatever, depending on the country where they may be, or even their security, like, we're both living in France, we know what that's like, you know, to be concerned about your security. I think privacy is kind of, it's a priority that should have been, I think, prioritized earlier than later, but it's great that it's happening. But, yeah, that's my take. I would actually, I think I would counter that. I think, I think, I mean, privacy is super important, 100%.

First of all, I don't think the economy would grind to a heart of kind of like no private transactions where possible. But if we were, if the economic rails were fully on chain and businesses couldn't do things in a private way, it would be very difficult to win business. Yeah, so kind of like it would change the modus

operandi for sure. But I think kind of like the cryptography, that kind of like underpins privacy, it's come such a long way in the last five years. So having had this as a priority five years ago would have set us up for failure. So kind of like if we say, we have

solve privacy first and then we do scaling, I think that would have been putting the who's before the cart. I think we, I mean, we did not have the tech also back in the days. I mean, it was not even possible, possibly, it was not possible at the time. Like, now we have ZK that solves both like privacy and scalability. And how much, how much, I mean, look at the real, real time proving stats. It's crazy. Crazy that this now works.

And anyone told us this five years ago, I would not have believed it. I would not have believed it. So it's great to see. Cool. But now let's look into the future. So where next? Where next? For DevCon and DefCon.

What are you going to do differently? And most importantly, where is it going to be here? So, yeah, I'm very excited to announce that DevCon will be happening in Mumbai, in India next year. So we're working hard on making that happen, but that will be after DeafConnect Argentina. So yeah, we're going to announce that at the end of the event. So by the time it's really easy, it will be live. Yes, we're very excited to go there.

We've never been in that region, in that country. And we simply have 1.5 billion attendees to potentially tap into. So that's going to be big. So also same following the principles of where can we go first like where others would not and where can we have the big potential impact on the region. And India has been at the top of the charts in terms of number of developers in terms of crypto adoption in terms of usage in general. Regulations seems to be moving favorably as well.

It's always up and down. It's a complex environment. but we are confident that it's going to be very, very positive for the ecosystem, for the region as well. And we hope that we can also have a, again, have a very strong impact and replicate some of the efforts that we've been doing here and in other countries. So we're very excited about this location. Just because that's DefCon. DefCon. DefCon.

We'll be in Mumbai. I can clarify as well that I think we're moved. Let's see. Let's see how it goes. I think we're moving a bit, I think this event has been a hybrid model between past DefConn X and past DefCon. We've done much more ourselves.

It's much more centralized. And so let's see how DefCon involved. I haven't been able to, we haven't been able to work too much on this. But it will be closer to DevCon. Fairly emerge. Probably there will be a merge in branding. We've already been using the DefCon, X account.

I think we'll be re-merging the branding. just there has been some confusion in the past the events were very different in the past so it made sense at the time now it's no longer really the case maybe I think I like the branding Ethereum was fair let's see if we keep that one DevCon for sure will remain

let's see what happens with DevConnect TBD but next year is DevCon so are you saying that like DevCon would possibly happen every year or like some new like mutant child of DevCon and DefConnack might happen every year? I mean, and Zach, back in the day,

DefCon used to happen every year. So kind of like this used to be a yearly thing until kind of DefConnect stepped into the... Yeah. Also, it's the same team, right? So I do think, though, that we're adapting always our events to the place, to the format, to the state of the ecosystem.

So let's see what is going to be. What are you most excited about doing? DEF CON and India. Inviting the, all the new developers are coming from India. Like, yeah. I mean, we've invited a lot of officials from India and Bhutan to, to see what's happening in Argentina. We've met with the ambassadors and we've invited the embassy to come here and to see a

bit what's like. We're very excited to start working with the local communities. It's very different from Argentina. in the way that the communities and the projects in India for a long time have been working outside of India. Yeah. So they're based in Dubai, Singapore, other places for mostly regulatory reasons. But we hope that it can improve. We hope that maybe we can help bring the attention and back into India with some help from the regulatory set of things.

But yeah, very excited to welcome all these developers to have a lot of local attendees. I think the focus will be on India for sure. It will not be a region thing. It will be India because it's a continent in itself. Yeah, I think one of the things that could be very interesting there, like you mentioned, is like the diaspora coming back, like American Indian diaspora coming to India and inspiring the local developers there.

I think that would be probably one of the outcomes here is that you just get this huge inspiration within the local Indian developer community. to start buildings for India rather than like just outside of the country. Right. And as a matter of fact, we've been in touch with everyone, like most of the big companies already in India. I mean, Polygon is an example. DeFolio, Denver from DeFio has been super helpful.

We have some Indian folks in the F who've been talking with and they've been helping us with local contacts and stuff. And we've been talking, I mean, for example, Mojit's from Polygon who's based in, like, In other places, Devine and Pius, and yes, I agree, it's a great take. You have people from India everywhere in the world working in the biggest project everywhere. The same way, by the way, Argentinian are in most biggest protocols like Ave, Uniswap, all the biggest. You have sometimes one super strong Argentinian developers. Wonderland was helping with the privacy wallet. It was a super, super strong dev shop, which is not.

I don't think they like the dev shop. Sorry, Matthias. But so you have so much strong team from Manhattan. So much also strong developers and people from India, that's, yeah, I think it's going to be interesting. And we're going to see an interesting momentum. So let's see how it goes. Mumbai is an interesting city.

Obviously, it's not, so Mumbai is like the financial hub of India. The tech hub is more Bangalore, but we, there's no suitable for new in Bangalore. Although everyone from Bangalore will fly, Water Rail trains. Like, definitely organized a hackathon your train. I'm not sure if you've seen that, but that was insane. I mean, the guys are so motivated.

So, yeah, we're excited about this one and see what happens. Yeah. I can't wait to take this opportunity to spend like a month in India. Right. And, yeah. Cool. Fantastic, Nathan. Thank you so much for taking the time during this very, very busy time for you

to kind of talk with us. And I have to say, you look remarkably well for someone who hasn't slept in a week. Doing all right. Thanks. Thank you.