This weekend marks the culmination of ETHDenver, probably the most important annual gathering for smart contract and DeFi [decentralized finance] developers right now, on Ethereum and beyond. I wish I could be there this year, but frankly I'm still recovering from a pretty intense four months of making cool things and exposing bad guys.
Fortunately, plenty of people are sharing clips from the event, so I can enjoy it vicariously. Unfortunately, many of these posts express something between innocent confusion and sneering takedowns of the supposedly lame ETHDenver goings-on.
But that attitude, to paraphrase the fugitive philosopher-thief Do Kwon, is a great formula for getting rekt. It may look like silliness and disorganization to you, but ETHDenver's rough edges are actually strong signals that a real community has been drawn together by shared interests to build something together from the ground up. That's the kind of community that has and will weather slow periods of crypto growth like what we're going through right now.
Low-key, it's also a signal that a lot of these people are far too rich to give a damn what you think.
It's hip to be cringe
It's true that compared to a lot of crypto conferences, ETHDenver and certain related events can seem just the slightest bit slapdash, and more than the slightest bit bizarre. Take, for instance, the annual contributions from Jonathan Mann, aka. "The Song a Day Guy." He has created and performed goofy, slightly amateurish tunes for the event for a while now – and every year, people on Twitter take the opportunity to dunk on him.
But let me tell you, a goofy song is barely the only thing at ETHDenver that might make you uncomfortable!
When I attended last year, ETHDenver was held in a refurbished parking garage, where the bathrooms were partly or entirely broken for much of the event. You couldn't see the main stage from roughly a third of the ground floor seating, and people talking at the back of the room halfway drowned out the speakers. Every once in a while, someone would drop 500 pizzas on an upstairs table, resulting in massive queues that made it nearly impossible to move.
And you know what? It was awesome.
Read the full article here.
– David Z. Morris
@davidzmorris
david.morris@coindesk.com
