How to attend Ethereum Conferences for Free

I spent a week in Miami for a multi-chain crypto conference and my flight, hotel and food cost me $0. I even made some money while doing this. The really crazy part? 2 months ago I didn’t even know such a thing was possible.

I recently learned about a thing called crypto scholarships and crypto hackathons and hundreds of people having been using them as a great ways to travel the world for free, meet cool people, build cool stuff, make some money and learn new skills. Today, I will show you how to do the same.

How I Learned About This

I first learned about this when I went to the Ethereum conference in Amsterdam, ETHAmsterdam, I met a cool group of women from an Organization called Blu3 DAO.

Me: “Amsterdam is fun but so expensive, I don’t think I don’t know when I can afford this again.”

Them: “O, we don’t pay for trips. We’ve been to Barcelona, Amsterdam, Denver. Flights, hotel, food. Everything paid for.”

I was intrigued.

Someone else told me in passing that they had about a couple days left of cash before they had to head back home but they were planning on winning 1 or 2 hackathon prizes so they could stay in Europe longer.

I was intrigued again.

Intrigued by all these things I was hearing, I decided to delve deeper and do some research, here’s my guide to how to travel the world for free with crypto scholarships.

How it Works

So what’s the catch? Even as I’m writing this, It’s pretty incredible that these things even exist. You literally travel the world for free, go to cool events and parties, do some work and get paid. The reason this exists (the catch) is that a lot of crypto companies, blockchains, tools need to grow and they have money to spend. So a common growth strategy is offering scholarships for people who use their platforms. You also don’t need to code to qualify, as I’ll explain later.

Join Crypto and Web3 Communities

The best way to start finding these opportunities is by being aware of the different communities that exist in the crypto and web3 space.

Get Twitter, Discord and Telegram accounts

Most of these communities exist virtually on Twitter, Discord and Telegram. So in order to get involved and be aware of what’s out there, you’ll need to make an account on those 3 platforms.

Crypto is a fast-moving space and most of the information is shared on Twitter and semi-public channels on Discord and Telegram so if you want to be aware of those opportunities you need to be plugged into those channels.

1. Twitter
2. Discord
3. Telegram

Join a DAO

Next, find a bunch of DAOs and join them. A DAO is basically just a fancy word for a club or a group of people that are connected in some way.

Here’s a list of DAOs you can join to start your search.

1. Developer DAO
2. PadawanDAO
3. Blu3 DAO
4. Atilatech
5. Her DAO
6. BoysClub
7. Women Build Web3
8. Women in Web3
9. BanklessDAO

From my research, most of the scholarship and grant opportuntiies are focused on getting more women and non-binary folx into web3. This is great news because if you’re woman or non-binary person reading this, it means there’s lots of scholarships available for you. It also means that tese events are not all “crypto bros”.

Also, even if you’re a man you can still get some of these grants. For example, one of the scholarships I received was by a women and non-binary group and marketed mostly toawards women, however, they reserved 10% of the total scholarship pools for men to join as allies. Many people might have missed that fine print but you should always look carefully at the fine print. I think many of the other women-focused DAOs do the same.

Follow the DAO’s Socials

First, thing you should do is follow the DAO on Twitter, then follow their Discord and Telegram pages. Different DAOs have different messaging norms. Most accounts have a Twitter presence, but will post the real-time information on Discord or Telegram.

There’s a lot of information asymmetry in web3, let me explain:

Remember that meme about how Twitter gets all the jokes first and then people on Instagram find out about it? Well usually some news will be shared on Discord or Telegram first (“alpha” in crypto twitter Lingo), then it will get to Twitter and sometimes depending on the nature of the information, by the time it gets to Twitter, it’s already too late.

You might find that even more information is being shared in an invite-only chat on Telegram and all you have to do to join is ask!. This is just like school study groups. There’s usually a group chat where a lot of useful information is being shared so make sure you ask around so you can find it and join.

Follow People in Web3

In addition to following organizations you should also follow individuals since they’ll post a lot of information as well that span across different organizations. I recommend the following accounts:

1. Mabel.Tech
2. GigaHierz
3. Steph (Oceans 404)
4. Novell
5. Dabit3
6. Maia Zennie
7. Daphne
8. Seemcat

Find Scholarships

Once you’ve joined or followed these DAOs you can start looking for scholarships.

1. Social Media Search (Twitter, Telegram, Discord)
2. Atlas Search
3. Asking organizations to create scholarships
4. Google Search

Social Media Search

Most of the information about scholarships are on social media websites and semi-public channels like Telegram and Discord, but it can be very hard to keep up with the large amounts of volume generated by these platforms. So a very underrated tool is just using the search features.

For Twitter search you can usually search for “[event_you_want_to_attend] scholarship” or “[dao_name]” scholarship. Here are some examples:

• “Blu3DAO scholarship”
• “ETHCC Grants”

For Discord and Telegram, go to each DAO that you’ve joined and just search for the word scholarship or grant.

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Atlas Search

Another method is using a dedicated crypto search engine like Atlas (broswer extension). If you search Atlas for the word, “scholarship” or “grants” all the crypto and web3 pages that are related to scholarships will be available.

Note: I made Atlas and Atila

Asking organizations to create scholarships

A very underrated way of finding scholarships, which I’ve recommended before is straight up asking people to create scholarships or grants programs. Suppose you want to attend ETHCC and you see a bunch of organizations are attending but not offering scholarships, you can just ask them to create one and give a compelling reason for what they could gain from doing a scholarship.

You can use this template when emailing or DMing organizations to start a scholarship ir grant.

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Google Search

Sometimes things are so obvious you overlook them. A great example of this is using Google to find crypto scholarships. A simple Google search for words like “crypto hackathon scholarships” or “crypto ecosystem grants” can deliver some great results.

Google is not very%2C%20but%20sometimes%20it%20pulls%20right%20up.) good at indexing crypto content. For example, many grants and scholarships are in Google Forms, Typeform or Notion. Pages won’t show up on a Google Search, so for those you will likely need to use a tool like Atlas to find them.

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List Dump of Scholarship Resources

• List of scholarship resources
• https://perks.surgewomen.io/
• https://ethereum.org/en/community/grants/
• https://www.blockchaingrants.org/

Apply for Scholarship

Once you’ve actually found some scholarships and grants, you’ll need to write an application. I wrote a guide on how to write a good scholarship or grant application. Here are some more tips that are specific to scholarships for crypto-related events:

Writing a Good Application

When you’re applying for a scholarship they generally want to see that you can contribute to their ecosystem. This can be reflected in a variet of ways.

1. Coding experience to build cools apps on their platform
2. Social media following to prompt their platform
3. Previous example of taking initiative

While 1 and 2 may require you to know how to code or have a large following on social media. Which not everyone might have. Literally, anyone can qualify for number 3. All it means is that you need to have some way to prove that if you were given the scholarship, you can give value back to the people providing the scholarship.

I asked Daphne, “what do you look for in a scholarship applicant”, she gave great answer.

Summary:

• Priority for software developers (you don’t need web3/crypto experience!)
  • but also open to people from a wide range of backgrounds (artists, lawyers, teachers etc.)
• They prioritize inclusivity so they try to get people from a wide range of backgrounds
• Effort in your answers. They look at how much thought and effort you put into the long answer questions

Engaging on Social Media

By now it should be clear to you how important social media is in the crypto and web3 space. Another, great way to stand out to the scholarship and grant reviewers is by engaging with them on social media. For example, see what my friend Maia did to get a ticket to ETHCC in Paris.

Fulfilling the Scholarship Requirements

In the spirit of transparency, I actually got one of my scholarships taken away because they felt like I didn’t fulfill the scholarship requirements. Learn from my experience, know that this is a thing that can be happen and make sure you’re very clear on what the expectations of the scholarship are.

Many Grants are Reimbursed but Arrangments Can be Made

Some of these scholarships require yu to buy the ticket first and then they pay you back. This helps situations which have happened to many DAOs where people take the money and don’t show up. Depending on your financial situation, this might not be feasible for you to pay even if you’re going to get reimbursed. I’d encourage you to message them and they can usually work something out.

Crypto Hackathons

The other thing you should do is apply for crypto hackathons. In addition to getting your trip paid for, you can also often get paid thousands of dollars for building a crypto-related project in a weekend. You also don’t need to know how to code to apply. As long as you can add value in another way (project management, slides, presentation, design etc.) find someone who can code and join their team. Also, at some hackathons you may not even need to code, I’ve been at a hackathon where one of the winners presented a Figma template. It’s pretty remarkable that for a lot of these hackathons you can do anywhere from 6-36 hours worth of work and win around $2-5,000.

Here’s a list of websites that offer hackathons:

1. Devpost
2. MLH.io
3. DoraHacks
4. Crypto Events 2022 [by CNC]
5. EthGlobal
   1. In my experience, ETHGlobal, consistently has the best hackathons. So if you can’t make it to all of these, try to make it to at least the ETHGlobal events.

Thank You

I want to thank the following organizations for paying for my trip expenses, giving me hackathon prizes and creating this amazing opportunity for thousands of people all over the world to discover web3.

• EthGlobal
• Blu3DAO
• Harmony One
• Storj
• Activate Build
• IPFS

You can read the full post here or watch the video version or read the Twitter thread summary.

Conclusion

Crypto scholarships and hackathons are a great way to travel the world, meet cool people, make some money and learn something new. It’s pretty amazing that such opportunities like this exist and many people don’t know about it. So now that you know about it, make the most of it.