The [REDACTED] ETHDenver 2022 Report

The outlet for whom this article was intended got cold feet about running it, so here's my report on ETHDenver 2022...

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The first ETHDenver was in 2018, deep in bear market doldrums. Hopium was lost. There was a whiff of vapor in the ware. Rumor has it that ETHDenver programming that year was just Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki in a rented bufficorn costume offering bounties for free hugs to an empty auditorium. Even in those salad days of free-wheeling pre-COVID physical contact, few people accepted. Oh, how things have changed.

After surviving an existentially challenging bear market and a near apocalyptic pandemic only to emerge stronger than ever, the mood amongst ETHNerds at ETHDenver 2022 was buoyant, only a gentle caress short of euphoric. Over 20,000 applicants for an event that could comfortably have accommodated a tenth of that meant this year was always going to be an unprecedented clusterfuck. That sense of euphoria lasted only until attendees encountered the line to get in. ETHDenver’s (ostensibly noble) COVID test upon entry policy meant a three hour wait to get in as the line snaked down the block, across the street, and almost into adjacent time zones — all caked in a post-snowstorm slurry. And wait they did, in droves, and for days on end.

That kind of excitement can only mean one thing. Lines for a COVID test. Lines for the elevator. Lines to get into talks. Lines for the bathroom. Lines in the bathroom. Crypto has two modes: Apocalypse and utopia. ETHDenver was firmly the latter. Self-flagellation is out. Self-congratulation is in. That’s because Web3 and DeFi and NFTs and DAOs have all achieved mainstream buzzword status, and none of those exists without Ethereum. You can tip people with ETH on Twitter. Fucky Zucky thought hijacking the metaverse could save his sinking ship. He must be sniffing metamine. Shit, Even Melania Trump bought her own NFT. And if Trump Org is grifting in your backyard, there’s gold in them hills. It’s a whole different kind of gold rush out here in Denver.

The thing is that Ethereum tech actually works now. Well, sorta. It may cost $73 and take a few hours, but if you want to spend $23 million on a jpeg of a monkey – that utopian reality is yours for the making. Do you want to loan a derivative of a derivative of a derivative of a dog-themed meme coin? Sure! Just please don’t call it a derivative or the SEC will sue everyone. APY? In this economy?! Fuck that. What’s your yield by the nanosecond? Imagine your favorite, most esoteric MMORPG, but with the graphics of a 16-bit Animal Crossing. Sounds not bad, right? Now imagine it with a JPMorgan Lounge. That’s Metaverse, baby!

At any crypto event, you’re gonna hear a heap of new lingo: Ponzinomics, POAP, danksharding, pussyverse, proto-shard data-blobs. Did you know that play-to-earn can solve poverty? That must have something to do with the Doge-wrapped McLaren parked in front of the Art Hotel. It was gone by day 3, so here’s hoping that someone vandalized it.

It’s 4pm on a weekday in the Castle, in a cavernous side room shrouded in fog and laden with the rolling thud of house music. Countless exhausted future Bufficorns lay supine in beanbag chairs, staring at the canopy of lasers above them weaving cerulean and lavender spears. Excited groups of kids share shots of liquor. A one man dance party shuffles alone in the center of the room until a gaggle of girls bound into the space and join him. Is this a tech conference or a music festival?

This could be the year that ETHDenver became SXSW for Crypto. It looks like the NFT gold rush has blown the space wide open culturally. The cool kids have arrived, and en masse. You can spot them because they share the same fashion aesthetic as a bored ape: animal prints, goofy sunglasses, glittering sequins, thousand yard stare. It’s too much for some, mostly the jaded blockchain marketing vets standing confused on the outskirts of all things, wondering how they haven’t downloaded Metamask mobile yet despite working in crypto for a half decade. They’ve spent a good portion of their careers slaving for ‘blockchain adoption,’ and now that it’s staring them in the face, they have no idea how to react other than slugging liquor for brunch, dazed, mumbling to themselves about ConsenSys equity.

Their energy is in stark contrast to the chillionaires, the very rich, very relaxed individuals with very few complaints about life. They’re the guys who bought hundreds of thousands of ETH at a fraction of a dollar. You can spot them because they’re wearing multiple rolexes on each arm, board shorts and flip flops, even in frigid-ass Denver. Nobody spots them faster than the bizdev shills, though, who are like guppies into the maw of these mega-whales. Here’s how you survive a hard sell from one of those desperate pitchmen who treat you like a microphone: smile and nod, smile and nod. Do not answer any of their rhetorical questions, because they’re all just hooks for another shill. Smile and nod. That’s how a thousandaire becomes a chillionaire.

While incredibly well socialized Ethereum developer Danny Ryan is on stage discussing semantic mismatches in the transition to Proof of Stake, the din from the reaches of the castle is deafening. Grizzled developers in newly spangled swag sweatshirts yuk it up with NFT obsessives in bedazzled leopard print, comparing shillhaul – which this year included free weed, USB lighters, and translucent metal sporks. Tiesto is in the building. The governor of Colorado just showed up. Vitalik’s mum is holding court. Someone dressed as Boba Fett saunters through the crowd.

“The merge is really, actually very close,” Ryan exhorts over the noise. That gets everyone’s attention. Ethereum Maxis talk about the merge like Heaven’s Gate members talked about the comet. It’s the second coming of Jesus and Jobs and Jehovah alike. On the day the don’t-call-it-ETH2.0 shards enliven, Vitalik will ride into the floor of the NYSE on a pale unicorn atop a rainbow that rains coins to save us all from our current reality: the one in which we’re already in a bear market and nobody except for VC Cunts and chillionaires have the wherewithal to admit it yet.

Speaking of: Look to your left. Now look to your right. chances are that one of you is a VC cunt. The ‘VC’ stands for ‘very cunty.’ A message to your ilk from the rest of us: Take your billions of dollars, your fuckin’ social skills, your well-adjusted attachment styles, your consistent sleep habits, your workout routines, your pearly white teeth — and go copy/paste someone else’s Ponzi scheme!

In the spirit of self-congratulation, ETH devs are here to PARTY. That means drinking enough alcohol to maintain eye contact! Woo! A fresh-faced, motor-mouthed young Web3 acolyte who works for a VC — although he promises it’s not a cunty VC — has a salient piece of advice for anyone, but especially those in crypto: Never meet your idols. He encountered one of his at an ETHDenver afterparty, a guy ‘worth a quarter of a billion at least,’ languishing in a catatonic state, mumbling about ‘the best acid in Denver.’ Apparently, that did not fit his idea of a post-millennial tech baron. He’s learned better now.

An interlude: What does a stablecoin have in common with a dominatrix? It’s all fun and games until you’re in too deep and they lose their peg. If it’s UST, you’re moving back into mom’s basement. If it’s your local Mistress, you’re going to the hospital. You’re fucked either way.

Speaking of fucked: DAOs may be both the ‘new venture capital’ and the ‘next sovereign nations,’ but you may not get that vibe from the myriad DAOs that have proliferated in recent times — BluntDAO, PartyDAO, SporkDAO, SlutDAO, for example. DAOs may change the world yet, but not until they roll a blunt, have a boogie, get the munchies, and visit a sex worker — so just like most politicians, then.

While an opera singer takes to the stage on the upper BUIDL floors for an impromptu performance, surprise guest Andrew Yang appears on the main stage. The room is packed and the audience listens on rapt. The wider crypto industry has been waiting on tenterhooks on the promise of a damaging Executive Order from President Joe Biden, and Yang has the inside scoop. He’s bullish on the EO, saying it won’t be as bad as many fear, but bearish on the long-term prospects of governmental meddling in the space. He says it’s a call to arms moment for the industry, and that we should all take it upon ourselves to fight back. He suggests gamifying lobbying, which actually sounds like a pretty good idea.

All of this isn’t to distract from the main point here: a conference with all the Etherati in one place is totally against the ethos of decentralization. Single point of failure! That’s blockchain 101. What happens if one disgruntled Solana dev sneaks into the Castle with a bomb strapped to his back? They are capable of this. Those guys blow up their own chain on a monthly basis.

The real stuff at ETHDenver is on the upper floors of the Castle, where the devs have been at work hackathoning away since before the hordes arrived, and where they remained when the hordes left. Developers are more mythical beast than the bufficorn could ever be, and here’s where you find those rare creatures in their habitat, buried deep behind the hype machines and money printers. Rows and rows of people, heads down, headphones on. This is the actual source of the substance of the event, the whole industry even. Shit, maybe even the whole world. Every so often, they take breaks to eat stale pizza and play DDR and Mario kart in the arcade, drum and bass blasting all the while. It’s on these floors that you’ll find anything resembling solace in the chaos.

ETHDenver is a place where the developers who build the stuff, the shills who sell it, the storytellers who narrate it, and now the consumers who actually use it are all there under one roof. Yeah, it’s disorganized, but this is the kind of chaos from whence stuff happens. When things get organized, they get lame. ETHDenver is the Birthplace of BUIDL, and it retains that accolade. Sure, 20,000 applicants and only about 150 hackathon projects offers a ratio of about 1 in 20 builders to shillers, but that’s pretty fucking good for crypto. Your average Bitcoin conference is just a mass congregation of undersexed sociopaths yelling past each other about Wikipedia-level macroeconomics. In comparison, ETHDenver is a wellspring of substance and positive energy.

Unfortunately the price of ETH did not mirror the buoyancy of the energy of ETHDenver, dropping over 15% over the course of the week. But nobody talked about markets or asset prices, even as they dropped precipitously and consistently all weekend. There’s something beautiful about that. ETHDenver envisions itself as a builder of culture for Ethereum, decentralization, and the creation of value in communities, and it does come good on that promise.

There’s two surefire ways to know when a party is over. The first is when you receive a COVID exposure notification from the exclusive afterparty the night prior. The second is when fuckin’ Diplo shows up. Both happened on Sunday night. The Denver airport was apparently like an Ethereum transaction mempool on Sunday night, so most of you are using the same criteria for figuring out when it’s time to GTFO.