Last week, along with 15,000 other friends in web3, I attended #ETHDenver. Since I began working fractionally about two years ago almost exclusively in web3 businesses, this week-long series of mini-conferences loosely tied to building on Ethereum has become somewhat of an annual rite of passage.
I attended close to 20 separate events, conferences, seminars, or happy hours. I met some of my newer colleagues for the first time, I reunited with some former colleagues, and I met as many new faces as possible. In the end, I meaningfully connected with over 100 new people in 7 days, many of whom I’m now triaging with on telegram threads or newly spun up Slack channels. (Turns out, there’s a lot to do when you only see people that you work with 3-4 times a year.)
And with that in mind, #ETHDenver doesn’t disappoint. On a couple of days I forgot to eat lunch.
Multiple events offered a sauna and cold plunge option for attendees. I closed down the hotel bar at the Four Seasons and stood outside in a line for an after-hours club and received complimentary branded earplugs from a hustling conference vendor. I participated in a multi-hour scavenger hunt throughout Denver, I watched a man peel an orange into the shape of a unicorn, and I got tricked with friends into taking an Uber to an event didn’t exist but ended up just being a rug store (IRL “rugged” if you will).
Every day I was out the door for an 8am coffee meeting and tucked into bed at midnight. I was living, breathing IRL from dawn to dusk. And it felt really damn energizing.
But it wasn’t until my plane ride back, at 7am on Saturday morning, that I happened to glance between the seats in front of me and notice the headlines for the first time that week. A freak snowstorm in the Pacific Northwest. Famine in Gaza. More election woes. An escalation in Ukraine.
We may have been IRL but we weren’t living in the Real World.
To a large extent this has been my existential crisis about working in web3 for many years. The power of democratizing access has incredible power and potential to transform the lives of millions of people, by putting ownership back into the hands of the every-person and broadening access to meaningful financial and social digital tools.
But in my seven days in Denver, we didn’t talk much about that as much as we spoke about the technological flavor of the week. ZK-enabled applications. Cross-chain bridges. Better L2s, new public goods funding opportunities, shinier job opportunities for those of us lucky enough to call ourselves insiders at this pivotal moment in time.
I get it, we’re early. I get it, we’re at the infrastructure phase. I get it, I do. This is just what it looks like when new technology takes a foothold in society, you have first be in the bubble to eventually build outside of it.
To some extent I wonder now about the meteoric rise of web3 during the onset of the 2020 pandemic. When we all shut ourselves inside, we escaped into the metaverse. With nowhere to go, we forged digital alliances, new identities and a new kind of community structure through DAOs. When the real world failed us, we invented new forms of governance. When the economy faltered, we invented our own money.
I like to make it a point to bring home the most ridiculous swag that I can find at events like these. This year I brought home a t-shirt of a wizard with a cryptocurrency logo front and center and text that read, “Magic Internet money.”
To be sure, it does feel like magic. When you’re there, on the ground, talking for hours about a better way to live and a better way to work and a better way to engage, you're living and breathing community at its best. I still can’t quite parse how it is that I feel closer to some people I only see 2-3 times a year, in far-flung cities where we drink herbal tea and dive deep into protocol upgrades about L1 blockchains, than I do to my neighbors who lives down the hall from me, in my own apartment building.
But it’s true. I do feel closer to people in web3 than I do to my next-door neighbors. To my new-mom friends. Sometimes even to my own family. I just wish we could bottle up that feeling, and carry it with us back home, away from these magical internet moments, to share it with someone new, someone whose life could meaningfully change as a result of what we’ve learned, what we’ve seen, what we’ve built. I hope to see a little more of that at the next web3 event I attend.
