the rise of urbe.eth
when we started urbe.eth we had no idea we'd arrive here today, nor had we planned for it.
you may ask “where are you now?” and i’ll confidently answer that “we are the go-to place for web3 builders in italy”.
it's been a hell of a ride, but god i would do it again and again, and don't get me wrong, it's far from over.
during ethrome opening cerimony, Matteo briefly described what happened in the last 1 year and half, so quoting now his speech:
“before urbe.eth there wasn't anything related to web3 in rome, no meetups, no international events, and not so many people working or being interested in web3.
everything changed one year and a half ago when i met limone in milan for the spaghett.eth event.
and there, together with Frank, we decided to open a simple discord server that we still use for organizing meetups and other activities.
the first time we were 4, me, Frank, limone and Cryptogallo. the second time we were 7, the third time we were 15.
now, in front of my eyes, i see 200 people attending an event organized by our community”
everything started with our personal need: me, Matteo, Frank and Cryptogallo needed a place where to share our passion for web3, exchange ideas and discuss about the latest updates in the ecosystem.
we decided to open a discord server for that (it early was may 2022), and from day one we established two simple rules:
urbe.eth (or whatever was the name at that time) had to be owned by everyone - and yeah even the name was decided by a public poll with the first 20 community members
in urbe.eth we never talk about coin prices or speculation, we only focus on tech and building startups in the ecosystem
at the time i was only 1-month old in the space (i started working with Backdrop in april 2022) and i really really needed more people around me to learn more about web3 from the most specific technicalities to even the slang that people use in this space
between articles shared and online discussions, the discord was growing, mainly thanks to Matteo’s linkedin reach: from time to time, he was posting about urbe.eth on his linkedin profile, and given his status and incredible network there, people started joining (to date, Matteo’s invite link has been used 417 times - around 60% of users joined our discord using Matteo’s link lol)
after 1-month of online discussions, at some point in june we decided to organize the first irl meetup and we decided to start easy meeting in a bar, sharing some beers and chatting in-person about our favourite article or project in web3
around 15 people showed up, and those same people (with some add-ons) kept showing up at the next meetups that we organized that summer (always very chills and informal vibe)
discord of course was still growing, reaching 200 members by september 2022.
in the meantime, the connections between community members were becoming stronger and we started planning some online activities or projects together.
the first one was the so called “urbe arena game” (beloved by Frank), a fully on-chain survival game built with solidity where gladiators fight with each other until only one remains alive and wins the final prize.
that experiment involved people with different backgrounds and experiences, from designers drawing the gladiator characters, developers working on solidity and others structuring the game logic.
none of us had enough experience or time to lead those distributed and decentralized efforts.
needless to say that we failed or at least we stopped working on it (i think it was around september 2022), but still it was a cool initiative where everybody saw potential to learn something new.
most importantly, it was the first time that we were working together on something.
that september something important was going to happen though: ethereum merge (15th sep 2022).
just by living on crypto twitter we saw how other communities were organizing meetups to celebrate that important milestone for the ethereum ecosystem (which urbe.eth is very close ofc), so we decided to organize one.
i remember we started planning for it two weeks before, actually not much time, but fortunately two of our most active community members (Emidio and Carlo) who are also members of legal hackers rome chapter, proposed to co-hosting the meetup with their community so that we could have used their venue.
that day, sept 15th, we were hosting our first and infamous urbetalks, a format that will prove crucial for the growth of our community.
the idea behind urbetalks, taking inspiration from tedtalks, was to invite 4 speakers on stage to give a brief talk about something they found interesting in web3, whether a topic they are an expert of or some insights/experiences that they wanted to share.
thus with a bottom-up spirit we open a “call for speakers” form, and we started receiving applications, giving a space for people to contribute to the community and express theirselves, their passion and ideas.
urbetalks, from the 1st edition, has always been a great success, and it’s still our monthly meetup format, allowing us all to meet with the community on a monthly basis, each time with different speakers and topics.
at each talk we also started distributing soulbound tokens as a proof of attendance using a service (MintKudos) that is not working any more today.
people started collecting this tokens (either as guest speakers or attendees) to gain reputation in our discord server.
indeed, we created two discord roles: community advocate and urbetalks speaker.
to become a community advocate, you had to collect at least 4 of these tokens, and believe me, people were really willing to have that title at the point that they started including it in their twitter or linkedin bio
that propelled the growth of a solid base of people sticking around the community, being rewarded for their activities and contributions.
connections between members were becoming stronger and stronger, at the point that me, Frank and orbulo (now known as the ethrome emperor) decided to join our first web3 hackathon in october: ethlisbon 2022.
traveling with us also a couple other members of urbe.eth like Matteo and Cryptogallo.
for the first time we were all together in a web3 event and we had a lot of fun, between the hackathon and the whole lot of side events that we joined (not even talking about the crazy afterparty).
in ethlisbon 2022 something important happened though, actually, two very important things:
after the hackathon and a couple beers, we decided to start planning the 1st edition of ethrome
the “urbe delegation” meme was started, and if you’ve been at any web3 event this year, you all know what urbe delegations are nowadays ahahahah
but how did we came up with the ethrome idea?
well, for us the reasoning was very easy:
we enjoyed ethlisbon, the energy, the vibes, the people
we understood that our 2023’s mission with urbe.eth was to organize something like this in our hometown, otherwise what’s the point?
you wouldn’t believe it (actually you would cause you can just look at our twitter feed - but let’s pretend that you wouldn’t), we made it happen.
the urbe.eth core team spent the month in december setting the basis for the work to be done in the coming year, thinking about dates (october 2023), type of event (hackathon) and organizing the work in 6 team units (communication & design, hackathon, sponsorship, logistics, finance, legal).
to keep fostering (yes orbulo, i wrote that word on purpose to trigger you) our bottom up approach, we opened a “call for ethrome contributors” in our discord server.
40 people applied, and we accepted all of them.
of course not all of them ended up contributing to the event, some people dropped off after the 1st ethrome weekly call, some others one month later, i mean you know how these things go.
in the end, the team behind ethrome was composed by 20-25 people, with a core team of 8-10 actively contributing more than others.
the ethrome organization turned out to be an incredible coordination experiment.
25 people that never worked together, started collaborating and volunteering with the crazy goal in mind to organize the 1st irl web3 hackathon in italy.
all along the year we all contributed for free, with weekly calls, updates, standalone team meetings or whatever initiative we felt like could bring value to ethrome.
but before getting in the nitty gritty details of ethrome organization, there’s something else that i would like to highlight: the urbe delegations.
2023 has been the year of urbe delegations, we started in march from ethporto (actually there was a small delegation composed by me and mctflurry in ethdenver at the end of february) and ended up the year with devconnect and ethglobal istanbul (in november).
the full list here:
ethporto - march
ethglobal lisbon - may
ethdam - may
ethprague - june
ethbarcelona - july (fun fact, we organized an urbe talks side event there!)
ethglobal paris - july
berlin blockchain week - september
ethlisbon - november
ethglobal istanbul - november
urbe delegations have been our strongest effort in team and community building but also in marketing our activities and events.
we showed up in groups of 8 people in avg at all these events, building and networking (we won 7 hackathons) during the day while partying at night.
all these trips together allowed us to create what today are strong friendship rather than just “we’re connected because we are both into web3”.
i think that this has been crucial also for the ethrome organization and everything else related to the incredible growth that urbe.eth had in the last year.
no need to tell you that we kept organizing one urbe talks per month (we recently organized our 13th edition - nov 29th), and expanded our efforts also in universities, setting up 6hrs of web3 talks + hands-on workshops for computer science & engineering students at la sapienza university of rome.
now back to the ethrome organization, which i think was crucial in our journey with urbe.eth.
ethrome has been incredibly useful for our community growth cause it gave us all a shared goal to work on.
some people in particular emerged for their effort and dedication to the cause (thinking about BabyBit and PG here), not that i didn’t expect it to happen, but was cool to see people that joined the community months after its first meetups and still contributing so much.
it was a real success for me and us, because it was the proof that we were actually empowering people to bring their experience and skills on the table, contributing to a bigger and shared goal.
we’ve been working together for 10 months on something that none of us have ever organized, no previous experience at all, but regardless of that the result was incredible but god it drained a lot of energies.
it’s obvious that it wasn’t easy and that we had a rollercoaster of emotions.
the first months of work were particularly difficult because we didn’t know each other really well, we didn’t know what we were doing and how we were supposed to collaborate with each other (even in terms of tooling for example).
slowly we got started, coming out with a brand, logo, sponsor deck and landing page by april, closing the first sponsor agreements by mid may and opening applications right before ethdam (mid may).
honestly, i don’t know how we convinced the first sponsors to come onboard, if not just by talking with them in person at these events.
ethporto and ethdam in particular have been useful to create a strong connection with gnosis and sismo.
they got to know us, and i believe the fact the we were always moving together started sticking into people’s mind.
ethprague was probably the best effort that we had in terms of brand awareness:
a team of 5 urbers won $<redacted>k at the hackathon, building the infamous brian, the ai web3 assistant that recently launched in private beta
me and PG spent the whole prague blockchain week talking about ethrome, distributing flyers, and sticking posters around all the events we were going
after ethprague, everybody knew that ethrome was a thing, at the point that we inverted the wheel: it was no more us reaching out to people about it, but people were actually looking for us.
one thing to note though is that between may and july/august brand awareness was growing but sponsors were not.
there’s always the chicken-egg problem, and in the case of hackathons is sponsor and hackers: who comes first?
hackers want to see cool sponsors and their bounties, sponsors want to see a lot of hackers coming.
those 3 months we weren’t really worried about hackers (yet) but more about sponsors, cause as a non-profit association we needed funding to make the event happen and for us that was not a good time.
lot of companies were soft committing but not confirming, who knew that a month later most of them would actually put a chip on ethrome?
regardless of that the community kept working heads down on ethrome, at that point the flywheel was started and no other issue could stop us, the rest is history.
another crucial point in urbe.eth history was during ethbarcelona, where we showed up with 15 urbers, recorded 10 urbe unplugged (interview format that we do around conferences - you can check them on our youtube channel) and organized an urbetalks, the 1st one abroad!
that urbetalks turned up to be very very special, emotional and personally i would never forget that evening.
the event have been co-hosted with akasha hub barcelona, a space part of the akasha ecosystem, where people meet and collaborate on projects.
akasha is a company building some primitives for decentralized social networks and it’s lead by mihai alisie (who is also co-founder of ethereum).
that night mihai has been a speaker at our urbe talks, and at the end of the event, when we were all taking a photo together, he took sometime to talk with us all sharing how much he was proud to see community like ours thriving in the ethereum ecosystem: “that’s all we wanted when we launched ethereum”.
i won’t lie, i was crying out of joy.
the incredible thing is that at each one of these urbe delegations, we’ve been always coming back home with something new: new learnings, new experiences, new friends, new energy, but most importantly we kept setting the bar higher and higher.
wanna know how went the last one in istanbul?
4 teams of urbe & frens won a total of ~$30k at ethglobal istanbul (around 5% of the pool prize - ~600k).
now you tell me what should we do next, to keep improving ourselves and our reality.
in the end we are just a group of friends who have the courage to shape the reality they are living in, just cause it doesn't fit their needs and likes and guess what: we won’t stop until we make it happen.
what i know for sure it’s that what we’re trying to do is bigger than us all, so each of us necessary to reach the goal.
what we did so far has been extraordinary and not easy to repeat, but still we somebody gotta do it, and it's us.
gloria ad urbe 🐺
PS. if you missed ethrome, we prepared an aftermovie for you
