November 27, 2025 • 44 mins
“DevConnect 2025 was about touching and feeling Ethereum IRL”Nathan Sexer, lead of the DevConnect 2025 and Events team at the Ethereum Foundation, gives a peek into the largest iteration of Devconnect ever, with 20,000 attendees, and why the team pivoted to a "World's Fair" format, creating tangible districts for DeFi and Privacy to let attendees truly "touch and feel" the ecosystem.
The conversation gets real about the friction of the physical world. He explained why Argentina’s crypto-native culture makes it the perfect host, how hyperinflation fueled bottom-up adoption, and even the venue-wide internet failure became an accidental "feature," breaking the on-screen silos and pushing genuine face-to-face connections.
A massive geopolitical win was how the team worked with the government to issue 1,000+ visas for attendees from over 130 nationalities to make this event in the true spirit of borderless crypto.
The Ethereum Foundation is heading to Mumbai in 2026! The goal for India is to unify a fragmented developer diaspora and bring regulatory attention to one of the world's most critical tech hubs.
Topics
- 00:00 Intro & Scale
- 04:15 World's Fair Concept
- 09:50 Why Argentina?
- 14:30 Operational Challenges
- 18:15 Internet Blackout
- 22:00 Booth Renaissance
- 28:30 Privacy Priority
- 33:00 Devcon Mumbai
- 37:40 Indian Developers
Links
- Devcon Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/EFDevcon
- Nathan Sexer on X: https://x.com/nethan_eth
- Ethereum Foundation: https://ethereum.org
- Gnosis: https://gnosis.io/
Sponsors: Gnosis: Gnosis has been building core decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015. With the launch of Gnosis Pay last year, we introduced the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Start leveraging its power today at http://gnosis.io
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Epicentre of the show, which talks about the
technologies, projects and people driving decentralization
and the blockchain revolution. Today we're here with.
That's all success. Michelman Atan have been leading
the desktop team this year and I'm very, very excited to
welcome you at Desk tonight. We wanted to organise an event
that could give a touch and fearexperience of what Ethereum
could feel like in the daily life.
And again, there is no better place than Alcantida to do that
(00:22):
because people use crypto, stable coins and Ethereum on a
daily basis. In Alcantina you can see people
using crypto. We estimate that about 5 million
people using on a daily basis and 20% in the country own
crypto. So you can pay with crypto and
everywhere in the venue with stable coins or ETH.
It is the biggest event EF ever organised in terms of
(00:44):
attendance. We've almost now reached 20,000
attendees. Hey, Nathan, what's going on?
Good. How are you?
Yeah, we're here at Defconnect. It's been a pretty insane week.
Lots of announcements, lots of sort of like new directional
(01:04):
focuses, I think, and narratives.
What's your main? What's your main take away from
this week? What are the things that kind of
struck you as most interesting and most surprising?
All right, so I, I guess I'm biased towards the take of an
event organizer deep down into the whiz of organizing an event.
So I've been focusing on well, organizing this event and make
it as good as possible. So I'm less into like I don't
(01:26):
know so much about the side events, even though I know there
are like a few hundreds happening inside like inside
Buenos Aires. I've seen a quite a lot of
announcements. So I think there's a a lot of
great things happening currentlythese days, right?
Like everyday there is a big announcement that I've seen
Polygon, I think trust lesson onsomething and the privacy wallet
by EF got released. I mean, there is a lot of new
(01:49):
releases, a lot of new products coming out.
So this is what I feel, but against again, like I'm deep
down into the Wizard of organizing dev connect, which I
think is a success for now. You tell me.
But but yeah, we are now more than halfway through and yeah, a
few days left, but yeah. This episode is brought to you
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(02:09):
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you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like,
start exploring at nosis dot IO.Can you give us an idea of the
scale of the event? Because it's an absolutely
massive venue. How many people are here, how
many talks, what kind of percentage of Argentinians and
so on. OK.
So it is the biggest event you have ever organized in terms of
(03:16):
scale of what we've been doing, in terms of attendance, in terms
of complexity and in terms of I think visibility in the country
and in the area in terms of scale of the events.
So we're doing within the male building which is very central
to Buenos Aires. We are doing 40 events in Paris.
So we're coordinating between 40different or even organizers
(03:37):
organizing a few events ourselves.
But most of the events are independently organized.
We also have a Co work inside the main venue indoor outdoor
and we organize the massive fair.
The return was fair where we have about 100 applications
getting showcase. So it's been a lot of
coordination with all the apps in creation And so we have three
(03:59):
main pavilion and again a lot ofthings happening.
So in terms of operations has been very big.
In terms of attendance, we've almost now reached 20,000
attendees, so ticket claims 2020thousand.
That came through the doors hereat Defconnect, tickets claimed.
Yeah. And I think we are now more than
(04:21):
6070% on day 4 of attendance. So yeah, that claimed the ticket
that showed up at the venue. Something that that is cool is
that every event that is happening inside the venue
required defconnect ticket. So it's also like a, you have a
disconnect ticket as a, as a pass to enjoy the fair, to go to
the fair, you enjoy the food, you enjoy the free spaces, you
(04:41):
go to the event. Some require additional sign up,
but most of them are free. So it's so the disconnect ticket
gives you things and we've been coordinating all the AV, the
production and many things for these events.
So in addition of these events plus plus all the world's fair
with applications, we also have like a football pitch, meeting
(05:02):
room, the same stage and many things happening.
So yeah, the the biggest today. Walk, walk me through the
decision to kind of make this a,a world fair because kind of
like that's a new format, right?Kind of like we, I mean, we've
had boost before and we had talks before and panels and so
on. But the world fair element is.
Is that decidedly new? Right.
So there are a few things I think for in terms of timing
(05:26):
journey of the ecosystem, we felt that showcasing more apps,
more applications of Ethereum where like this is a year where
we had to showcase that like last.
I think that was the main, if not the only criticism we got
out of the event that we were missing applications, concrete
stuff that people could use in the in their daily lives.
And so it of course helped us toselect, maybe we can talk about
(05:50):
this, but also this is what sparked the idea of the welfare,
inspired by the 1st welfare of Chicago that demonstrated the
the use and the power of electricity.
We wanted to organize an event that could give a touch and fear
experience of what Ethereum could feel like in the daily
life. And again, there is no better
(06:10):
place than Alcantina to do that because people use crypto,
stablecoins and Etherium on a daily basis.
So we felt again, he was a greattiming for the ecosystem because
we now have hundreds of apps live on Ethereum, but also in
terms of yeah, in terms of applications ready and and also
in terms of doing it into Argentina, which is a a great
(06:33):
place to do it. What was some of the kind of
reasons why Defconnect landed here in Argentina?
So we've been scouting Argentinafor many years.
As a matter of fact, we almost organized in Argentina in 2022
when we scouted South America. We went to Bogota instead
because at the time we wanted toorganize DEFCON.
(06:54):
I was not part of the team at the time, but we wanted to
organize DEFCON, which is more like a classic programming
that's EF owns and the classic talks and workshop format.
And you know, we did not found find the venue actually there
was a really matter of venue that could fit this this style
of event. So we went with the the great
venue at at Bogota and we but wevisited liberal some people at
(07:21):
the EF at the time in 2020, I think or 21 visited this place
and wonder this is going to be one place for an event one day
and two days. I mean, this year is a is a
year. And yeah, I think it's a good
format for something that is more decentralized, more open
air, more of like festival each 5.
And so I think this is again, this is what letters to do to
(07:41):
organize this kind of events. And compared to say, organizing,
you know, deaf connect in, in Amsterdam or like in a European
country, we organized an event here.
And like there's a particular set of challenges to organizing
events in in a place like Argentina, where you're coming
from Europe, where, you know, there's language, there's
culture. I found one of the things that
(08:03):
was particularly complex was payments, which sort of led
stuff, well, to, you know, to doing a crypto event here.
What? What did you how did you
overcome those sound challenges?So I can.
So Amsterdam, for the record, was also organized right after
COVID. So it was even possible to
organize it in Amsterdam because, well, all the venues
were super cheap and available. Like no one crazy enough was
(08:25):
going enough to organize an event right after COVID and it
was the one of the first big event opening.
And so the initial ID came out of of Devcon and came out of
COVID because we could not simply organize like A-57 people
event. And so we decided to the team at
the time decided to set up a, a Co work and signal toward the
place and invite other even organizers and teams to organize
(08:49):
their own events. Yeah, this is how we started.
That was a genesis of of Dev connect.
And then there was Istanbul. Then there was Istanbul where we
signal the same towards the city.
We did a bit more ourselves, like we had a a bigger Co work.
We had more events inside the same building.
We, we already had the idea of trying to do a bit more
ourselves, like having one placewhere we centralized a bit more
(09:10):
of the people and people could go from one event to another.
So that was the first trial. And we took that to the next
step with a, an even bigger venue and running 40 events in
parallel and having even more events like outside, like
external parties organizing their own events inside the main
building. But yeah, this is the main
spirits, the main ID we added ontop of 40 events, the World's
(09:32):
Fair, which is also very new. We experimented a little bit
with that at Devcon Bangkok because we had the supporter
spaces. You could walk in the hallways
and see the some projects. But now it's really about the
apps. The focus was reached to
showcase applications. You could go at the booth, try
and try the apps. And that was the idea of the, of
the, the event. But yes, so the shift changed a
(09:54):
bit. We're also doing much more
ourselves in Istanbul and Amsterdam.
It was more about side events and inviting people to go to
like visit the city. So we, we helped like with with
bikes in the city, we help with guides and creating a map,
etcetera. This year it was really the
focus was on the core events, aswe call them internally, the
(10:15):
core events inside the main building.
And we we've put like a bigger focus on on the venue and
everything that's happening herebecause we're doing so much
ourselves. So it's also a question of
focus. That's the main difference.
Tell us about the attendees. What percentage of attendees are
local and how many have flown infor this?
We have about now 20,000 attendees and about 50% of them
(10:37):
are locals. So we put a lot of effort into
inviting local attendees and we're about 20, a few between 50
and 20 in the team. And we have 5 local people.
And so we've been working very hard in involving local
communities on all fronts. And we have someone full time
here. Cabella Fassano has been very,
very active in onboarding all again, the universities, the
(10:59):
companies, the, the government officials, all the local
committees are very, very activeand hunting.
Now we can also talk about this like if you're Marcatina Silla
time is KIPPU, all these organizations that have been
also that are organizing their own events here, like there is a
today an Ethereum Marcantina Caton, like there are a lot of
things happening. And and so yes, so about 50% of
(11:22):
look of attendees are local. We've also put a lot of
discounts for locals, for students as always, but the
locals could come very easily. It was very accessible.
It was $20.00 for the tickets and we did a lot of partnership
with universities, so you can often see waves of students
coming inside a venue like out of like school bus.
(11:44):
That's very cool to see. We had tracks of universities
with 10 of the biggest universities of Argentina every
day, twice a day. So content for newcomers
happening always. Also something we've done is
that we've been able to set up astreamline process with the
Immigration Office of Argentina directly in line with the
(12:04):
government, where we issued morethan 1000 visa to people all
around the world that are normally blocked from attending
these events. So you can see inside the venue,
a lot of people from from India,from Nigeria, a lot of people
from Africa actually. And as a result, we also have
more than 130 countries represented.
Wow. So it's, it's, I mean, we're
only missing like what 60 countries?
(12:26):
Like, all right, next step, we need to get them.
But I mean, this is, this is amazing.
And then it is also far from a lot of places.
I mean, some people flew for 45 hours doing 354 or five stops.
Like it was a concern that we had at some point.
And also let us double down on involving local communities in
Argentina, also LATAM, but, but we managed to get people from
(12:50):
all around the world and it's very exciting to see.
So, yeah, making the event as accessible as possible was a
big, big focus and also involving local communities at
the same time. I think it is always a focus of
Defcon and Defconnect. That was the case also in
Southeast Asia. This is what This is why we're
going to think Defcon and Defconnect in these places.
We're going to places where others want others.
(13:15):
Organize conferences in Europe and CC is very big in France
have been involved for many years with this events.
Now you have like events in in the US with the East calf based
global. Global is going on in a lot of
places in global is also going to many places where it's been
harder, like they're going to places like Africa or India and
(13:37):
many, many different countries. But yeah, so this is about the
diversity. We had a lot of it and we are.
We're proud of it. Yeah, the visa thing is huge.
I mean, that's, that's a big undertaking, I think to have
like the government involved andmaking sure that like people can
come as yeah, I mean, even FIFA can't do this, right?
Like apparently, apparently theycan't get fast track for, for
(14:00):
people to go to the FIFA World Cup.
You know, people in crypto, there's there's this narrative
about like South America being avery fertile place for crypto
innovation because of, come on, people's monetary sovereignty,
because of the state of the payment rails and the financial
system. And this has been something
that, you know, we've been hearing for years in the in the
(14:21):
crypto community, like people Camille Russo have talked about
it extensively written about it.And what's your sense of how
impactful it was to have Def Connect here?
And what are some of the really interesting kind of use cases
that you know, you've seen or oryou've emerged here at Def
Connect that validate this thesis?
(14:43):
So there's a hard thing about what we do is that we often
don't see the repo effects of our events for many, many years.
I can tell that's our events in Bogota had side effects and
impacts like for many years. And now we're also harvesting
the seeds that we've planted in,in Bogota three years ago,
because a lot of the communitiesthat are, are involved now in
(15:04):
all over that time were born around Bogota.
So it's, it's hard to put numbers on the impact that such
an event has. But years later we can, we can
tell because for example, in Bangkok last year, we had many
communities coming from South America all the way to Bangkok
because they're so DEFCON. They went to DEFCON, they saw
the impact. And so they, they wanted to, to,
(15:26):
to be part of it. So the impact is always hard to,
to evaluate. We have a financial direct
financial impact by with tourism, obviously with all the
money we put, but all the side events put that the companies
that will come here that will invest into into the country
(15:47):
that will hire local, local talents that will probably set
base like a con base is getting approval to like got approvals
to like financial regulated. They have like PSAVPSAV like a
local vast regulated entity to be able to to deal with finances
(16:08):
here. So people are going to companies
are going are getting established.
And also if you use cases payments are definitely the
biggest ones. I mean, in Argentina you can,
you can see people using crypto.We estimate that about 5 million
(16:29):
people using on a daily basis and 20% in the country own
crypto, 5 million using on a daily basis.
It's 10% of the population. It's it's huge.
And so they use crypto obviouslyfor several reason, but for for
payment because it's convenient.So when you pay a merchant, they
often don't get the the money into their bank for 20 days.
(16:51):
It's very common here. And also when they're paid into
pesos, well, the, the money filtrate, right?
Like the inflation is very famous in like infamous, I would
say. And so the pesos have been
crashing for the last many, manyyears.
And even this year, like I was here earlier this year and now
my dollar is 70% more powerful. So I leave it myself, coming
(17:16):
here three times this year. It's very like it's the, the
need for crypto and Ethereum is obvious.
You have the system of Quevas. I'm not sure if you've
experienced that, but you send amessage on Telegram or WhatsApp
and you send a crypto transaction with USDT on
Ethereum or other other network and the guy shows up with a bag
(17:40):
of cash in front of your door. It's, I think not really legal,
but not really for being. Everyone is doing it and it's
not common like we've been many service providers doing the
same, like the guy send you justan address, you need to send
$500 there and hope for the best.
But then the thing happened and happens.
And it's quite surprising. It's very common and it's
(18:02):
happening with crypto because it's simply better.
And it's amazing to see. And this is also why we're we're
here, yeah. That's fascinating.
And did did you guys encounter any real issues with like
currency fluctuations or these certain things that when
organizing? Yes, yes, because we are
planning this event we for a year, I mean we are working for
(18:25):
more than a year on this event. And so quotes vary.
We need to be careful about whatcurrency do we use, how like
split the payments in time so that it doesn't fluctuate too
much. We had often had puts getting
plus 20% because of currency evaluation.
The biggest impact we, well the biggest sort of thing that
(18:45):
struck us was that contracts don't matter.
They want the money in the account.
And so we've had at least one con one service provider cancel
our contract after a very short period time, just several days
because we hadn't made the made the payment and we didn't
realized just how important it was for them to have payment.
Then we sort of felt that throughout, you know, the entire
process of working for service providers is that they don't
(19:06):
care until the money is in the in the bank yet.
And you can, you can understand,you can understand that they've,
they've gone through tough situations.
They, they've gone through a situation where banks were
closing their accounts, like where they could not accept the
money into the banks. And so I mean, we've been
talking about this like, you know, censorship resistance in
Europe and in US and we talk about it, but we've never
(19:27):
experienced it ourselves. I mean, I have never been bank
less. And so I don't understand the
same way I don't understand or Idon't feel it feel the same way
as an Argentina that gone through the Coradito crisis in
2001. Like feel about crypto.
Like it's not, it's not the same.
They really, they've been through it and not all of them.
Obviously now we have a lot of young people that are into it,
(19:49):
but but their, their parents live through it.
And so they understand. So it's so yeah.
They they. Yeah.
Well, maybe let's look back to the event.
So we're almost, we're more thanhalfway through.
It's a little bit early, but what are your preliminary take
home take home learning? So kind of like what, what
(20:09):
worked well, what didn't go so well?
What? What will you be seeing more of
in the future? All right.
I'll start with what did not go well.
Is this the Internet? Right.
I think that's the entire city of Buenos Aires.
I mean, I've found the Internet to be very shoddy everywhere.
Yeah. Right.
Wi-Fi situation is not great in the Huntington.
(20:30):
Generally Wi-Fi situation in this building is very well known
to be catastrophic. And So what happened is that we
built the whole system from scratch and it was a huge
endeavor. And on top of that, there are,
there were many, many things that we did not control, like
cloud fare outage and, and otherthings.
(20:52):
I'm not blaming external factors, but it was a huge
endeavour. We, we hired some of the best
companies, private companies to set up the whole thing from
scratch. I can send you the pictures of
the the 50 luggage that we brought like huge a luggage of
material that we brought to build the whole thing from
scratch. You will see all the setup
(21:13):
everywhere. If you look now, it's now, it's
set up, it's back, it's working.But we had a rough time at the
beginning. I think that was the main
criticism if not the only that we received probably coffee
fixed but but in the end I thinkwe have not received too much
complaints. Cloud fair helps maybe a little
bit, but I think it was also a good occasion to to disconnect
(21:36):
so. I think it was actually so kind
of it was actually quite nice because kind of like we were
planning kind of like on our noses booth, we were planning to
kind of on board people and showthem the things and none of that
worked. But it didn't didn't just.
It didn't. Sorry about that.
No, no, no, It's all. It's a kind of like I, I, I'm,
I'm drawing the silver lining here.
So kind of because it also didn't work for anyone else,
(21:56):
people were forced to make conversation.
There you go, right. It's kind of like they actually
got talking about the things andkind of like, and I, I often I,
I think kind of like often we kind of jump in and say, let me
just show you. And then you show show people
and kind of like you that kind of often next part of the
narrative of why you're actuallydoing it.
And I think not having the app to show I'm, I'm if I could, if
(22:19):
I could choose kind of like a future setup, these, these,
these have the Wi-Fi, but kind of like if the Wi-Fi doesn't
work, it's not that everything doesn't work anymore.
It's kind of like that kind of that you, you find different
levels kind of connect with people on.
It's interesting. So for us, it was like one of
the biggest learning as an eventorganizer that we, we clearly
(22:40):
understood the impact that no Wi-Fi, no Wi-Fi means that like
on the live streams, on the userexperience, really it's not
great on many, many items. The repo effects were huge.
But surprisingly, we have not received that many complaints.
I mean, that was the main one. But we, we saw that like people
connecting more people, not so many people complain.
(23:02):
Surprisingly, we were like, for us, it was the end of the world.
But at the end of the day, he was not too bad.
And we feel the situation and so, so now it's OK.
But but yeah, it won't happen again.
That was the biggest challenge since day one, organizing this
event at this venue. We knew it.
We took all the measures that wecould possibly take, but we knew
(23:25):
some outage would happen. And it happened, and we did our
rest. We talked about the Internet,
the coffee and the tea bags. It was a little bit weird.
Yeah, I saw those are the. Kind of, I kind of like, I kind
of like the tea bags myself there.
You go, Yeah. And.
You push for getting more peopleto drink, Marty, because the
Marty's chips were out. So kind of like they were making
(23:47):
the the coffee deliberately shitty so people would kind of
try try the thing they don't know.
That was our purpose. It's the kind of elements when
you organize an event that you know, it's the kind of details
that you have to go into every detail and check, Oh, you serve
coffee or the space? How is the coffee?
Show me the coffee, Show me thisnot powder coffee that you put
water into, right? So it's also learning like if
(24:11):
you want high quality events, you need to take all the
details. And also with the scale of what
we're doing is it was sometimes hard to to go so precisely into
a digital test, but but well, wefixed it.
It's very good learning. Tell me about the, the boots and
kind of the, the fair element ofthis, right, Because that's new.
(24:33):
And kind of if you go to talks, it's actually a little bit sad
because there's almost no one there, but people love the
boots. All the boots are crowded.
So kind of like it seems like you kind of like hit the hit the
nail on the head here. Right.
So I guess the the experience shifted a little.
The idea of the warfare was to showcase the apps.
(24:53):
So to have more of like country concrete showcases was we put a
lot of focus on that specifically.
So we had eight districts. We like defy AI hardware and
wallets, collectibles, layer twos.
What am I missing? Privacy gaming.
So I think that was it. And we wanted we wanted to
experiment with a new format, have a more concrete way for
(25:16):
people to interact with the events.
So I think people loved it. It's new for the EF especially.
Like we usually we were like very like showcasing projects,
but in the plain neutral way. And now we went into like full
mode into selecting the best projects or some of the best
projects, including like the thebiggest international, the
biggest projects, also the, the best local ones.
(25:37):
So you can see the exchanges like below Ripio Lemon and you
can experiment with them. And we were also able to
showcase some licensed 1. So you have on ramping stations
with a repo where you can buy crypto on the ground.
So that's also something else that we've done is that we've
allowed and we've worked with merchants to have crypto
payments. So you can pay with crypto and
(25:58):
everywhere in the venue with table coins or ES.
And we've also facilitated and with the app, a way for you to
connect any external wallets or if you don't have a wallet with
an e-mail, create a wallet and get into the RMP station or
claim a peanut link so that you can have $2.00 to buy a coffee
or something like that. So we really wanted to give a
(26:18):
concrete experience of like whatcould a city living on Etherium
could, could be like. I will not agree with you.
That's all that, but the rooms are imt.
You have some rooms like. No, I was, I was, I was kind of
like, I, I was, I was exaggerating a bit.
But there's one room that's absolutely massive.
And I think it would, it would take probably like 2000 people
(26:39):
at least kind of like put to actually fill it up.
So it's like we organized a big room for the biggest events.
Ethereum Day was really packed. We had the econ the massive
event organized by all the localcommunities.
It's the time is Quipu with likethe mayor of Buenos Aires that
came Chiquita Pia, the head of like the football organization
(27:01):
in Argentina that came the room was packed from from like from
the beginning to the end. So yes, the the events coming
afterwards with smaller capacityfeel the the difference.
Obviously, where would you thinkit'd be the rooms arranging the
set up a little bit, but but yeah.
But I invite you to go see some of their events with the
(27:23):
hackathon that is completely full of hackers right now
happening in the middle of the week.
So I think kind of like talks isactually very specific thing,
right? Because kind of like if you have
a talk somewhere, it's mostly the endorsement that you you can
have the talk, then I would I would always assume that kind of
like 98% of people who watch my talk actually watch it later on
(27:44):
YouTube. And so so and I also take that
that stunts when I I'm at an event, kind of like I
deprioritize going to talks because I know I can watch them
on the way home, right. So it's and I think that's
that's generally kind of do. You really do that because
everybody says they do that, butI don't actually watch them on
(28:04):
the way. I usually sleep on the plane.
100%, yeah. So kind of, yeah.
I need to I need to maximize my playing time.
Victoria kind of, I'm also I, I don't know whether kind of like
we've known each other a long time.
Don't know whether you know this, but also patience is not
one of my virtues. So kind of like and and kind of
feel to kind of Fast forward someone on YouTube is way less
offensive than saying just speedit up.
(28:28):
I think so. That's an interesting one.
For years we've been saying thatthe conference model is broken
and no one is attending the talk.
I still think that's when you'repassionate about the topic that
you want to be the first one to see.
Attending your talk is differentlike like going to see obviously
Vitalic or any person that you really enjoy like you will, you
(28:49):
will sit here, you will not takeyour phone and you will listen
to the to the talk and you have the experience and the immersion
like the same way you would go to a concert and enjoy the
experience. But that's a small fraction of
the talks, right? Probably, but I, I, I do think
that's when you a topic matter. I think it's a, it's a personal
question. If you really care about a topic
(29:10):
and you like the speaker, you would go to like in the room and
then speak to the person or I agree, it's a small fraction.
I think that's, I mean, we have to think about it as event
organizers, like how do we manage this?
The speakers still want a place on stage.
They want to show a. 100% I, I mean, I also gave a talk and
(29:31):
kind of like, I'm happy I gave atalk because kind of like the,
the curation is part of the service, right?
So to have having the talk up late and kind of like linking,
linking it to kind of give people an intro what you're
doing. I think it's it's, it's super
valuable. So I mean nowadays all the talks
are so live stream they recorded.
We see a lot of people in the live streams actually.
(29:52):
So even when the room is half half full, you can like you
often times have 345 times the people like like watching in the
stream. So I think we should be low ego
as well as speakers or and do not feel bad because the room is
half 100. Percent, 100%.
But I think like one, one of thethings that's really important
(30:16):
to recognize as event organizersis that you know, your your
content is not just who's sitting in your room, but it's
also the reach. And, you know, if you're
marketing that content well, you're going to get lots of
eyeballs on on those ideas. And I think at the end of the
day is what really matters. I do want to talk a little bit
about like, so the main themes this week, not just here, but
all the side events. And there's been a few that have
(30:38):
struck me up. Obviously like stable coins have
been a massively important topicin the last few months, but also
this year that but privacy seemsto be the main thing.
And we yesterday we were talkingto Peter Van Volkenburg about
this. And my my question to him was,
you know, is the interest in privacy driven by the market or
is the market reacting to the interest in privacy?
(31:01):
Is it, it was sort of like a chicken and egg thing?
My question would be like, why? Why do you think now Etherium
seems to be, like, taking privacy very seriously And, you
know, like, the sunglasses of Italic will be like a meme that
will live on forever. And I think, like, it's going to
solidify this idea that Ethereumneeds to be private.
Like, why? Why is it so important now?
I think. Pragmatically, the ethermic
(31:22):
system been solving one problem after the other.
We've sold the merge, right? We've we've moved to proof of
stake, We solved scalability. Now transactions are like fast
and cheap. We're solving fragmentation,
we're solving UX. I think this is ongoing.
That's been ongoing for many years, like part of the next big
(31:43):
topics and privacy is one of them. 100% If we want credible,
credibly neutral technology, permissionless technology,
censorship resistant technology,we need privacy.
And when you think about it, if we don't have this, like if we
don't have privacy, then you canidentify the person or the the
network or the tool and just kill it.
(32:05):
So privacy is just a need, it's a human rights.
And I think so that's on the tech side.
If you don't have privacy, the tech is just simply limited and
you you cannot fulfil the promise of what Ethereum aims
that, you know, achieving. So that's one of the tech side.
And I think currently, like nowadays with the rise of far
(32:27):
right or like extreme parties inboth sides and nationalism and
media control and things like that, you need and just
surveillance tools that have been widespread in and for many
years now, but maybe increasing a bit, we need even more privacy
(32:49):
technology and privacy implementation of privacy
generally. When you see regulation like
chat control potentially coming to Europe, I mean, that was
crazy. I don't go into politics often,
but when I looked at that, I show that to my family like this
is this is I don't I'm not sure,sorry if I cannot say that on
the recording, but that was thatway louder, extremely
(33:10):
concerning, extremely concerninglike having shot control would
have caused signal to potentially stop operations like
this is massive. This is not only this is not
only Ethereum or blockchain related.
This is like a society problem like it was crazy.
It was even. Considered and kind of like I
mean, so basically kind of like it failed in the end, but kind
(33:32):
of it failed because by by just so kind of like Germany was
actually the deciding vote in the end.
And kind of like that it failed because there were some concerns
about how it was implemented. And I was like, what what do you
mean some sense? So this is insane.
And, and I think this is something that the Ethereum
committee also take, you know, like take very seriously and it
(33:53):
makes me proud to be working theEthereum committee that cares so
much about privacy and that has some of the best cryptographic,
you know, researchers and movinglike forward the needle of I
mean, the yeah, moving forward the cryptography with DK tech
and, and, and privacy tech in general, because I feel that
this is also how our ecosystem can have a very strong impact in
(34:15):
the world. Like when you yeah, again, like
when you promote censorship resistance, you need privacy.
And This is why I think it matters.
This is why Ethereum Foundation even is working a privacy wallet
with other partners. This is why the topic is so
important today. I to answer your question also
shortly, it's, I think it's a matter of priority.
We had to solve things before solving that.
(34:36):
But now it's, it looks like a big, a big elephant in the room
that if you don't solve like it's just we're not fulfilling
the full like the the entire value prop of Ethereum and
decentralized technology. So we need we need to address
it. Yeah, I, I think.
There's, there's also an, another concern with privacy is
that in order for Ethereum to becredible in the institutional
(34:57):
space and for businesses, you need privacy because like
businesses have privacy and, andthey, they lobby for, I mean,
they, they, they have it and they want to keep it.
Because I think, you know, there's sort of an adage that
capitalism works because you have individual privacy and you
have businesses that can have privacy over their transactions
in a business deal. That's sort of like constant
arbitrage, right? And, And a world where
(35:21):
everything is totally on chain is a world where so like the
economy sort of comes to a halt,right?
And but. Yeah, I I do think that if.
You're sort of took this priority a bit late, not saying
like scaling and those things were not important, but they
took a long time and. I I think that.
(35:44):
Privacy just because of sort of the ethos of Etherium and and
also like the risk that sort of people in crypto are generally,
you know, so they, they exist ina space that's more risky to
their like they're kind of financial freedom or their in,
in whatever, depending on the country where they may be or
even their security. Like we're both, we both live in
(36:05):
France. We know what that's like, you
know, to be concerned about yoursecurity.
I think privacy is kind of because it's a priority that
should have been, I think prioritized earlier than than
later. But it's great that it's
happening. But yeah, that's my take.
Yeah, I I would actually, I think.
I would counter that I think kind of I, I do actually think I
mean privacy is super important 100%.
First of all, I don't think the economy would grind to a heart
(36:26):
of kind of like no private transactions where possible, but
no. But if we were if the.
Economic rails were fully on chain and businesses couldn't do
things in a private way. It would be very difficult to
win business. Yeah.
So kind of like it would change.The modus operandi for sure, but
I think kind of like the the cryptography that kind of like
underpins privacy. It's come such a long way in the
(36:50):
last five years. So having, having had this as a
priority five years ago would have set us up for failure.
So kind of like if we say we have to solve privacy 1st and
then we do scaling, I think I, Ithink that would have, would
have been putting, putting the who's before the cut.
I think we, I mean we did not have the.
Tech also back in the days, I mean it was not even possible.
(37:11):
Possibly it was not possible at the at the time like now we have
ZK that solves both both like privacy and scalability.
So, and how much? How much?
I mean, look at the real real time proving stats.
Crazy, crazy that this now works.
Had anyone told us this five years ago, we, I I would not
have believed it. I would not have believed it.
(37:33):
So it's great to see good but. Now let's look into the.
Future. So where next for?
Defcon and defconnect. What are you going to, what are
you going to do differently? And most importantly, where is
it going to be? So yeah, I'm very excited.
To announce that DEFCON will be happening in Mumbai in India
(37:57):
next year. So we're working hard on making
that happen. But that will be after
Defconnect Argentina. So, so yeah, we're going to
announce that at the end of of the event.
So by the time it's really easy,it will be it will be live.
Yes, we're very excited to go there.
We've never been in that region,in that country and and we have
(38:18):
we simply have 1.5 billion attendees to potentially tap
into. So that's going to be that's
going to be big. So go also same following the
principles of where can we go first like where others would
not and where can we have the big potential impacts on the
region. And India has been at the top of
(38:39):
the charts in terms of number ofdevelopers, in terms of crypto
adoption, in terms of usage in general.
Regulation seems to be moving favorably as well.
It's always up and down. It's a complex environment, but
but we are confident so that it's going to be very, very
positive for the ecosystem for the region as well.
(39:02):
And we hope that we can also have an again have a very strong
impact and replicate the some ofthe efforts that we've been
doing here and you know other countries.
So we're very excited about about this location just because
that's DEFCON. Defcon.
Defcon will be in Mumbai. I can clarify as well.
That's. I think we're move.
Let's see, let's see how it goes.
(39:25):
I think we're moving a bit like I think this event has been a
hybrid model between past DEFCONX and past DEFCON.
We've done much more ourselves. It's much more centralized.
And so let's see how DEFCON evolved.
I haven't been able to. We haven't been able to work too
much on this, but it will be closer to DEFCON fairly much.
Probably there will be a merge in.
(39:46):
Branding, we've already been using the Devcon X accounts.
I think we'll be re merging the branding.
Just there has been some confusion in the past.
The events were very different in the past.
We've made sense at the time. Now it's no longer really the
case. Maybe I think the I like the
(40:07):
branding Ethereum was fair. Let's see if we keep that one.
Defcon for sure will remain. Let's see what happens with
Defconnect TBD. But next year is Defcon.
So are you saying that like Defcon?
Would possibly happen every yearor like some new like mutant
child of Defcon and Defconnect might happen every year.
I mean, and that back in the day.
(40:28):
Defcon used to happen every year, so kind of like this.
This used to be a yearly thing until kind of Defconnect stepped
into the Yeah. Also, it's the same team.
Right. So the I do think though that's
we're adapting always our eventsto the, to the place, to the
format, to the state of the ecosystem.
(40:49):
So let's see what what is going to be.
What are you most excited about?Doing defcon in India.
Inviting the all the new developers are coming from
India. Like, yeah, I mean, we've, we've
invited a lot of officials from India and Bhutan to to see
(41:10):
what's what's happening in in Argentina.
We've met with the ambassadors and we've invited the embassy to
come here and to see a bit what's like.
We're very excited to start working with the local
communities. It's very different from
Argentina in the way that the communities and the projects in
India. For a long time, I've been
working outside of India. So they're based in Dubai,
(41:32):
Singapore, other places for mostly regulatory reasons, but
we hope that you can improve. We hope that maybe we can help
bring the attention and back into India with some help from
the regulatory side of things. But yeah, very excited to to
welcome all these developers to have a lot of local attendees.
(41:53):
I think the focus will be on India for sure.
It will not be a region thing, will be India because it's it's
a continent in itself. So yeah, I think, I think.
I think one of the things that could be very interesting there
like you mentioned is like the diaspora coming back, like
American Indian diaspora coming to India and inspiring like the
local developers there. I think that would be probably
(42:15):
one of the outcomes here is thatyou just get this huge
inspiration within like the in the local Indian developer
community to start buildings forIndia rather than like just
outside of the country, right. And as a matter of fact.
We've been in touch with everyone like most of the big
companies already in India. I mean, Polygon is an example.
The Folio Denver from the Folio has been super helpful.
(42:38):
We, we have some Indian folks inthe air we've been talking with
and they've been help. They've been helping us with
local contacts and stuff and we've been talking.
I mean, for example, Moody's from Polygon is based in it's in
other places. There's been A and yes, I agree.
So a great take. Like you have people from India
(43:00):
everywhere in the world working the biggest project everywhere.
The same way, by the way, are continuing are in most biggest
protocols like have a uni swap all the biggest.
You have sometimes one super strong and continuing developers
Wonderland was helping with the privacy wallet.
It was a super, super strong devshop, which is not I don't think
(43:23):
they like the dev shop, sorry, but so you have so much strong
team from so much also strong developers and people from
India. That's I think it's going to be
interesting and we're going to see an interesting momentum.
So let's see how it goes. Mumbai is interesting city.
Obviously it's not. So Mumbai is like the financial
hub of India. The tech hub is more Bangalore,
(43:46):
but we there's no suitable venuein Bangalore, although everyone
from Bangalore will fly. I will tell the rain like they
fully organize it. I got on your train the last,
I'm not sure if you've seen that, but that was insane.
I mean, the guys are so motivated like.
So yeah, we're going. We're excited about this one and
see and see what happens. Yeah, well, I can't.
(44:09):
Wait to take this opportunity tospend like a month in India,
right? And yeah, fantastic.
Nathan, thank you so much for taking the time during this
very, very busy time for you to kind of talk with us.
And I have to say, you look remarkably well for someone who
hasn't slept in a week doing allright.
(44:30):
Thanks. Thank you.
Welcome to Epicentre of the show, which talks about the
technologies, projects and people driving decentralization
and the blockchain revolution. Today we're here with.
That's all success. Michelman Atan have been leading
the desktop team this year and I'm very, very excited to
welcome you at Desk tonight. We wanted to organise an event
that could give a touch and fearexperience of what Ethereum
could feel like in the daily life.
And again, there is no better place than Alcantida to do that
(00:22):
because people use crypto, stable coins and Ethereum on a
daily basis. In Alcantina you can see people
using crypto. We estimate that about 5 million
people using on a daily basis and 20% in the country own
crypto. So you can pay with crypto and
everywhere in the venue with stable coins or ETH.
It is the biggest event EF ever organised in terms of
(00:44):
attendance. We've almost now reached 20,000
attendees. Hey, Nathan, what's going on?
Good. How are you?
Yeah, we're here at Defconnect. It's been a pretty insane week.
Lots of announcements, lots of sort of like new directional
(01:04):
focuses, I think, and narratives.
What's your main? What's your main take away from
this week? What are the things that kind of
struck you as most interesting and most surprising?
All right, so I, I guess I'm biased towards the take of an
event organizer deep down into the whiz of organizing an event.
So I've been focusing on well, organizing this event and make
it as good as possible. So I'm less into like I don't
(01:26):
know so much about the side events, even though I know there
are like a few hundreds happening inside like inside
Buenos Aires. I've seen a quite a lot of
announcements. So I think there's a a lot of
great things happening currentlythese days, right?
Like everyday there is a big announcement that I've seen
Polygon, I think trust lesson onsomething and the privacy wallet
by EF got released. I mean, there is a lot of new
(01:49):
releases, a lot of new products coming out.
So this is what I feel, but against again, like I'm deep
down into the Wizard of organizing dev connect, which I
think is a success for now. You tell me.
But but yeah, we are now more than halfway through and yeah, a
few days left, but yeah. This episode is brought to you
by Nosis, building the open Internet one block at a time.
(02:09):
Nosis was founded in 2015 and it's grown from 1 of Ethereum's
earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user
owned finance. Nosis is also the team behind
products that had become core tomy business and that are so many
others like Safe and Cow Swap. At the center is Nosis Chain.
It's a low fee layer one with 0 downtime in seven years and
(02:31):
secured by over 300,000 validators.
It's the foundation for real world financial applications
like Nosis Pay and Circles. All of this is governed by Nosis
Dow, a community run organization where anyone with a
GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects, and even run
a validator from home. So if you're building a Web 3 or
(02:51):
you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like,
start exploring at nosis dot IO.Can you give us an idea of the
scale of the event? Because it's an absolutely
massive venue. How many people are here, how
many talks, what kind of percentage of Argentinians and
so on. OK.
So it is the biggest event you have ever organized in terms of
(03:16):
scale of what we've been doing, in terms of attendance, in terms
of complexity and in terms of I think visibility in the country
and in the area in terms of scale of the events.
So we're doing within the male building which is very central
to Buenos Aires. We are doing 40 events in Paris.
So we're coordinating between 40different or even organizers
(03:37):
organizing a few events ourselves.
But most of the events are independently organized.
We also have a Co work inside the main venue indoor outdoor
and we organize the massive fair.
The return was fair where we have about 100 applications
getting showcase. So it's been a lot of
coordination with all the apps in creation And so we have three
(03:59):
main pavilion and again a lot ofthings happening.
So in terms of operations has been very big.
In terms of attendance, we've almost now reached 20,000
attendees, so ticket claims 2020thousand.
That came through the doors hereat Defconnect, tickets claimed.
Yeah. And I think we are now more than
(04:21):
6070% on day 4 of attendance. So yeah, that claimed the ticket
that showed up at the venue. Something that that is cool is
that every event that is happening inside the venue
required defconnect ticket. So it's also like a, you have a
disconnect ticket as a, as a pass to enjoy the fair, to go to
the fair, you enjoy the food, you enjoy the free spaces, you
(04:41):
go to the event. Some require additional sign up,
but most of them are free. So it's so the disconnect ticket
gives you things and we've been coordinating all the AV, the
production and many things for these events.
So in addition of these events plus plus all the world's fair
with applications, we also have like a football pitch, meeting
(05:02):
room, the same stage and many things happening.
So yeah, the the biggest today. Walk, walk me through the
decision to kind of make this a,a world fair because kind of
like that's a new format, right?Kind of like we, I mean, we've
had boost before and we had talks before and panels and so
on. But the world fair element is.
Is that decidedly new? Right.
So there are a few things I think for in terms of timing
(05:26):
journey of the ecosystem, we felt that showcasing more apps,
more applications of Ethereum where like this is a year where
we had to showcase that like last.
I think that was the main, if not the only criticism we got
out of the event that we were missing applications, concrete
stuff that people could use in the in their daily lives.
And so it of course helped us toselect, maybe we can talk about
(05:50):
this, but also this is what sparked the idea of the welfare,
inspired by the 1st welfare of Chicago that demonstrated the
the use and the power of electricity.
We wanted to organize an event that could give a touch and fear
experience of what Ethereum could feel like in the daily
life. And again, there is no better
(06:10):
place than Alcantina to do that because people use crypto,
stablecoins and Etherium on a daily basis.
So we felt again, he was a greattiming for the ecosystem because
we now have hundreds of apps live on Ethereum, but also in
terms of yeah, in terms of applications ready and and also
in terms of doing it into Argentina, which is a a great
(06:33):
place to do it. What was some of the kind of
reasons why Defconnect landed here in Argentina?
So we've been scouting Argentinafor many years.
As a matter of fact, we almost organized in Argentina in 2022
when we scouted South America. We went to Bogota instead
because at the time we wanted toorganize DEFCON.
(06:54):
I was not part of the team at the time, but we wanted to
organize DEFCON, which is more like a classic programming
that's EF owns and the classic talks and workshop format.
And you know, we did not found find the venue actually there
was a really matter of venue that could fit this this style
of event. So we went with the the great
venue at at Bogota and we but wevisited liberal some people at
(07:21):
the EF at the time in 2020, I think or 21 visited this place
and wonder this is going to be one place for an event one day
and two days. I mean, this year is a is a
year. And yeah, I think it's a good
format for something that is more decentralized, more open
air, more of like festival each 5.
And so I think this is again, this is what letters to do to
(07:41):
organize this kind of events. And compared to say, organizing,
you know, deaf connect in, in Amsterdam or like in a European
country, we organized an event here.
And like there's a particular set of challenges to organizing
events in in a place like Argentina, where you're coming
from Europe, where, you know, there's language, there's
culture. I found one of the things that
(08:03):
was particularly complex was payments, which sort of led
stuff, well, to, you know, to doing a crypto event here.
What? What did you how did you
overcome those sound challenges?So I can.
So Amsterdam, for the record, was also organized right after
COVID. So it was even possible to
organize it in Amsterdam because, well, all the venues
were super cheap and available. Like no one crazy enough was
(08:25):
going enough to organize an event right after COVID and it
was the one of the first big event opening.
And so the initial ID came out of of Devcon and came out of
COVID because we could not simply organize like A-57 people
event. And so we decided to the team at
the time decided to set up a, a Co work and signal toward the
place and invite other even organizers and teams to organize
(08:49):
their own events. Yeah, this is how we started.
That was a genesis of of Dev connect.
And then there was Istanbul. Then there was Istanbul where we
signal the same towards the city.
We did a bit more ourselves, like we had a a bigger Co work.
We had more events inside the same building.
We, we already had the idea of trying to do a bit more
ourselves, like having one placewhere we centralized a bit more
(09:10):
of the people and people could go from one event to another.
So that was the first trial. And we took that to the next
step with a, an even bigger venue and running 40 events in
parallel and having even more events like outside, like
external parties organizing their own events inside the main
building. But yeah, this is the main
spirits, the main ID we added ontop of 40 events, the World's
(09:32):
Fair, which is also very new. We experimented a little bit
with that at Devcon Bangkok because we had the supporter
spaces. You could walk in the hallways
and see the some projects. But now it's really about the
apps. The focus was reached to
showcase applications. You could go at the booth, try
and try the apps. And that was the idea of the, of
the, the event. But yes, so the shift changed a
(09:54):
bit. We're also doing much more
ourselves in Istanbul and Amsterdam.
It was more about side events and inviting people to go to
like visit the city. So we, we helped like with with
bikes in the city, we help with guides and creating a map,
etcetera. This year it was really the
focus was on the core events, aswe call them internally, the
(10:15):
core events inside the main building.
And we we've put like a bigger focus on on the venue and
everything that's happening herebecause we're doing so much
ourselves. So it's also a question of
focus. That's the main difference.
Tell us about the attendees. What percentage of attendees are
local and how many have flown infor this?
We have about now 20,000 attendees and about 50% of them
(10:37):
are locals. So we put a lot of effort into
inviting local attendees and we're about 20, a few between 50
and 20 in the team. And we have 5 local people.
And so we've been working very hard in involving local
communities on all fronts. And we have someone full time
here. Cabella Fassano has been very,
very active in onboarding all again, the universities, the
(10:59):
companies, the, the government officials, all the local
committees are very, very activeand hunting.
Now we can also talk about this like if you're Marcatina Silla
time is KIPPU, all these organizations that have been
also that are organizing their own events here, like there is a
today an Ethereum Marcantina Caton, like there are a lot of
things happening. And and so yes, so about 50% of
(11:22):
look of attendees are local. We've also put a lot of
discounts for locals, for students as always, but the
locals could come very easily. It was very accessible.
It was $20.00 for the tickets and we did a lot of partnership
with universities, so you can often see waves of students
coming inside a venue like out of like school bus.
(11:44):
That's very cool to see. We had tracks of universities
with 10 of the biggest universities of Argentina every
day, twice a day. So content for newcomers
happening always. Also something we've done is
that we've been able to set up astreamline process with the
Immigration Office of Argentina directly in line with the
(12:04):
government, where we issued morethan 1000 visa to people all
around the world that are normally blocked from attending
these events. So you can see inside the venue,
a lot of people from from India,from Nigeria, a lot of people
from Africa actually. And as a result, we also have
more than 130 countries represented.
Wow. So it's, it's, I mean, we're
only missing like what 60 countries?
(12:26):
Like, all right, next step, we need to get them.
But I mean, this is, this is amazing.
And then it is also far from a lot of places.
I mean, some people flew for 45 hours doing 354 or five stops.
Like it was a concern that we had at some point.
And also let us double down on involving local communities in
Argentina, also LATAM, but, but we managed to get people from
(12:50):
all around the world and it's very exciting to see.
So, yeah, making the event as accessible as possible was a
big, big focus and also involving local communities at
the same time. I think it is always a focus of
Defcon and Defconnect. That was the case also in
Southeast Asia. This is what This is why we're
going to think Defcon and Defconnect in these places.
We're going to places where others want others.
(13:15):
Organize conferences in Europe and CC is very big in France
have been involved for many years with this events.
Now you have like events in in the US with the East calf based
global. Global is going on in a lot of
places in global is also going to many places where it's been
harder, like they're going to places like Africa or India and
(13:37):
many, many different countries. But yeah, so this is about the
diversity. We had a lot of it and we are.
We're proud of it. Yeah, the visa thing is huge.
I mean, that's, that's a big undertaking, I think to have
like the government involved andmaking sure that like people can
come as yeah, I mean, even FIFA can't do this, right?
Like apparently, apparently theycan't get fast track for, for
(14:00):
people to go to the FIFA World Cup.
You know, people in crypto, there's there's this narrative
about like South America being avery fertile place for crypto
innovation because of, come on, people's monetary sovereignty,
because of the state of the payment rails and the financial
system. And this has been something
that, you know, we've been hearing for years in the in the
(14:21):
crypto community, like people Camille Russo have talked about
it extensively written about it.And what's your sense of how
impactful it was to have Def Connect here?
And what are some of the really interesting kind of use cases
that you know, you've seen or oryou've emerged here at Def
Connect that validate this thesis?
(14:43):
So there's a hard thing about what we do is that we often
don't see the repo effects of our events for many, many years.
I can tell that's our events in Bogota had side effects and
impacts like for many years. And now we're also harvesting
the seeds that we've planted in,in Bogota three years ago,
because a lot of the communitiesthat are, are involved now in
(15:04):
all over that time were born around Bogota.
So it's, it's hard to put numbers on the impact that such
an event has. But years later we can, we can
tell because for example, in Bangkok last year, we had many
communities coming from South America all the way to Bangkok
because they're so DEFCON. They went to DEFCON, they saw
the impact. And so they, they wanted to, to,
(15:26):
to be part of it. So the impact is always hard to,
to evaluate. We have a financial direct
financial impact by with tourism, obviously with all the
money we put, but all the side events put that the companies
that will come here that will invest into into the country
(15:47):
that will hire local, local talents that will probably set
base like a con base is getting approval to like got approvals
to like financial regulated. They have like PSAVPSAV like a
local vast regulated entity to be able to to deal with finances
(16:08):
here. So people are going to companies
are going are getting established.
And also if you use cases payments are definitely the
biggest ones. I mean, in Argentina you can,
you can see people using crypto.We estimate that about 5 million
(16:29):
people using on a daily basis and 20% in the country own
crypto, 5 million using on a daily basis.
It's 10% of the population. It's it's huge.
And so they use crypto obviouslyfor several reason, but for for
payment because it's convenient.So when you pay a merchant, they
often don't get the the money into their bank for 20 days.
(16:51):
It's very common here. And also when they're paid into
pesos, well, the, the money filtrate, right?
Like the inflation is very famous in like infamous, I would
say. And so the pesos have been
crashing for the last many, manyyears.
And even this year, like I was here earlier this year and now
my dollar is 70% more powerful. So I leave it myself, coming
(17:16):
here three times this year. It's very like it's the, the
need for crypto and Ethereum is obvious.
You have the system of Quevas. I'm not sure if you've
experienced that, but you send amessage on Telegram or WhatsApp
and you send a crypto transaction with USDT on
Ethereum or other other network and the guy shows up with a bag
(17:40):
of cash in front of your door. It's, I think not really legal,
but not really for being. Everyone is doing it and it's
not common like we've been many service providers doing the
same, like the guy send you justan address, you need to send
$500 there and hope for the best.
But then the thing happened and happens.
And it's quite surprising. It's very common and it's
(18:02):
happening with crypto because it's simply better.
And it's amazing to see. And this is also why we're we're
here, yeah. That's fascinating.
And did did you guys encounter any real issues with like
currency fluctuations or these certain things that when
organizing? Yes, yes, because we are
planning this event we for a year, I mean we are working for
(18:25):
more than a year on this event. And so quotes vary.
We need to be careful about whatcurrency do we use, how like
split the payments in time so that it doesn't fluctuate too
much. We had often had puts getting
plus 20% because of currency evaluation.
The biggest impact we, well the biggest sort of thing that
(18:45):
struck us was that contracts don't matter.
They want the money in the account.
And so we've had at least one con one service provider cancel
our contract after a very short period time, just several days
because we hadn't made the made the payment and we didn't
realized just how important it was for them to have payment.
Then we sort of felt that throughout, you know, the entire
process of working for service providers is that they don't
(19:06):
care until the money is in the in the bank yet.
And you can, you can understand,you can understand that they've,
they've gone through tough situations.
They, they've gone through a situation where banks were
closing their accounts, like where they could not accept the
money into the banks. And so I mean, we've been
talking about this like, you know, censorship resistance in
Europe and in US and we talk about it, but we've never
(19:27):
experienced it ourselves. I mean, I have never been bank
less. And so I don't understand the
same way I don't understand or Idon't feel it feel the same way
as an Argentina that gone through the Coradito crisis in
2001. Like feel about crypto.
Like it's not, it's not the same.
They really, they've been through it and not all of them.
Obviously now we have a lot of young people that are into it,
(19:49):
but but their, their parents live through it.
And so they understand. So it's so yeah.
They they. Yeah.
Well, maybe let's look back to the event.
So we're almost, we're more thanhalfway through.
It's a little bit early, but what are your preliminary take
home take home learning? So kind of like what, what
(20:09):
worked well, what didn't go so well?
What? What will you be seeing more of
in the future? All right.
I'll start with what did not go well.
Is this the Internet? Right.
I think that's the entire city of Buenos Aires.
I mean, I've found the Internet to be very shoddy everywhere.
Yeah. Right.
Wi-Fi situation is not great in the Huntington.
(20:30):
Generally Wi-Fi situation in this building is very well known
to be catastrophic. And So what happened is that we
built the whole system from scratch and it was a huge
endeavor. And on top of that, there are,
there were many, many things that we did not control, like
cloud fare outage and, and otherthings.
(20:52):
I'm not blaming external factors, but it was a huge
endeavour. We, we hired some of the best
companies, private companies to set up the whole thing from
scratch. I can send you the pictures of
the the 50 luggage that we brought like huge a luggage of
material that we brought to build the whole thing from
scratch. You will see all the setup
(21:13):
everywhere. If you look now, it's now, it's
set up, it's back, it's working.But we had a rough time at the
beginning. I think that was the main
criticism if not the only that we received probably coffee
fixed but but in the end I thinkwe have not received too much
complaints. Cloud fair helps maybe a little
bit, but I think it was also a good occasion to to disconnect
(21:36):
so. I think it was actually so kind
of it was actually quite nice because kind of like we were
planning kind of like on our noses booth, we were planning to
kind of on board people and showthem the things and none of that
worked. But it didn't didn't just.
It didn't. Sorry about that.
No, no, no, It's all. It's a kind of like I, I, I'm,
I'm drawing the silver lining here.
So kind of because it also didn't work for anyone else,
(21:56):
people were forced to make conversation.
There you go, right. It's kind of like they actually
got talking about the things andkind of like, and I, I often I,
I think kind of like often we kind of jump in and say, let me
just show you. And then you show show people
and kind of like you that kind of often next part of the
narrative of why you're actuallydoing it.
And I think not having the app to show I'm, I'm if I could, if
(22:19):
I could choose kind of like a future setup, these, these,
these have the Wi-Fi, but kind of like if the Wi-Fi doesn't
work, it's not that everything doesn't work anymore.
It's kind of like that kind of that you, you find different
levels kind of connect with people on.
It's interesting. So for us, it was like one of
the biggest learning as an eventorganizer that we, we clearly
(22:40):
understood the impact that no Wi-Fi, no Wi-Fi means that like
on the live streams, on the userexperience, really it's not
great on many, many items. The repo effects were huge.
But surprisingly, we have not received that many complaints.
I mean, that was the main one. But we, we saw that like people
connecting more people, not so many people complain.
(23:02):
Surprisingly, we were like, for us, it was the end of the world.
But at the end of the day, he was not too bad.
And we feel the situation and so, so now it's OK.
But but yeah, it won't happen again.
That was the biggest challenge since day one, organizing this
event at this venue. We knew it.
We took all the measures that wecould possibly take, but we knew
(23:25):
some outage would happen. And it happened, and we did our
rest. We talked about the Internet,
the coffee and the tea bags. It was a little bit weird.
Yeah, I saw those are the. Kind of, I kind of like, I kind
of like the tea bags myself there.
You go, Yeah. And.
You push for getting more peopleto drink, Marty, because the
Marty's chips were out. So kind of like they were making
(23:47):
the the coffee deliberately shitty so people would kind of
try try the thing they don't know.
That was our purpose. It's the kind of elements when
you organize an event that you know, it's the kind of details
that you have to go into every detail and check, Oh, you serve
coffee or the space? How is the coffee?
Show me the coffee, Show me thisnot powder coffee that you put
water into, right? So it's also learning like if
(24:11):
you want high quality events, you need to take all the
details. And also with the scale of what
we're doing is it was sometimes hard to to go so precisely into
a digital test, but but well, wefixed it.
It's very good learning. Tell me about the, the boots and
kind of the, the fair element ofthis, right, Because that's new.
(24:33):
And kind of if you go to talks, it's actually a little bit sad
because there's almost no one there, but people love the
boots. All the boots are crowded.
So kind of like it seems like you kind of like hit the hit the
nail on the head here. Right.
So I guess the the experience shifted a little.
The idea of the warfare was to showcase the apps.
(24:53):
So to have more of like country concrete showcases was we put a
lot of focus on that specifically.
So we had eight districts. We like defy AI hardware and
wallets, collectibles, layer twos.
What am I missing? Privacy gaming.
So I think that was it. And we wanted we wanted to
experiment with a new format, have a more concrete way for
(25:16):
people to interact with the events.
So I think people loved it. It's new for the EF especially.
Like we usually we were like very like showcasing projects,
but in the plain neutral way. And now we went into like full
mode into selecting the best projects or some of the best
projects, including like the thebiggest international, the
biggest projects, also the, the best local ones.
(25:37):
So you can see the exchanges like below Ripio Lemon and you
can experiment with them. And we were also able to
showcase some licensed 1. So you have on ramping stations
with a repo where you can buy crypto on the ground.
So that's also something else that we've done is that we've
allowed and we've worked with merchants to have crypto
payments. So you can pay with crypto and
(25:58):
everywhere in the venue with table coins or ES.
And we've also facilitated and with the app, a way for you to
connect any external wallets or if you don't have a wallet with
an e-mail, create a wallet and get into the RMP station or
claim a peanut link so that you can have $2.00 to buy a coffee
or something like that. So we really wanted to give a
(26:18):
concrete experience of like whatcould a city living on Etherium
could, could be like. I will not agree with you.
That's all that, but the rooms are imt.
You have some rooms like. No, I was, I was, I was kind of
like, I, I was, I was exaggerating a bit.
But there's one room that's absolutely massive.
And I think it would, it would take probably like 2000 people
(26:39):
at least kind of like put to actually fill it up.
So it's like we organized a big room for the biggest events.
Ethereum Day was really packed. We had the econ the massive
event organized by all the localcommunities.
It's the time is Quipu with likethe mayor of Buenos Aires that
came Chiquita Pia, the head of like the football organization
(27:01):
in Argentina that came the room was packed from from like from
the beginning to the end. So yes, the the events coming
afterwards with smaller capacityfeel the the difference.
Obviously, where would you thinkit'd be the rooms arranging the
set up a little bit, but but yeah.
But I invite you to go see some of their events with the
(27:23):
hackathon that is completely full of hackers right now
happening in the middle of the week.
So I think kind of like talks isactually very specific thing,
right? Because kind of like if you have
a talk somewhere, it's mostly the endorsement that you you can
have the talk, then I would I would always assume that kind of
like 98% of people who watch my talk actually watch it later on
(27:44):
YouTube. And so so and I also take that
that stunts when I I'm at an event, kind of like I
deprioritize going to talks because I know I can watch them
on the way home, right. So it's and I think that's
that's generally kind of do. You really do that because
everybody says they do that, butI don't actually watch them on
(28:04):
the way. I usually sleep on the plane.
100%, yeah. So kind of, yeah.
I need to I need to maximize my playing time.
Victoria kind of, I'm also I, I don't know whether kind of like
we've known each other a long time.
Don't know whether you know this, but also patience is not
one of my virtues. So kind of like and and kind of
feel to kind of Fast forward someone on YouTube is way less
offensive than saying just speedit up.
(28:28):
I think so. That's an interesting one.
For years we've been saying thatthe conference model is broken
and no one is attending the talk.
I still think that's when you'repassionate about the topic that
you want to be the first one to see.
Attending your talk is differentlike like going to see obviously
Vitalic or any person that you really enjoy like you will, you
(28:49):
will sit here, you will not takeyour phone and you will listen
to the to the talk and you have the experience and the immersion
like the same way you would go to a concert and enjoy the
experience. But that's a small fraction of
the talks, right? Probably, but I, I, I do think
that's when you a topic matter. I think it's a, it's a personal
question. If you really care about a topic
(29:10):
and you like the speaker, you would go to like in the room and
then speak to the person or I agree, it's a small fraction.
I think that's, I mean, we have to think about it as event
organizers, like how do we manage this?
The speakers still want a place on stage.
They want to show a. 100% I, I mean, I also gave a talk and
(29:31):
kind of like, I'm happy I gave atalk because kind of like the,
the curation is part of the service, right?
So to have having the talk up late and kind of like linking,
linking it to kind of give people an intro what you're
doing. I think it's it's, it's super
valuable. So I mean nowadays all the talks
are so live stream they recorded.
We see a lot of people in the live streams actually.
(29:52):
So even when the room is half half full, you can like you
often times have 345 times the people like like watching in the
stream. So I think we should be low ego
as well as speakers or and do not feel bad because the room is
half 100. Percent, 100%.
But I think like one, one of thethings that's really important
(30:16):
to recognize as event organizersis that you know, your your
content is not just who's sitting in your room, but it's
also the reach. And, you know, if you're
marketing that content well, you're going to get lots of
eyeballs on on those ideas. And I think at the end of the
day is what really matters. I do want to talk a little bit
about like, so the main themes this week, not just here, but
all the side events. And there's been a few that have
(30:38):
struck me up. Obviously like stable coins have
been a massively important topicin the last few months, but also
this year that but privacy seemsto be the main thing.
And we yesterday we were talkingto Peter Van Volkenburg about
this. And my my question to him was,
you know, is the interest in privacy driven by the market or
is the market reacting to the interest in privacy?
(31:01):
Is it, it was sort of like a chicken and egg thing?
My question would be like, why? Why do you think now Etherium
seems to be, like, taking privacy very seriously And, you
know, like, the sunglasses of Italic will be like a meme that
will live on forever. And I think, like, it's going to
solidify this idea that Ethereumneeds to be private.
Like, why? Why is it so important now?
I think. Pragmatically, the ethermic
(31:22):
system been solving one problem after the other.
We've sold the merge, right? We've we've moved to proof of
stake, We solved scalability. Now transactions are like fast
and cheap. We're solving fragmentation,
we're solving UX. I think this is ongoing.
That's been ongoing for many years, like part of the next big
(31:43):
topics and privacy is one of them. 100% If we want credible,
credibly neutral technology, permissionless technology,
censorship resistant technology,we need privacy.
And when you think about it, if we don't have this, like if we
don't have privacy, then you canidentify the person or the the
network or the tool and just kill it.
(32:05):
So privacy is just a need, it's a human rights.
And I think so that's on the tech side.
If you don't have privacy, the tech is just simply limited and
you you cannot fulfil the promise of what Ethereum aims
that, you know, achieving. So that's one of the tech side.
And I think currently, like nowadays with the rise of far
(32:27):
right or like extreme parties inboth sides and nationalism and
media control and things like that, you need and just
surveillance tools that have been widespread in and for many
years now, but maybe increasing a bit, we need even more privacy
(32:49):
technology and privacy implementation of privacy
generally. When you see regulation like
chat control potentially coming to Europe, I mean, that was
crazy. I don't go into politics often,
but when I looked at that, I show that to my family like this
is this is I don't I'm not sure,sorry if I cannot say that on
the recording, but that was thatway louder, extremely
(33:10):
concerning, extremely concerninglike having shot control would
have caused signal to potentially stop operations like
this is massive. This is not only this is not
only Ethereum or blockchain related.
This is like a society problem like it was crazy.
It was even. Considered and kind of like I
mean, so basically kind of like it failed in the end, but kind
(33:32):
of it failed because by by just so kind of like Germany was
actually the deciding vote in the end.
And kind of like that it failed because there were some concerns
about how it was implemented. And I was like, what what do you
mean some sense? So this is insane.
And, and I think this is something that the Ethereum
committee also take, you know, like take very seriously and it
(33:53):
makes me proud to be working theEthereum committee that cares so
much about privacy and that has some of the best cryptographic,
you know, researchers and movinglike forward the needle of I
mean, the yeah, moving forward the cryptography with DK tech
and, and, and privacy tech in general, because I feel that
this is also how our ecosystem can have a very strong impact in
(34:15):
the world. Like when you yeah, again, like
when you promote censorship resistance, you need privacy.
And This is why I think it matters.
This is why Ethereum Foundation even is working a privacy wallet
with other partners. This is why the topic is so
important today. I to answer your question also
shortly, it's, I think it's a matter of priority.
We had to solve things before solving that.
(34:36):
But now it's, it looks like a big, a big elephant in the room
that if you don't solve like it's just we're not fulfilling
the full like the the entire value prop of Ethereum and
decentralized technology. So we need we need to address
it. Yeah, I, I think.
There's, there's also an, another concern with privacy is
that in order for Ethereum to becredible in the institutional
(34:57):
space and for businesses, you need privacy because like
businesses have privacy and, andthey, they lobby for, I mean,
they, they, they have it and they want to keep it.
Because I think, you know, there's sort of an adage that
capitalism works because you have individual privacy and you
have businesses that can have privacy over their transactions
in a business deal. That's sort of like constant
arbitrage, right? And, And a world where
(35:21):
everything is totally on chain is a world where so like the
economy sort of comes to a halt,right?
And but. Yeah, I I do think that if.
You're sort of took this priority a bit late, not saying
like scaling and those things were not important, but they
took a long time and. I I think that.
(35:44):
Privacy just because of sort of the ethos of Etherium and and
also like the risk that sort of people in crypto are generally,
you know, so they, they exist ina space that's more risky to
their like they're kind of financial freedom or their in,
in whatever, depending on the country where they may be or
even their security. Like we're both, we both live in
(36:05):
France. We know what that's like, you
know, to be concerned about yoursecurity.
I think privacy is kind of because it's a priority that
should have been, I think prioritized earlier than than
later. But it's great that it's
happening. But yeah, that's my take.
Yeah, I I would actually, I think.
I would counter that I think kind of I, I do actually think I
mean privacy is super important 100%.
First of all, I don't think the economy would grind to a heart
(36:26):
of kind of like no private transactions where possible, but
no. But if we were if the.
Economic rails were fully on chain and businesses couldn't do
things in a private way. It would be very difficult to
win business. Yeah.
So kind of like it would change.The modus operandi for sure, but
I think kind of like the the cryptography that kind of like
underpins privacy. It's come such a long way in the
(36:50):
last five years. So having, having had this as a
priority five years ago would have set us up for failure.
So kind of like if we say we have to solve privacy 1st and
then we do scaling, I think I, Ithink that would have, would
have been putting, putting the who's before the cut.
I think we, I mean we did not have the.
Tech also back in the days, I mean it was not even possible.
(37:11):
Possibly it was not possible at the at the time like now we have
ZK that solves both both like privacy and scalability.
So, and how much? How much?
I mean, look at the real real time proving stats.
Crazy, crazy that this now works.
Had anyone told us this five years ago, we, I I would not
have believed it. I would not have believed it.
(37:33):
So it's great to see good but. Now let's look into the.
Future. So where next for?
Defcon and defconnect. What are you going to, what are
you going to do differently? And most importantly, where is
it going to be? So yeah, I'm very excited.
To announce that DEFCON will be happening in Mumbai in India
(37:57):
next year. So we're working hard on making
that happen. But that will be after
Defconnect Argentina. So, so yeah, we're going to
announce that at the end of of the event.
So by the time it's really easy,it will be it will be live.
Yes, we're very excited to go there.
We've never been in that region,in that country and and we have
(38:18):
we simply have 1.5 billion attendees to potentially tap
into. So that's going to be that's
going to be big. So go also same following the
principles of where can we go first like where others would
not and where can we have the big potential impacts on the
region. And India has been at the top of
(38:39):
the charts in terms of number ofdevelopers, in terms of crypto
adoption, in terms of usage in general.
Regulation seems to be moving favorably as well.
It's always up and down. It's a complex environment, but
but we are confident so that it's going to be very, very
positive for the ecosystem for the region as well.
(39:02):
And we hope that we can also have an again have a very strong
impact and replicate the some ofthe efforts that we've been
doing here and you know other countries.
So we're very excited about about this location just because
that's DEFCON. Defcon.
Defcon will be in Mumbai. I can clarify as well.
That's. I think we're move.
Let's see, let's see how it goes.
(39:25):
I think we're moving a bit like I think this event has been a
hybrid model between past DEFCONX and past DEFCON.
We've done much more ourselves. It's much more centralized.
And so let's see how DEFCON evolved.
I haven't been able to. We haven't been able to work too
much on this, but it will be closer to DEFCON fairly much.
Probably there will be a merge in.
(39:46):
Branding, we've already been using the Devcon X accounts.
I think we'll be re merging the branding.
Just there has been some confusion in the past.
The events were very different in the past.
We've made sense at the time. Now it's no longer really the
case. Maybe I think the I like the
(40:07):
branding Ethereum was fair. Let's see if we keep that one.
Defcon for sure will remain. Let's see what happens with
Defconnect TBD. But next year is Defcon.
So are you saying that like Defcon?
Would possibly happen every yearor like some new like mutant
child of Defcon and Defconnect might happen every year.
I mean, and that back in the day.
(40:28):
Defcon used to happen every year, so kind of like this.
This used to be a yearly thing until kind of Defconnect stepped
into the Yeah. Also, it's the same team.
Right. So the I do think though that's
we're adapting always our eventsto the, to the place, to the
format, to the state of the ecosystem.
(40:49):
So let's see what what is going to be.
What are you most excited about?Doing defcon in India.
Inviting the all the new developers are coming from
India. Like, yeah, I mean, we've, we've
invited a lot of officials from India and Bhutan to to see
(41:10):
what's what's happening in in Argentina.
We've met with the ambassadors and we've invited the embassy to
come here and to see a bit what's like.
We're very excited to start working with the local
communities. It's very different from
Argentina in the way that the communities and the projects in
India. For a long time, I've been
working outside of India. So they're based in Dubai,
(41:32):
Singapore, other places for mostly regulatory reasons, but
we hope that you can improve. We hope that maybe we can help
bring the attention and back into India with some help from
the regulatory side of things. But yeah, very excited to to
welcome all these developers to have a lot of local attendees.
(41:53):
I think the focus will be on India for sure.
It will not be a region thing, will be India because it's it's
a continent in itself. So yeah, I think, I think.
I think one of the things that could be very interesting there
like you mentioned is like the diaspora coming back, like
American Indian diaspora coming to India and inspiring like the
local developers there. I think that would be probably
(42:15):
one of the outcomes here is thatyou just get this huge
inspiration within like the in the local Indian developer
community to start buildings forIndia rather than like just
outside of the country, right. And as a matter of fact.
We've been in touch with everyone like most of the big
companies already in India. I mean, Polygon is an example.
The Folio Denver from the Folio has been super helpful.
(42:38):
We, we have some Indian folks inthe air we've been talking with
and they've been help. They've been helping us with
local contacts and stuff and we've been talking.
I mean, for example, Moody's from Polygon is based in it's in
other places. There's been A and yes, I agree.
So a great take. Like you have people from India
(43:00):
everywhere in the world working the biggest project everywhere.
The same way, by the way, are continuing are in most biggest
protocols like have a uni swap all the biggest.
You have sometimes one super strong and continuing developers
Wonderland was helping with the privacy wallet.
It was a super, super strong devshop, which is not I don't think
(43:23):
they like the dev shop, sorry, but so you have so much strong
team from so much also strong developers and people from
India. That's I think it's going to be
interesting and we're going to see an interesting momentum.
So let's see how it goes. Mumbai is interesting city.
Obviously it's not. So Mumbai is like the financial
hub of India. The tech hub is more Bangalore,
(43:46):
but we there's no suitable venuein Bangalore, although everyone
from Bangalore will fly. I will tell the rain like they
fully organize it. I got on your train the last,
I'm not sure if you've seen that, but that was insane.
I mean, the guys are so motivated like.
So yeah, we're going. We're excited about this one and
see and see what happens. Yeah, well, I can't.
(44:09):
Wait to take this opportunity tospend like a month in India,
right? And yeah, fantastic.
Nathan, thank you so much for taking the time during this
very, very busy time for you to kind of talk with us.
And I have to say, you look remarkably well for someone who
hasn't slept in a week doing allright.
(44:30):
Thanks. Thank you.
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