What Ethereum developers are building in the Web3 wilderness to fuel the next super cycle

“Didn’t someone say something about a bear market?” ETHDenver founder John Paller asked the crowd at the start of the event’s opening night. “We don’t believe in that crap!”



It’s not just the bear market that ETHDenver shrugged off this year. The event, which ran from February 24 to March 5, is probably the furthest thing you can imagine from a normal tech conference. In fact, one of the first things Paller told the crowd was that ETHDenver is not a “conference” but a “festival”: “We embrace the weird,” he said.



Which is a bit of an understatement. He welcomed attendees while standing on stage wearing a brightly colored and sparkly orange onesie that he explained was meant to look like the event’s mascot, the “bufficorn,” which, he said, combines the community focus and herd mentality of the Colorado buffalo with the magical and fantastical nature of the unicorn. A group of similarly dressed bufficorns standing off to the side of the stage cheered him on.



Following Paller’s opening speech, Jonathan Mann, a singer-songwriter who has written and published a song every day since 2008 (and had a minor viral hit with one about Baby Yoda back in 2019), performed a song meant to officially kick off the weekend’s festivities and, also, hopefully address the elephant in the room.



“Fuck SBF,” Mann crooned as he strummed a little guitar accompanied by a group of bufficorn onesie-wearing backup singers, referring to the disgraced and indicted crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.



A video of Mann’s song would later go viral on Twitter—and not in a good way. “Couldn’t even watch it,” one Twitter user wrote. “Maybe I should sell everything.” Though Mann may have had the last laugh, considering he would then sell a live recording of the song as an NFT for more than $10,000 worth of Ethereum.



Which is sort of the perfect encapsulation of the entire ETHDenver experience: earnest, borderline embarrassing, flush with cash and a dizzying amount of enthusiasm, and standing defiantly proud in stark contrast to the still very dire state of the wider cryptocurrency industry.



But if there’s a path forward for the industry as a whole, it’s likely to be found at ETHDenver, the longest-running cryptocurrency meetup in the world. This year, its sixth, brought in more than 30,000 registrations, almost three times the registrations from last year. It combines the stages and vendors you’d see at your typical tech conference, a weeklong crypto-focused “build-a-thon,” millions of dollars in investment grants, and the kaleidoscopic psychedelia of an EDM music festival. And, bear market be damned, it’s growing.



Thanks to its increasing popularity, ETHDenver had to move to a new venue this year, migrating from a space in downtown Denver (which infamously didn’t have enough bathrooms) to the National Western Complex, a large exposition hall north of the city typically used for livestock shows and rodeos. Organizers did their best to make the space feel a bit more tech-focused, adding a “rainbow road” that led to the main event stage, food trucks, a sports car covered in Doge meme decals parked near a DJ chill-out space, an art gallery, and an arcade complete with rare Japanese imports like Taiko Drum Master. But the whole bottom floor, where Mann and the crowd of bufficorns would sing their “Fuck SBF” song, still smelled unmistakably like horses.



The Web3 community, which praises decentralization above almost all else, is surprisingly comfortable with jarring aesthetics, however. The dyed-hair Gen Z coders, burned-out millennial tech workers, and Gen X finance guys on a professional walkabout who make the trek to Denver each year all believe they’re building the future—not just of finance or the internet but of modern society. This year was more important for their industry-cum-sociopolitical movement than possibly any other that’s come before. Because if Web3 is going to survive, now is the moment that its players have to figure out how.







Web3 has not had a good 18 months. Ethereum, the cryptocurrency that powers the tech behind things like NFTs and smart contracts, has lost almost two-thirds of its value from where it was at its peak in November 2021. Adding insult to injury, a series of catastrophic central exchange crashes in 2022 all but assured that this current crypto winter is going to be a long one.



So you’d think the mood at ETHDenver would be closer to a funeral than Burning Man with crypto wallet payment options. But aside from the Sam Bankman-Fried song on opening night, and stickers with his curly-haired caricature on the urinals, walking around the event it was easy to forget that the Web3 community is facing a somewhat existential crisis. As chaotic as it all felt, though, there was a slowly emerging sense of where to go next being articulated across the event’s various stages.



The buzzword this year was abstraction, which, in typical cryptocurrency fashion, is a bit dense jargon meant to obscure a fairly basic idea. “The way that we win is that you don’t know you’re using Web3,” Kayla Kroot, the cofounder of Koii Network, told me on the second day of ETHDenver. “Six months later, you hear that this new app that you love, whatever the next TikTok is, or whatever—you’ve been using it and it’s fun, and it’s cool, and it’s exactly everything you want. They’re like, ‘Oh, that works on the blockchain.’”



Examples of what this might look like in practice are still sparse, but more than a few attendees who spoke to me at ETHDenver excitedly declared Starbucks’s new NFT-powered Rewards platform as proof that abstraction was the future. Users download crypto tokens and don’t even realize it.



But there is a place where a lot of these intense still-hypothetical conversations about NFTs and Web3 payments aren’t actually hypothetical. In a funny twist for the largely techno-libertarians who have come to Denver to crack the code for large-scale Web3 adoption, with all their talk about data protection and lofty goals of building an internet where users are free to own their content, their dreams of casual crypto are already a reality in China.



The Chinese government is widely restrictive about actually buying and selling cryptocurrency, but it’s very interested in NFTs. In December, it launched a nationalized version of OpenSea called the China Digital Trading Platform, allowing citizens to trade NFTs on a secondary market. The best example of mainstream Web3 use in China right now is the digital collectibles found inside Xiaohongshu, or “Little Red Book,” which is the country’s answer to Instagram. The NFT marketplace inside Xiaohongshu runs on a network built by Conflux, which had a team at ETHDenver this year. The Xiaohongshu NFTs work just like NFTs do in any other context, except it’s possible that users have no idea they’re NFTs. They just show up as fun stickers and badges on users’ profiles and users buy them with fiat currency.



The problem with trying to move the entire Web3 community toward one goal, though, is that it is, by definition, fractured and often at war with itself. “We’re all moving toward the same end, but then you are building on Ethereum and someone else is building on Solana and you have these silos where you’re stuck in this ecosystem,” Kroot said. “It’s not just sending money but sending information across blockchains to move us out of those silos.”



The main way that ETHDenver helps bridge those silos—beyond software—is by giving crypto’s biggest developers a chance to party together.







The second night of ETHDenver is when the majority of the affiliated happy hours start popping up all over the city. I managed to get into the PizzaDAO party, which was held in a small venue on the edge of Denver’s trendy River North neighborhood. For the uninitiated, a DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization. Imagine a chatroom, but with users who buy crypto tokens that give them a certain amount of voting power on what the chatroom does. PizzaDAO, as you might guess, cares a lot about pizza.



Immediately upon walking into the venue, I came face-to-face with a giant pile of weed—which is legal in Colorado—sitting on a table by the door. There was also a table set up for attendees to smoke dabs of 99% THC, and a guy walking around handing out large nuggets of marijuana. A man next to me was handed one and then said aloud, “What do I do with this?”



The main attraction—beyond the weed, free pizza, and open bar—was another performance from Mann. He played a set of songs, including one about the cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, complete with four backup dancers dressed as the titular crime-fighting amphibians.



“You’re not going to see a lot of people driving around in Lambos or something,” Mann told me before the party. “[People here are] more concerned with having fun and being together and having something that actually feels like a community.”



Which is true, in a sense, but this is also a community obsessed with restricting access. For instance, many of the biggest parties at ETHDenver are token-gated, as in, available only for those who are part of a particular DAO or own a specific NFT. Others are tweeted out with only minutes to secure a spot before they fill up. Although PizzaDAO’s party didn’t have one, several of the other parties I attended had prominently featured roped areas or special VIP rooms of some sort for token holders.



In many ways, this is the central tension of Web3 and arguably the reason the entire sector is facing such an uphill battle now to survive the depths of a bear market. How do you get the average person to buy into crypto, and thus make early adopters wealthy, while also trying to build a version of the web that is (at least on the surface) less open and less convenient than the one we have now?



Well, according to Rohun Vora, better known as Frank DeGods, the creator of two of the biggest NFT lines of the past few years, DeGods and y00ts, you don’t.







Easily the most crowded talk at ETHDenver this year, including anything on the main stage, was the one that featured Vora as a speaker on the third day of the event. DeGods, slouching on a small stage near the arcade and dressed in a black hoodie and a matching pair of black sunglasses, spoke about the ways that creators could use Solana, the blockchain on which he released both of his NFT lines, arguing that cryptocurrency would be perfect for building tip-jar-style tools that you might see on social platforms like Twitch. [Later in March, he would move y00ts to the Polygon blockchain and then begin migrating DeGods to Ethereum.] After the talk, Vora was swarmed by fans.



“I think that it’s a losing battle to try to convince a mom from Idaho to buy an NFT,” he told me after his talk. “There are so many people who are Web3-adjacent, there are so many Dogecoin holders, there are so many people who are in this space right now who are going to be way more susceptible and interested in what an NFT is and what it has to offer.”



Vora said he’s heard the abstraction argument, but he believes the entire crypto industry first has to understand what NFTs are and what they aren’t. “NFTs are closer to the creator economy than they are to startups,” he told me. “That’s the mistake everyone made in the early days—they looked at it like it’s supposed to be this Big Tech startup, and it was a fucking JPEG project. But no, they’re closer to the creator economy. . . . It’s more of a two-way creation. The community makes stuff, the creators make stuff, but they’re sharing their goals.”



He said that he’s waiting for a large creator like YouTuber MrBeast to launch an NFT line. “If MrBeast started doing NFTs, it’s goodbye Yuga,” he said, referring to Yuga Labs, the company behind the most famous NFT line, Bored Ape Yacht Club. (Yuga Labs did not have a presence at ETHDenver this year.)



The question is why? Why go through all this trouble just to build a better Venmo? Well, the answer might be found in ETHDenver’s Shark Tank-esque build-a-thon competition on the last night, in which teams that have been programming all week get a chance to show off what they’ve built on stage for a team of judges.



It’s here that I saw the most coherent glimpse of what a possible Web3 future might look like.







Attendees packed themselves back into the National Western Complex, which still smelled like horses, to see what the build-a-thon teams had been working on all week—many of whom have been sleeping on 552 air mattresses in an adjacent rodeo arena.



The teams took the stage to demo the tools they had cooked up, such as “sesame,” which sends Ethereum over SMS instead of the internet; “Synesthesia,” a “Spotify Wrapped”-like tool for music NFTs; and “tribe.credit,” a Web3 credit and lending app that is largely anonymous and pools funds from users’ contact lists.



The winners of the night were sesame; “fundpg,” which allows users to allocate their crypto yields to fund public goods; “Swappy,” a search engine for swap exchanges; “zkpoex,” a security tool; and “baZaarK,” an NFT gaming project that verifies—but also hides—different traits for NFT game characters.



If that all sounds very dense, rest assured: It is . . . because the Web3 true believers are determined to build an entirely separate way of using the internet from the ground floor up.



The show is equal parts inspiring and mildly terrifying, if only because there is simply so much money being invested in bringing it to life and because, if it succeeds, it will require a complete overhaul of our financial system.



Closing out the event, a bluegrass band took the stage. “It ain’t my coins if it ain’t my keys,” the guitar player sang in a thick, affected drawl. “Now that phrase is lost so they’re nobody’s.”