Fozzy goes to devconnect
conference goer POV
Been a while since I wrote a blog. Is this because im out of ideas or the adderall sub ran out? Maybe im just lazy...
Longest day of my life
Planned on arriving Monday morning but after hearing about Unicup and Boca Juniors game decided I couldn’t miss out. Flying 11 hours straight knowing id have to go straight to the soccer tournament didn’t feel great but I knew I couldn’t miss out. Havent touched a ball in 9 years, but once I started warming up I was confident I still had it. Boy was I wrong, the moment the whistle blew and you had use any sort of agility my entire body seized up. Looked like I had never played in my life, was a huge wake up call tbh. We ended up taking a team of misfits ( formed 24h before the cup ) to the quarter finals and lost in PKs. Great group of lads and enjoyed the experience. Props to @Uniswap for hosting, was truly an amazing event. Side note but found it funny Uniswap foundation and labs were 2 separate teams, always good for a laugh.
sharp lads
After losing in the quarter finals I went straight to the streets of argentina to drink fernet and coke. If your not familiar with the official drink of argentina well its an italian liqour mixed with coke. Everyone drinks it, from the fans to the venders. It’s so engrained in their community, its like the equivalent of bud light on an NFL sunday. Apparently they banned visitors and alcohol because there was too much violence.
good vibes
The game was awesome, can’t even begin to describe the amount of raw energy and culture on display. Constant chanting the entire game, no clue how the trumpet dude keeps it up. The funniest part is when my friend translated the chants into english, they are so dumb.
At this point you might be saying “nobody cares, tell us what to bet on” or “this dude has no idea how to use a comma” and you prolly right so lets begin.
People watching
As a gambler talking to people is very important. Right or wrong, dumb or smart, rich or poor doesnt matter. It’s important to just smile and wave and learn what they have to say. All info is good info.
As I hobbled from event to event my goal was to try and meet interesting people. I started with the conference, very well organized except for the internet. My first realization was wow there are alot of people here, like I get coming to devconnect for the events and food but who are all these people going booth to booth?
So I asked a friend, their response gave me a good laugh...
the most dangerous species of booth goer, the ‘business development representative’
So I started just randomly asking people walking around, “what do you do”. Most to my surprise were students interested in what crypto was and ofc the swag merchants. Since I was at the conference I figured id take some notes how big the booths were, luckily iphone has this measure feature so i got to work.
For the longest time I used to think BD / marketing people didn’t really matter but over time I realized nobody really has a moat and they are the differentiating factor. Any successful project is ran by the smartest BD / Growth / Sales people. Does this mean your lending protocol needs to host massive parties at every conference? Im still 50/50 on this but slight lean to yes if the music is good.
First crowd I met with are the MEV types, most of the discussion is over my head but feel I have a solid filter for who is legit or just shilling buzzword fugazi. I get the sense that this crowd is bored, flow is slowing and they are slightly unsure what to do with their skillsets.
Second crowd are the very skilled engineers who are post-economic. What does this word mean? well me and my friends have been using it lately to explain people who have made so much money they just dont really care anymore. Care not in the sense of dont try, but care in the sense of being aggressive raising money and having to listen / work for people. Be somewhat liable for an idea or success of a company. Met with some incredibly smart people that are just interested in building out stuff they have wanted to do for a while but don’t want to raise money and are just doing it for intellectual curiosity on their own time. tldr enjoying life but still coding, these guys never lose the (CODING ENJOYMENT WORD).
Third crowd is the VCs. Prolly the most intelligent, caring, attractive, well rounded self-aware people in the industry ( i might try and raise money soon). Most seemed unable to deploy and a bit worried. Chasing trends like prediction markets valued at 50-100m and stablecoin stuff. My guess is this is a combination of the above where the new exciting projects they want to invest in can only be built by the “post-economic” dont care anymore crowd and the risk reward for investing in the copy paste stuff just isn’t there anymore. I’d like to think most would agree with this sentiment, but tbh there did not seem to be many VCs down there.
chill pup
Last but not least brings us to the final crowd.....normies. People that have no clue what crypto is and because of that smile every day, enjoy life, and just overall happy people. There was a photographer taking a picture of this dog who was just chillen watching the horses. Was kinda of bored of talking to crypto folks at this point so I decided to walk down there and talk to her. Her english was surprisingly good so I began to ask her about crypto ( she was the event photographer). She said she had heard of it but had no clue how it worked, but said she has had clients that wanted to pay her in crypto but she could never accept it. I asked if she wanted to learn so I had her take out her phone and download phantom wallet (found this to be the easiest onboarding wallet) and sent her like $8 in sol. We then swapped it to USDC and explained how it worked. She was really smart and understood everything, was very impressed. Then she asked “what is a stablecoin”, and I began to explain how its mostly US dollars that are digital. Her next question made the entire trip worth it, she asked “what is the inflation?” to which I replied idk maybe 4% or whatever they tell us. She then went on to explain how the argentinian peso at some point was inflating at almost 10% per month. I replied not even our best ponzi schemes get that kind of return, she laughed we locked eyes then kissed. Now we have 2 kids, both learning rust. Only joking, but it was amazing to talk to someone who is cryptos best use case but never really took the time to understand it. Most of us who have been in this ecosystem for years are luckily we got onboarded because of our gambling problems or video game addiction. But for others their interest was rooted in deep economic instability where they had to educate themselves to stay above the poverty line. Now to some this makes perfect sense, but I fear most don’t really understand how bad it is for most.
Nobody cared we were nuking
To my surprise not once did anyone bring up the price of crypto. I never would have expected this considering we were nuking the entire conference. People just didn’t care, they were either there to have fun / talk to friends / network / enjoy a different culture. Idk if I had to guess if this were a solana conference and SOL was down 20% in 3 days everyone would be talking about it. I’m pretty confident the frequency of price checking of a eth dev is far less than a sol dev. Maybe the ethereum community actually cares about building and not price? Does this make the price go up, is it good or bad? well thats the billion dollar debate that is hard to gauge in the short term.
My gut feeling is the dev community for each chain has different reflexivity, im not even sure if that makes sense or I used the word correctly but I always try to fit “reflexive” into every blog. Next blog word is juxtaposed so be on the look out for that banger.
Privacy & Agents
Two topics that were discussed extensively at the conference were privacy and agents. Privacy seems to be a meta that has just caught attention recently. Is zcash leading the narrative? Quantum worries? No clue, but I think its been under represented in crypto mindshare and ofc all it takes is some dino token to pump for people to begin paying attention again.
Privacy is important I really do believe that, but its just impossible to invest in. If your not here to put food on the table congrats, I respect that but not sure I understand it. I do think its kinda funny how ethereum is aligning with privacy and the notion that its not investible. A match made in heaven as I see it, however if they are able to pull off privacy without sacrificing the other parts of the blockchain values we could see some real value. The world sadly will only get more chaotic and privacy will be a necessity for most or at least the thought of it. Don’t really have too much more to say about privacy but it had alot of eyes at devconnect and people really seemed like they cared.
Agents, are they useful? Jury is still out, or maybe the trial hasn’t even started yet. Unfortunately when people think agents they prolly think ai16z elizaOS. Not a great kleenex for us tbh, was just a sdk that didn’t really do much but as long as you lead the narrative and go on an taylor swift era exit liquidity asian tour you too can make millions.
Agents will be a thing, but also impossible to invest. Agentic payment rails will be very important and x420 seems to be doing a good job building out the infra so far. Devs will start to take note and I think we could see another AI mini narrative start to form if things quiet down. Wish I knew more about crypto agents but I just don’t think its worth the research rn. But still important to note it also had alot of mindshare at the conference.
tldr
7.5/10
Enjoyed meeting new folks, great food, cool city, good friends, amazing culture. As for me, id like to think im the dog in the photo. Just observing for now, alot of market things scare me a bit ( will blog about these soon ).
The best trades I got out of the conference were either to start vibe coding a project or invest in Argentina real estate. I only have the money for one of those. Also gota get healthier.
happy thanksgiving