ETH Denver is probably the best community-organized crypto conference in the United States. It is broadly similar to the Ethereum Community Conference (ethcc) in Europe — both are nominally Ethereum-specific events, but are fairly ecumenical and include other protocols and applications, and are basically broad crypto events.
ETH Denver is unique in that the main event is entirely community run (through Spork DAO), but there are also hundreds of side events thoughout the week. 2024 was my second year attending, and the first year where I actually ran some side events myself. Looking forward to 2025 and hopefully doing more.
Conferences like this are really convenient because everyone is in the same city at the same time — it’s easy to do casual meetups throughout the week, plus serendipitous meetings (walking from my hotel to the Four Seasons for another event, ran into random other people I wanted to see), and the “activation energy” to run a side event is pretty low — just find a venue (bars are usually free meeting spaces if you commit to a minimum bar spend of a few thousand dollars!), put up a Luma page, and take signups.
This year I stayed at the Brown Palace downtown — quite happy with it. Cheap corporate rate, and as a Marriott Ambassador I got upgraded to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Suite. I ended up having 8 meetings throughout the week at various venues throughout the hotel (including an empty meeting room on my floor which had been abandoned by the users, including a bunch of half-eaten food, for the entire week…wtf), and the location was great. I’d almost always stay downtown rather than in RiNO. Booking hotels well in advance is worthwhile as the city sold out (30k attendees), at least in 5mi radius of the event.
I was going to try to speak/run a security-specific track at the conference, but apparently this year a primary goal of the event was “diversity”, so as a white man I didn’t get to speak (this was explicit communication from the organizers; very 2019 of them, maybe they’ll catch up — hard to hate a community-led effort for anything, but this is fucking bullshit IMO). Also hilariously this was promoted in true witch-hunt fashion by one of the MC’s on main stage:
I did see one great talk on main stage: Ilya (NEAR, Google transformers paper) and Eric Voorhees (Shapeshift, Satoshidice, crypto-libertarian) talking about AI Freedom. This one is definitely worth watching on video when it comes out.
I ran a side event in a bar around Network States and Vitalia — Balaji came in via Zoom and was excellent (as always). I bought a personal PA system so I’m set up to run small events like this in the future. This went pretty well — I have newfound respect for how much work goes into running live events, even in an “easy” environment like a bar — and I’ll try to do some bigger events next year.
I spent a lot of time with the current investors at Evertas (the crypto insurance company where I’ve been CSO for several years), as well as meeting clients. TRGC is amazing — several of the partners there are personal friends of mine now, and they’ve been amazingly helpful to our company (and to the rest of their portfolio) — strongly recommend them, and they hosted a few great events. I’m also an LP at a few funds which were present at ETH Denver, and enjoyed catching up with them and learning about some upcoming investments — lots of alpha there. Breed VC is consistently one of my favorites for finding new stuff.
One of my personal interests, independent from what’s most insurance-relevant, is ZK: spent a fair bit of time at Aleo’s events (I’m friends with a few people there, and it’s very exciting to see them launch). They had some excellent talks, and the idea of ZeFi (ZK Decentralized Finance) is one of the most interesting aspects for me. I’ve been into crypto stuff since the 1990s, and against the “blockchain” model due to lack of privacy (vs. Chaumian blinded tokens) until ZK became feasible.
Evertas hosted a dinner for clients, investors, and friends at the excellent Uchi restaurant. I actually went two days early to “test” it — it’s great Japanese fusion (although I personally prefer “traditional”, it’s still really good, especially for an inland US city.) We had about 35 people split across two rooms, with two of the top academics in crypto (inventors of ZCash…), some investors in Evertas, etc. Overall I’d consider sponsoring dinners to be better value for money than buying $20-100k booths at conferences, and I earned 4X Amex MR on my Gold Amex for this — sign up for one yourself (and earn 60K MR signup bonus — MR are worth about $0.02/ea).
Another fun part of the week was the “Building Network States” event, where I got to be on a panel (and moderate it) with Riva Tez, Eric Voorhees, and Arirudh Pai. We discussed parallel societies and institutions — I spoke about insurance as a great regulatory alternative. This was held in a beautiful venue — the Forney Museum of Transportation — and I’m looking forward to maybe hosting something there in 2025.
Overall, I strongly recommend attending ETH Denver if you’re at all interested in cryptocurrency or the ecosystem around it.