DevConnect 2025: Inside The Biggest Ethereum Event in History

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 fear experience of what Ethereum could feel like in the daily life.

And again, there is no better place than Alcantida to do that 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 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 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 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 currently these days, right? Like everyday there is a big announcement that I've seen Polygon, I think trust lesson on something and the privacy wallet

by EF got released. I mean, there is a lot of new 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.

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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 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 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 40 different or even organizers 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 main pavilion and again a lot of things 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 2020 thousand. That came through the doors here at Defconnect, tickets claimed.

Yeah. And I think we are now more than 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 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 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 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 to select, maybe we can talk about 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 place than Alcantina to do that because people use crypto, stablecoins and Etherium on a daily basis.

So we felt again, he was a great timing 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 place to do it. What was some of the kind of reasons why Defconnect landed here in Argentina? So we've been scouting Argentina for 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 to organize DEFCON. 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 we visited liberal some people at 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

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 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 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 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 place where we centralized a bit more 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 on top of 40 events, the World's 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 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, as we call them internally, the core events inside the main building.

And we we've put like a bigger focus on on the venue and everything that's happening here because 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 in for this? We have about now 20,000 attendees and about 50% of them 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 companies, the, the government officials, all the local committees are very, very active and 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 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. 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 a streamline process with the Immigration Office of Argentina directly in line with the government, where we issued more than 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? 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 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. 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 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 and making sure that like people can come as yeah, I mean, even FIFA can't do this, right? Like apparently, apparently they can't get fast track for, for people to go to the FIFA World Cup.

You know, people in crypto, there's there's this narrative about like South America being a very 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 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 or you've emerged here at Def Connect that validate this thesis? 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 communities that are, are involved now in 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, 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 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 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 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 obviously for 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. 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, many years.

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 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 a message 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

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 just an 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 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 more than a year on this event. And so quotes vary. We need to be careful about what currency 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 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 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 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 I don'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, 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 than halfway through. It's a little bit early, but what are your preliminary take home take home learning? So kind of like what, what 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. 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 other things. 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

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 think we 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 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 show them 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, people were forced to make conversation. There you go, right. It's kind of like they actually got talking about the things and kind 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 actually doing it. And I think not having the app to show I'm, I'm if I could, if 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 event organizer that we, we clearly understood the impact that no Wi-Fi, no Wi-Fi means that like on the live streams, on the user experience, 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. 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 we could possibly take, but we knew

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 people to drink, Marty, because the Marty's chips were out. So kind of like they were making 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 this not powder coffee that you put water into, right? So it's also learning like if 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, we fixed it. It's very good learning. Tell me about the, the boots and kind of the, the fair element of this, right, Because that's new. 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. 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 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 the biggest international, the biggest projects, also the, the best local ones. 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 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 concrete experience of like what could 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 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 local communities. It's the time is Quipu with like the mayor of Buenos Aires that came Chiquita Pia, the head of like the football organization 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 capacity feel the the difference.

Obviously, where would you think it'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 hackathon that is completely full of hackers right now happening in the middle of the week. So I think kind of like talks is actually 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 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, but I don't actually watch them on 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 speed it up. I think so. That's an interesting one.

For years we've been saying that the conference model is broken and no one is attending the talk. I still think that's when you're passionate about the topic that you want to be the first one to see.

Attending your talk is different like like going to see obviously Vitalic or any person that you really enjoy like you will, you will sit here, you will not take your 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 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 kind of like, I'm happy I gave a talk 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. 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 the things that's really important to recognize as event organizers is 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 struck me up. Obviously like stable coins have been a massively important topic in the last few months, but also this year that but privacy seems to be the main thing. And we yesterday we were talking to 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? 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 Ethereum needs to be private.

Like, why? Why is it so important now? I think. Pragmatically, the ethermic 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

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 can identify the person or the the network or the tool and just kill it. 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 right or like extreme parties in both 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 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 that way louder, extremely concerning, extremely concerning like 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 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 makes me proud to be working the Ethereum committee that cares so much about privacy and that has some of the best cryptographic, you know, researchers and moving like 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

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.

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 be credible in the institutional space and for businesses, you need privacy because like businesses have privacy and, and they, 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 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.

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 in a 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 France. We know what that's like, you know, to be concerned about your security.

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 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 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, I think 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. 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. 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 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 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 the charts in terms of number of developers, 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. And we hope that we can also have an again have a very strong impact and replicate the some of the 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. I think we're moving a bit like I think this event has been a hybrid model between past DEFCON X 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. 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 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 year or like some new like mutant child of Defcon and Defconnect might happen every year. I mean, and that back in the day. 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 events to the, to the place, to the format, to the state of the ecosystem.

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 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, 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.

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 one of the outcomes here is that you just get this huge inspiration within like the in the local Indian developer community to start buildings for India 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.

We, we have some Indian folks in the 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 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 dev shop, which is not I don't think 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, but we there's no suitable venue in 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.

Wait to take this opportunity to spend 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 all right. Thanks. Thank you.