Attending Devconnect was an invigorating experience! This year it was in Buenos Aires. The city is big, busy, and vibrant. It bears all the hallmarks of an evolved metropolis. This image shows Puerto Madero, the old port, now the city’s most expensive neighborhood.
Devconnect took place from November 17-22. It was the largest Ethereum Foundation event ever. Some stats:
14,000+ attendees
From 130+ countries
A World’s Fair-style campus
With 8 themed districts:
DeFi, Privacy, L2s, Decentralized Social, Hardware & Wallets, AI, Gaming, and Art80+ application exhibitors
40+ deep-dive events
and 15 Community Hubs
The location was a complex named “La Rural”. It reminded me of the rural ETH Denver fairgrounds, which usually host rodeos, with arenas and expansive exhibit spaces. The weather was warm, with many of the booths in the open air.
The keynote was delivered by Vitalik, in the flesh, sporting dark glasses for the summer season. I really appreciate the optimism in the Ethereum ecosystem. That spirit derives from its founder.
One of the community hubs was the Regen Hub. The core coordination and program was done by Regens Unite, which has organized activities at 19 Ethereum events since 2022. Local production was by NetX State. The crew’s expertise was evident; the hub was astutely orchestrated.
“The Regen Hub is for builders, makers, activists and anyone interested in exploring how Ethereum and Web3 can support regenerative, community-driven solutions to social and environmental issues.”
Activities were grouped into daily themes:
Mon: 🌅 Arriving & Grounding Together
Tue: 🍄 Mycelial Structures & Mechanism Design
Wed: ✨ Community is Immunity
Thu: 🌿 Bioregional Commons Coordination
Fri: Regenerative Finances: From ReFi to RealFi
Sat: 👁 Radical Imagination and Desirable Futures
An extensive list of sister organizations participated, doing talks, staging events, and mounting exhibits: Greenpill Network, especially neighboring Greenpill Brazil plus the Dev Guild, ReFi DAO, Agroforest DAO, Mujeres en Crypto, Fork Forest, Commons Hub Brussels, Funding the Commons, ReHuman, Gardens, CofiBlocks, Rifai Sicilia, PhiEconomy, and many more. See the full roster on the Regens Unite calendar.
On Friday I did a talk about Green Goods, an app developed by the Greenpill Dev Guild:
“Green Goods: Creating Hyper-local Hubs of Regenerative Actions
An exploration of how hyper-local hubs empower regenerative initiatives and collective impact at the community scale”
Green Goods is an app for community gardens that makes grassroots impact visible, verifiable, and fundable.
By sofiverse.eth
At the end of the week we were told that, of the 15 various hubs at Devconnect, the Regen Hub was the busiest. Go gang!
One of the guys from AgroForest DAO, Diogo, organized a Regen Haus where, depending on the day, a number of people stayed. In tandem he facilitated a Regen Village:
“We invite builders, dreamers, and grounded doers to join the Regen Village — a living microeconomy where food, culture, and coordination flow as commons.
This is your Call to Commoning:
to weave your value into a collective story,
to reclaim the act of living, learning, and exchanging as a commons,
to build local economies that root Ethereum in the soil of everyday life.”
In order to participate you had to bring something. People brought wine, cheese, bread, olive oil, honey. Your contribution became: “vouchers — seeds you plant in our Community Pool. In return, you receive $VILLA tokens, your key to our dinners, workshops, and the shared treasury that funds what comes next.”
At the end of the conference week on Sunday there was a “Pacha Mama Closing Ceremony: Walk to Las Yungas Garden”:
‘“To close the Regen Hub @ Devconnect BA 2025, we invite you to our Pacha Mama Closing Ceremony: an immersive experience to connect with the real Buenos Aires. We will meet the Women that created the "Las Yungas Community Garden" in Barrio Rodrigo Bueno. They lead this space since the Pandemics and are a living example of community resilience and regeneration.”’
‘Pacha Mama’ means Earth Mother. Here are some photos from the ancestral ritual.
It was rewarding to wrap up a stimulating and inspiring conference week with a visit to a local, regenerative, on-the-ground collective. It was like zooming in, getting closer and closer, until we found ourselves meshing with like-minded locals in the real Buenos Aires.
