On Friday evening, after the FarCon summit wrapped up, I found myself walking north through Williamsburg with an old ConsenSys friend, Ryan, who now works at Base. Eight years earlier, we’d walked these same streets while just beginning to explore crypto and blockchain, back when the neighborhood felt different, and so did the technology.

The summit itself captured everything great about community-run crypto events: thoughtful, single-track conversations, a venue that felt lively and filled with faces I know from online, and personal touches like badges with our Farcaster profile photos, thanks to icebreaker.xyz. When Fred Wilson described his vision for portable user-owned data stores, it felt like he was speaking directly about Memory. Winning Best Interoperable App with our buildathon project, FollowCast, made the moment even sweeter.

Earlier in the week, I'd jumped between Variant’s office to cowork, Archetype’s happy hour, and a Base gathering where I met the Paragraph.xyz team in person. Thursday was a blur between meetings with friends at Splits and Catalog, along with stops back and forth to the buildathon in midtown.

Reflecting on that Friday evening walk again, it felt symbolic. Navigating crypto is a lot like moving your way through busy New York streets. Sometimes you're forced to zigzag, crossing unexpectedly when you have the pedestrian light, sometimes jaywalking, other times going down blocks that weren't a part of your original route, but always moving forward. Ryan and I left the summit under the Williamsburg Bridge and moved up all the way through Williamsburg to the south end of McCarren Park. Up, albeit zigzagging, a lot like each of our separate journeys in crypto. Like NYC, there is always another thing to get to. Farcaster and the community around it remind me why the constant effort is worth it. The journey isn't meant to end; ideally, it keeps evolving. And events like FarCon help keep that spirit alive.