Before Devconnect, most of my Ethereum story lived in places that felt far from La Rural: our pilot coffee farm in Kenya, WhatsApp farmer groups, web3 community events in Kenya, early morning and late‑night meetings on Project Mocha, our attempt to turn smallholder coffee trees into digital assets and direct relationships with buyers.
When the invitation arrived on August 25 inviting me, Peter Maina, to join the Devconnect ARG Scholars Program, it felt like an unlikely bridge between those farms and the heart of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Reading the Scholars description, one idea stood out: this wasn’t just about getting people to an event; it was about building a cohort that would co‑learn and co‑create, building bridges between Ethereum and other worlds. For me, that other world was the Kenyan farming community, farmers who rarely hear the word Ethereum but live every day with intermediaries, opaque pricing, and fragile trust, the very coordination problems Ethereum claims to address.
The journey to Argentina became a metaphor for the program itself: long, layered, occasionally confusing, but intentional. Argentina’s government had created a special 30‑day entry authorization for DevConnect participants, a signal of how seriously the country took this Ethereum World’s Fair arriving in Buenos Aires.
My itinerary read like a mini world tour: Nairobi to Dubai, Dubai to Rio de Janeiro, then finally to Buenos Aires, with layovers that gave me plenty of time to replay the same question in my head: What am I bringing to a room of 100 global scholars and the global Ethereum community?
By the time I checked into Bromelia Hotel Boutique in Palermo, where the Ethereum Foundation had arranged my stay, the imposter syndrome was louder than the city traffic outside.
The first scholar gatherings dissolved that doubt quickly. We had been meeting virtually for a few weeks before and had a common Telegram group to coordinate communication, so the in‑person reunion felt like catching up with old friends rather than meeting strangers.
The cohort reflected exactly what the Scholars Program promised on paper: community organizers, lawyers, policymakers, journalists, artists, and protocol builders, each expanding Ethereum into a different corner of the world.
What stood out wasn’t just their technical depth, but their motives. A Brazilian organizer building financial literacy circles, a European lawyer working on open‑source‑friendly regulation, a journalist mapping power shifts in the Global South; very quickly it became clear that this was not a scholarship built merely around access, it was built around community as infrastructure.
Months of online calls before Devconnect, shared accommodation, and structured group work meant that by the time we walked into La Rural, we weren’t just attendees, we were already mid‑conversation. We spoke less in terms of projects to pitch and more in terms of responsibilities to carry, and that difference changed how the entire week felt.
Devconnect Argentina was framed as the first Ethereum World’s Fair, and truly the description matched reality. La Rural was organized into themed districts and Community Hubs, spaces curated around deep topics rather than shallow marketing: Real‑World Assets, Regen, DeSci, Legal, Open Source, and more.
Instead of endless rows of booths competing for attention, the fair felt like a series of neighborhoods. In one corner, you might find a working DeFi credit primitive; in another, an art installation exploring collective authorship; in yet another, a circle discussing climate justice and regen funding. It was less of an expo hall and more of a living lab.
I spent a significant part of my week anchored at the Real‑World Assets (RWA) Community Hub, a space dedicated to projects turning physical assets such as land, commodities, loans, and infrastructure into onchain representations that real people actually use. Conversations at the hub were refreshingly honest; RWA wasn’t treated as a trendy buzzword, but as a complex redesign of ownership and risk, who bears downside, who captures upside, and how local communities keep agency when their assets meet global liquidity.
Walking that floor as a Co-founder of Project Mocha felt strangely familiar. Panels and demos on tokenized credit, supply‑chain transparency, and yield‑bearing RWAs, including experiments like tokenized yerba mate, echoed the same questions we wrestle with for coffee trees: How do you capture seasonality and climate risk honestly? How do you make sure farmers aren’t reduced to line items in someone else’s yield strategy?
I now have a newer and clearer way of thinking of Project Mocha not as a niche coffee use case, but as part of a broader RWA wave that is trying to rewire how value and information move in the real economy. With all the lessons and questions I was pointed towards during Devconnect, Project Mocha is now looking to finalise our pilot, start onboarding new farmers and expand our product into a coffee futures market, using the coffee trees as proof of production
Whenever the energy of the fair tipped toward overload, I found myself walking to the Regen Hub, co‑created by Regens Unite. In contrast to the intensity of different panel discussions and product/tech showcases, the Regen Hub felt like a breathing space, with maps of local ecosystems and walls where people pinned their projects, needs, and offers.
There, the conversation shifted from tokenomics to relationship design.
We talked about how to avoid extractive tokenization, how to honor local stories, how to co‑design projects with communities rather than for them. It was a gentle but firm reminder that regen work is not just about new financial rails; it is about repairing trust and ecosystems that industrial systems have exhausted.
Those discussions reached directly into my work. Instead of describing Project Mocha as putting coffee onchain, I have started describing it as protecting and rewarding living infrastructure, tree by tree, farmer by farmer. The Regen Hub helped me name that shift.
The DeSci, or Decentralized Science, Hub added yet another dimension.
It gathered researchers, DAO builders, and protocol teams who want to rebuild science as a public good using open data, transparent review, community‑driven funding, and reproducible results stored on open infrastructure.
As someone working in agriculture, this hit close to home. Farmer field data, soil tests, yield observations, and climate patterns are all forms of science, but they often end up trapped in reports or private databases. In the DeSci Hub, people were asking what it would look like if research data lived on infrastructure that communities could query, fund, and govern together.
That question landed deeply. It suggested a future where the experiments that matter to farmers, such as new varieties, regenerative practices, and yield comparisons, don’t just stay in data silos or NGO reports. Instead, they could become part of a shared knowledge commons that informs both local decisions and global coordination through Ethereum.
Parallel to my Scholars journey, I had been part of the Scroll DAO delegate training program, a structured path to becoming an informed and active delegate in the Scroll ecosystem. The program focused on more than voting power; it emphasized understanding protocol roadmaps, tradeoffs, and the responsibility that comes with representing others in decentralized governance.
Buenos Aires was the first time I met many of my fellow delegates in person. Seeing people I had only known from calls and governance forums gathered in one place made delegation feel less abstract; these were real humans tying their reputations to decisions about protocol upgrades, incentives, and long‑term strategy. One highlight was a gathering of the Scroll community and delegates captured in posts from Scroll and StableLab, where we discussed how governance can better reflect the needs of builders, users, and communities on the edges of the ecosystem.
Standing there as both a Devconnect Scholar and a Scroll delegate, I felt how tightly governance, public goods, and real‑world experiments like Mocha are woven together.
Devconnect also gave me the chance to share the Project Mocha journey with the Scroll community in real life. Talking through our pilot, how we are structuring our solution for scale, and our design questions with people who spend their days thinking about rollups, scaling, and security created a powerful bridge between L2 infrastructure and coffee fields.
With the Scroll community, the conversations often went straight into the mechanics: How could we use L2 infrastructure to make farmer‑facing interactions cheaper and more seamless? How might identity, attestations, or data availability interplay with RWA tokens backed by coffee trees? It felt like connecting the dots between different layers of the stack, from governance at Scroll to the last mile of value delivery for farmers in Kenya.
One of the joys of Devconnect was how porous everything felt. It wasn’t unusual to start the day at a highly technical talk about L2 infrastructure and end it at a small gathering where poets, visual artists, and developers debated collective ownership over creative work.
In the art and AI corners, people were exploring ideas like shared authorship, community‑governed creative direction, and royalty flows that route value back to the originators of culture. These experiments rhymed with what we are trying to do with coffee: take something rooted in place and community, and design digital structures that preserve meaning rather than strip it away.
Those edge conversations made me realize that Ethereum’s most interesting frontier isn’t just financial engineering; it is coordination design across every domain where trust and value collide.
The most surreal moment of the week started when I caught up with our friends and partners at GainForest, a project using blockchain and incentive mechanisms to support forest stewards and regenerative land use. They invited me to bring coffee to their presence at Devconnect, and, in true Buenos Aires fashion, a casual idea quickly evolved into an impromptu coffee stand.
We had no elaborate booth, just a simple coffee brew machine, bags of Kenyan coffee, and a story. In that corner of the venue, people weren’t just hearing about RWA and regen; they were literally drinking it. Attendees would take a sip, and we would tell them that this cup represents specific farmers, specific trees, specific risks and hopes, and explain how we are trying to reflect that onchain without erasing them from the picture.
The questions that followed were sharper than any panel Q and A.
What happens to the farmer’s income during a price crash? How do you avoid turning them into a yield source rather than a partner? Who governs the data that backs these tokens? Those conversations did more to stress‑test Project Mocha than any whiteboard session ever has.
One of my suitcases was packed almost entirely with beans and ground coffee.
Carrying that suitcase onto the flight felt heavy in more ways than one; it was weight from the dreams of the farmers and community who had trusted us, and from my own desire to prove that their work belongs in rooms like Devconnect.
When I arrived at Bromelia Hotel Boutique, I noticed the breakfast coffee on the first morning and thought that if I was going to haul Kenyan coffee across three continents, it should be shared properly. So I went to the hotel management with a simple pitch: let us serve this coffee to the Scholars every morning, and turn breakfast into a small portal into Kenyan coffee country. To their credit, Bromelia’s team said yes. For the rest of the week, Scholars from every continent started their day over cups of Kenyan coffee, asking about the farmers, the harvest, the logistics, and the onchain side of it all. Breakfast became its own daily micro‑hub, part RWA salon, part regen circle, part therapy session for builders.
Around those tables, the lines between RWA, Regen, and DeSci disappeared.
We talked about soil health and carbon, governance and credit, data and dignity. We shared stories of policy fights back home, of wins and bruises in the field, of the ghosts of past impact projects that had promised a lot and delivered little.
In that sense, the coffee was doing more than waking people up.
It was grounding abstract discussions in something tangible, flavorful, and human, a reminder that every chart and contract we draft ultimately lands in someone’s morning, someone’s field, someone’s family budget.
One thing that set Devconnect apart from many crypto events was how non‑commercial it felt. Yes, there were products, launches, and announcements, but they weren’t the center of gravity. The center was conversation: circles on the floor, impromptu meetups at side events, long walks between districts.
The official app and logistics were there to facilitate meeting and coordination, not to capture attention. As a result, the most meaningful interactions happened in liminal spaces: outside a hub after a session, in line for coffee, on a bench between talks, at a small park in Palermo where a late‑night conversation carried on far past the closing time of the venue.
For an ecosystem often caricatured as about money, Devconnect made it clear that the real asset is trust, earned slowly, in person, one conversation at a time
Looking back, the different Community Hubs weren’t isolated silos.They were different lenses on the same core question: How do we use Ethereum to coordinate care, for assets, for ecosystems, for knowledge, and for each other?
The RWA Hub focused on expressing the physical world onchain without flattening it.
The Regen Hub focused on healing the systems we depend on, starting with land and communities.The DeSci Hub focused on rebuilding science so evidence and experimentation become public goods.
In the middle of all that, a suitcase of Kenyan coffee, an improvised stand with GainForest, breakfasts at Bromelia with fellow Scholars, and in‑person time with the Scroll DAO delegate community became my own synthesis of those questions. Each cup and each conversation represented a tiny, tangible answer: that coordination, when done with care, can taste like something, smell like something, and send value back to where it began.
On paper, the Devconnect Scholars Program gave me flights, accommodation, tickets, and structured learning. In reality, it handed me three deeper gifts: a mirror that sharpened how I see my work, a community of practice I can build with for years, and a responsibility to turn this experience into something concrete for the people who trusted me to carry their story.
As I unpack back in Kenya, the task is clear. My next phase must reflect what Devconnect taught me: that Ethereum’s power lies not just in composable contracts, but in composable communities, RWA builders, regens, scientists, artists, organizers, and governance stewards, who are slowly, stubbornly insisting that technology meet the real world on its own terms.
If you are curious about that journey, or want to build at the intersection of farming, coordination, and crypto, you can always reach me on X ( Twitter) or on LinkedIn.
The World’s Fair is over, but the work of bringing the world’s fields onchain, with integrity, regeneration, and shared upside, has only just begun.