Devcon is Ethereum's most ambitious conference, bringing together developers, researchers, and blockchain industry professionals to share ideas and build the future of the chain. Thanks to Seed's sponsorship and a year of preparation, I was able to attend this life-changing event.

Although Devcon was scheduled for mid-November, I arrived a couple of weeks earlier in Thailand. After long hours of travel, I reached my destination: Chiang Mai, Thailand. A vibrant city with warm weather and approximately one hundred thousand inhabitants. My first stop was Punspace, where The Mu was taking place, a coworking space where I met friends I had made in MuBuenos. Whenever I arrive at Mu, I feel very comfortable sharing space with people passionate about blockchain technology, working in areas such as smart contract development, security, front-end, and many other disciplines.

The goal of The Mu is to create a permissionless and inclusive popup city that engages locals and foster crypto projects for societal benefit.

Chiang Mai was also home to other pop-up cities like MegaZu, Lanna, and Invisible Garden, each offering slightly different experiences but sharing similar goals: connecting and building within this ecosystem.

The Mu has ambitious plans for 2025, including more pop-up cities and participation in the Japan Expo 2025 in Osaka from April 13 to October 13, expecting 28 million visitors and 161 participating countries.

After The Mu, I attended the Lanna Hackathon. While many of my friends were working on their own projects and I didn’t participate directly, I had the chance to discover fascinating initiatives like FindSpaceTime (an app for locating friends and sharing travel plans), Syntonikka (an incredible artist), and Collab.Land.

The hackathon also featured high-level talks on diverse topics, available at StreamETH.

As The Mu concluded, MegaZu hosted a Demo Day, showcasing a month's work on projects like Maitri and Wysdom, which focus on collaborative notebooks for web3 projects. Tools like Celo Composer, a boilerplate for deploying dApps on Celo, and more daring initiatives like KissOrSlap also stood out. With so many projects, it was hard to keep track of them all.

Before leaving Chiang Mai, I had time to practice Muay Thai and enjoy local cuisine. Then I departed for Bangkok to attend the DeFi Security Summit (DSS). There, I began with the first Damn Vulnerable DeFi workshop by Tincho Abatte, a member of the red guild and WebTres, where the most prominent web3 developers in LATAM are located. The talks are available on the DSS channel, such as DeFi Security 101.

A talk by Pablo Sabatella highlighted how most recent fund losses were due to hacking people using web2 techniques like social engineering, 0-day exploits, DNS hijacking, SIM swaps, malware, and private key leakage, among others.

There were many talks that evolved around formal verification. The full agenda is available at https://defisecuritysummit.org/

After three days of DSS, I attended Governance Day, where I met other scholarship recipients, and we collaborated to ensure the event's success. I interacted with academics, and there was a wide variety of talks, including governance tools, some theory, and discussions about the role of delegates. Representatives from Scroll and Morpho, who are initiating their web3 governance, were present.

The very next day, I went to Datapalooza, my first data event related to The Graph. I enjoyed talks about On-Chain Privacy by Lisa from Aztec and "Making Sense of Data in an Interoperable World," among others. Most talks can be found on The Graph's YouTube channel.

The following Monday, I attended DuneCon, an event that excited me greatly. Ten new chains on Dune were announced, the launch of Echo as a real-time multichain platform, and the acquisition of smlXL, an integration that promises to be fascinating.

The conference was excellent, but I gained the best insights in the wizards' space. There, I met analysts like Kofi, who explained how to filter spam, bots, and Sybils in data. We also explored the oneinch.swaps table, a central tool for analyzing the 1inch protocol, and I discovered that all Polkadot data is now available on Dune.

Then I attended 'Unlocking Real Insights, Metrics That Matter' by Tim Conard of Slice Analytic, where he showed the importance of generating metrics with more context. Instead of just 'active addresses' over time, he suggested showing address segmentation by fees, activity, value, and address quality score, ideally based on cross-chain activity, evaluated through metrics like transaction frequency and volume.

There was also a great presentation about the evolution of Uniswap and how v4 will work and save data on-chain.

Devcon Experience

If the DeFi Security Summit seemed massive, Devcon far surpassed it. It occupied three floors of the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center. I arrived at noon and dedicated myself to exploring the venue, reuniting with friends and people I had met in previous days.

The merch hunt was tremendous, but I stuck with this beautiful magazine, which is written in Chinese, it has amazing visualizations. I'm fascinated by mushrooms and believe we have to learn more about them.

In the venue there were many artistic interventions which was cool.

There were also many stands with useful resources besides merchandise, like the following graph about resource allocation through history.

Several Latin American representatives were present in the talks, such as Eth Kipu and Crecimiento. A group of the Global Majority was formed, gathering thinkers from the 'global south' with different backgrounds.

I tried prediction markets for the first time in Chiang Mai, using Seer, betting on the results of the US presidential election. It was fun and sparked an interest in this fascinating subject. The talk I enjoyed most was by Robin Hanson about Designing Conditional Markets and Futarchy. Conditional markets allow predicting outcomes from potential decisions, enabling what is called futarchy governance.

There was another fascinating talk about a new style of data workflow that has emerged, using entirely open-source software and local-first processing. This new ecosystem of tools allows anyone to cheaply, easily, and robustly collect and analyze any EVM dataset from the comfort of their own laptop.

Overall, the experience was excellent. I felt privileged to attend such an event. If you've read this far, you might think the Devcon part of the article is brief, and you'd be right. What happens at Devcon is highly social, and much of the experience occurs through chance encounters, during lunch, at a workshop, or at another event.

As the event was about to end, I realized that many fascinating people I spoke with, I only did so once and for brief periods. With some, I didn't exchange any social networks to stay in touch, and with others, I didn't seem to have much to discuss, and some didn't even return my messages—they'll be strangers again. With others, I was able to say goodbye, and it was crazy to think that each of them would soon be jumping to different parts of the globe, a "see you soon."

I often found myself with little energy to start new conversations, as many are superficial—"What's your name, and what do you do?"—and responding by repeating what I had already said to other people at least a couple of times. Still, it's okay for everyone to have their own experience, but if I were to give advice if the experience were to be repeated, it would be to value each conversation as if it were the last and to dare to speak to anyone who piques your curiosity.

I thank each person I met and my friends who made this trip fun and pleasant. It's not trivial to be on the other side of the world, constantly receiving new stimuli.

Being a scholarship recipient was a great boost to attend Devcon and reaffirm my chosen path. Crypto is not easy; I'm far from having high salaries or having my life solved by betting on the right memecoins. On the contrary, we are constantly intellectually challenged and must continue working to add value to the ecosystem.

Finally, the words that resonate in my mind about Ethereum are 'credible neutrality'—the commitment of a system to operate without favoring any participant, agenda, or outcome.

"We believe that all humans should have the right to use strong cryptography, the right to transact freely, and the right to freedom of speech." - Harry Halpin