This year, ETHDenver moved to a larger venue. Despite the crypto market’s downturn, the attendance for the conference hit an all-time high. My coworker and I participated in their hackathon last year and this year he offered to volunteer as a mentor.

We arrived towards the end of its first day and proceeded downstairs into the nearly empty #BUIDL Floor. (The misspelling is intentional.) A small sign was propped up under the Wi-Fi password that read: THE INTERNET IS TERRIBLE… NOT MUCH WE CAN DO. Presumably most of the hackathon participants had cleared out, unable to work without a reliable internet connection. My coworker took a seat, determined to fulfill his mentorship duty despite the lack of in-person turn out.

Feeling a bit hungry, I went foraging for snacks in the adjoining #BUIDL Bodega. Hi-Chews, Red Vines, a bag of apples, and a few other snacks were scattered under a sign that read: Free for now. 2-3 items maximum.

This “bodega” also included a Web3 Vending Machine full of Liquid Death (expensive seltzer in craft beer cans) and Yerba Mate. The touch screen indicated these drinks could be purchased for either $3.99 or $0.00. Naturally, I tapped the free option, only to be informed that there was actually a minimum charge of $0.50. I was presented with a QR code to complete the transaction using Google Pay.

I went upstairs to track down the booth for Optimism, a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. They were giving away some awesome neon red socks. Unfortunately, their booth had a small handwritten sign posted that they were gone for the day.

But I only realized this after chatting with the people at the neighboring booth, confused by their neon red tablecloth. They were building a meta-aggregator. Aggregators automatically route orders to buy and sell tokens through exchanges that provide the best price for the user. A meta-aggregator aggregates the aggregators.

Still hungry, I purchased a hot dog for $7.95 using my credit card and ate it while watching a parody of a pop song performed on the main stage. The lyrics were replaced with rhymes about how Layer 2 scaling solutions reduce gas fees. “Saving on, saving on, saving on gas!”

After playing Dance Dance Revolution in the very well-curated arcade, I escalated my support request at a booth (related to IPFS, a decentralized file storage protocol) and went outside to smoke a joint in the parking lot.

Ready to leave, I found my coworker in a sea of empty seats, surrounded by a small group eagerly hanging on his words as he explained some of the nuances involved with creating derivatives using smart contracts.

While I heard many lament long lines and a lack of diversity at the conference, the developers that stuck around this late were mostly focused on whether the Wi-Fi had recovered so they could get back to work.

Pushing the bounds of what’s possible with applied cryptography is truly exciting. Though if you’re asked to explain why it’s so exciting at a cocktail party, it generally doesn’t go over well.

Crypto is in an awkward adolescent phase.

So far, the main use case is financial infrastructure but the vast majority of people don’t understand how existing financial infrastructure works. Capitalism—and the financial industry that keeps it running—isn’t pretty. Technology that democratizes finance isn’t going to be particularly pretty either. Many who are “in it for the tech” aren’t comfortable with this.

It also just doesn’t work that well yet. To buy that hot dog, for example, I’d need to use Layer 2 blockchains to avoid high gas costs when processing the transaction. Otherwise, the system is effectively broken if the cost to send money is more than the money I’m trying to send.

Even still, there are many “L2s” so users need to know which chain they are transferring to and from. Decentralized solutions for cross-chain transfers and systems for abstracting balances across chains exist, but are still fairly primitive.

Also, on-chain transactions reveal the sender and recipients’ account balances and previous transactions to one another. There are privacy solutions that rely on innovations in cryptography to avoid this, but they’re heavily stigmatized and strangely seen as only useful for criminals.

This technology will inevitably mature thanks to contributions from universities, corporations, venture-backed start-ups, and anonymous teenagers using NFT profile pictures on Discord servers. And the use cases extend well beyond purchasing hot dogs into the arcane, rent-seeking aspects of the heavily centralized, global financial system we’re all dependent on.

Horrible consumer products and services from banks and unenforceable pre-internet rules will fade into irrelevance as freely available, open source options begin to really compete. The early adopters of this technology are mainly trading and investment firms. (They’re the ”power users”, in start-up parlance.) But even just thinking of the typical international traveller, why would they use a traditional foreign currency exchange if a meta-aggregator could consistently provide a better rate?

Especially compared to the polished, big budget crypto conferences that were put on a year ago at the height of the bull market, ETHDenver’s grit has stayed consistent. That’s part of its charm. Though of course the internet has become more reliable and efficient over the last few decades, there’s a persistent nostalgia for early internet culture.

ETHDenver has kept a similar magic about it, staying numb to changes in popularity and prices. No one can say for sure whether the “support public goods” ethos that feels embedded in its culture will ultimately make it into the technology that becomes commonplace, but it’s certainly not going away.

As the scammers on Twitter trying to pump the price of their shitcoins would say, we’re still early.