Author: Anthurine Source: X, @Anthurine

1. Changes in scale and atmosphere

ETHDenver before the epidemic was just a small gathering, but after the epidemic was suspended for three years, it has become the most attended meeting in the Ethereum ecosystem except Devcon. Especially the first session after the epidemic was impressive - everyone arrived early, there were many activities around the week before the meeting, and almost all activities required early registration and approval before entry. This kind of scenario is very rare in industry conferences, after all, most events hope that the more people the better. I remember that there were more than 1,000 people at the scene at the same time, and the scene was very spectacular. The number of people has decreased in 2024, but high-quality events can still attract hundreds of people to be present at the same time. The only thing that needs to queue up is Berachain's event. This year, the number of activities around the country has decreased significantly. In addition to social activities at night, there are few people attending the activities during the day, and activities that can exceed 100 people are considered to be the best.

2. Changes in topic popularity

2023 is the year of ZK. The scope of ZK can chat with is already very wide, so the topics belonging to ZK are still wide and diverse. In addition, topics such as Chain, DeFi, GameFi, NFT have also attracted much attention. In 2024, ZK's popularity has declined, and the focus has turned to areas such as Restaking, Data Availability, Layer2, AI and Account Abstract. And this year, there seems to be no other new topics except AI, especially AI Agent. Unlike other conferences, ETHDenver has a lower proportion of social activities and is more of a hardcore technical lecture. However, due to the lack of attractiveness of the theme this year, not only were there few people present, but there were only a few people willing to listen carefully. There were only a few people in the audience at many event sites. The meme content of this session is very low, even lower than last year, whether it is from special events or panels. I personally don’t have to do with meme, but if there is only meme in the industry and nothing else, it will definitely not last long.

3. The presence of VCs has weakened

In previous years, many VCs have held peripheral events, but this year the presence of VCs has decreased significantly. Although representatives are still sent to the conference, it is rare to see VCs who sponsor and host events as well as in the past two years.

4. Changes in booths

The number of booths this year is not inferior to previous years, mainly because the sponsorship plan was determined as early as Q2-Q3 last year. However, most booths are infrastructure-related projects, pure DAppThere are few projects, and the popular Web3 games in previous years are almost gone. However, for the first time in many booths this year, robots and robot dogs have appeared on the market. The most interesting booth design I think is the look of the Polygon as a storage room. The cutest one is ZircuitL2's kitten doll.

5. The peripheral attractiveness has always been the most creative and concise activity I think, no one. It is also the only activity I would be willing to take a lot of surrounding areas back. This year, the surprises around the surrounding area have decreased a lot, especially hats. I couldn't help but shoot a hat competition in the past two years, so this year we specially prepared hats for the surrounding area, but the competition was too weak, and 75% were distributed on the first morning. 6. The decline in the proportion of developers

In previous years, the most impressive thing about ETHDenver was that there were many developers. Among the people who received the booth, they rarely encountered novices who knew nothing about blockchain and Ethereum. More than 30% were developers (it may also be that because our booth is related to infrastructure, we have contacted more programmers). Everyone will ask a lot of high-quality technical questions. This year, half of the developers received were received, and more were BDs and marketers of other projects (such as node service providers, audit companies, traffic platforms, etc.).

7. Mistakes in the arrangement of speech venues

This year's speech stage moved from the booth area to another building (in the same area as the hackathon), and this arrangement was very bad. The abortion is mainly concentrated in the booth area. In previous years, everyone could switch freely between visiting exhibitions and listening to lectures. When they are tired of visiting, they would listen to the speeches they are interested in. This year, the speech venue is difficult to find and the distance is long, resulting in the average audience of each speech being only single digits, and the sponsorship effect is greatly reduced.

8. Denver's practical tips

Although the trough is confusing, it is gratifying that there are still many builders willing to stay in this industry. Many of the projects participating in the exhibition are also long-termists. After all, this industry needs some long-term spiritual people. Finally, I would like to give some practical tips: In Denver, it is recommended to use Lyft instead of Uber to take a taxi. The same route, under normal circumstances, the uber will soar to $50 during peak hours, while the Lyft is around $20, although the price has also increased, it is not that outrageous. In addition, Denver's Chinese food is expensive and not tasty, but Thai food is surprisingly good. Especially recommended Aloy Modern Thai, which is worth a try.