ETHDenver 2022 Recap
THE YEAR OF THE GWEI
In 2022, despite the ups and downs of recent Covid-19 events, ETHDenver was able to head back to its roots, hosting the largest and longest running Ethereum event thus far. With community events, educational speakers, innovation opportunities, and more; ETHDenver brought together the best and the brightest of the Ethereum community. This year’s conference focused on topics like sustainability, DAOs and DACs, decentralized identity, the metaverse, and universal basic income. Also taking center stage this year was NFT art pieces, featuring works from around the world. One favorite of Capture Alpha’s was featured artist Collageno, or Nicolas Kouri, whom we met in line and became fast friends with. Collageno is a visionary artist exploring the ontology of the being, vibration and dimensionality. He has been involved in crypto art since 2020 and hails from Lima, Peru.
Speaking of lines, as we entered the first day of the main event, we realized quickly that the turnout for this year’s ETHDenver was incredible, almost mind-blowing. Lines existed at every venue, however, those lines became some of our best conference moments. In those lines, we talked to promising artists, connected with talented developers eager to get their start in blockchain, fellow node operators and veterans of the space, entrepreneurs of all of kinds, and even a traditional investment banker, who had called in sick to work, just to see what all of the buzz of “DeFi” was about. The ETHDenver lines were the first indicator of how much diverse talent, experience, and incredible potential had shown up within a 5 city block area. The power of the world, sat roughly between Colfax Avenue and Tenth in Denver, Colorado.
Once inside the venues, the conference, and the people, lived up to the lines. Bounties were awarded for innovative projects with potential to make significant impacts, such as Bunker.finance, an NFT-backed lending protocol offering instant liquidity via pooling, and Arena-Verse, The Worlds First Smart Sport Franchise, which creates a metaverse for athletics that restructures the economics, empowering the players. Also available were leading innovator-speakers, including Ethereum’s own, Vitalik Buterin, dressed to impress as the ETHDenver Bufficorn itself. Other notable speakers included Andrew Yang, champion of human-centered economy, and Kimbal Musk, food entrepreneur and founder of the Big Green DAO. Between coffee runs, provided by some of Colorado’s finest baristas, we partook in the best of blockchain, networking, and community.
Capture Alpha was able to touch base with many of our favorite projects, including talking sustainability with @OG_Lemurman, a founding team member of the Sustainable Development DAO, an initiative striving to bring sustainability by creating a carbon-negative network, backed by HarmonyONE. Team members were also able to touch base with friends from Pocket Network, Opolis Commons, MyEtherWallet, and more. We also enjoyed speaking with projects, such as Gamerjibe, who provided the virtual ETHDenver experience in the metaverse last year, and was invited back to again provide this experience to attendees.
As the conference came to a close, the Capture Alpha team came together, motivated and inspired to continue to grow the blockchain community, provide problem-solving strategies, and help blockchain continue it’s march forward as one of the most innovative technologies of our time. Below you will find a comprehensive recap, as well as links, so that you can continue to be inspired by this landmark event.
2/11 – 2/17 #BUIDLWEEK
News and Announcements
- Harmony was a standout giving out $300 million on Web3, Grants & DAOs.
- Skale announced a $100 million ecosystem fund.
- The Graph announced a $205 million ecosystem fund.
- Near launched its new Web 3 startup platform Pagoda.
- Metamask Snaps will allow for non-EVM chain integration into the Metamask wallet.
- Polygon announced Finity a DApp UI/UX design toolkit.
Bounty Winners
- Space & the New Frontier
- ZKmaps Protecting user’s location with ZK proofs
- zkProof of Buffiness (zkPoB) Hi anon, join us at ZKPoB and prove that you are a Bufficorn without revealing anything about yourself other than your Buffiness.
- NFTs
- Bunker.finance NFT-backed lending protocol offering instant liquidity via pooling.
- Supercool A no-code NFT creation tool and tokenized social engagement engine.
- LOUDVΞRSΞ BLOUDVERSE is a 2-sided marketplace for funding hard-to-quantify public goods like music, poetry, and theater.
- Mimicry Protocol
- Mobile-First Focus
- Democracy Mini App Integration for AR Wallet Display and Play with Your NFTs in Augmented Reality and Interact with Web3 Through Mini Apps
- ExchangeIt! Mobile buy and sell marketplace enforced and incentivized by smart contracts and backed by a DAO
- Infrastructure & Scalability
- Deus Ex Securitas Using ML to Create a More Secure Crypto Future
- Death Star: Quash hacks & scams with a MEV Frontrunner Protect your wallet from hacks & scams by intercepting malicious transactions as soon as they are detected on chain.
- Cannon A Hardhat plug-in for declaring on-chain dependencies and enabling multi-chain development.
- Blocksnap Blocksnap is a simple, powerful tool that makes it easy to capture snapshots of on-chain data, and utilize that data in your web3 application.
- Impact
- Arena-Verse The Worlds First Smart Sport Franchise Create a metaverse for athletics that restructures the economics empowering the players.
- Fracture | Constitute Document Recovery via Trusted Social Consensus
- BattleZips – ZK Battleships BattleZips – CryptoZombies for All Things Zero Knowledge
- Proof of Meditation App to incentivize people to take more care of their health and emotional wellbeing through meditation.
- Gaming & Metaverse
- DeFi
- IdentDeFi A decentralized & open standard for on-chain compliance that utilizes zK proofs to retain user anonymity.
- SlowSwap AMM with a Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) that prevents MEV front-running and sandwiching issues
- DustSweeper Clean small token balances from your wallet and swap for ETH!
- Skew You (Automated Skew Farming) Defi Vault to automate skew farming with risk mitigation for perpetual pools.
- DAOs & Communities
- AcademyONE An education platform allowing projects to outsource and incentivize creation of high quality learning materials. A platform for educators to make money fulfilling bounties. A place to learn and earn governance rights in the process.
- Do or DAOn’t? $5k DoOrDon’t supports new DAO joiners to evaluate the transparency and decentralization of a DAO. With the help of our trust scores, they will only join DAOs that align with their values!
- Intuition Game-Theoretic Decentralized Identity System
- Background Network: Discord Chatbot & Help Center Protocol Decentralized Help Center as a service protocol
- DAI: Decentralised Autonomous Intelligence Governance, bounty & membership protocol to allow DAOs to actually be decentralized, autonomous and operationally efficient.
- ColoradoJam
- farm kudos Rewards and Incentives for Farmers and Food System Supporters
- Colorado Aware Moving Colorado To A Net Zero World One Notification At A Time
- 22222.World VIP Membership Through NFT Ownership with myColoradoID integration and Tableland records
2/17 – 2/20 Main Event
Notable Speakers
Vitalik Buterin
- Government & Blockchain
- Blockchain Voting
- Identity & Reputation
- Decentralized Governance
- Blockchain Privacy
- Ethereum Canary Network
- Airdrops
Andrew Yang
- Universal Basic Income
- Regulation
- Lobby3 DAO
Kimbal Musk
- Big Green DAO
- Decentralized Philanthropy
- Blockchain environmental impact.
Notable Events