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A message from the Executive Director:
A heartfelt appreciation to our participating developer community, speakers, internal staff, sponsors, enthusiasts, volunteers, event coordinators, students, and other contributors for uniting for another remarkable Devcon3!
To begin with, yes, recordings of all sessions from both the Main Hall and Breakout Hall will be available on the Ethereum Foundation YouTube channel as soon as our post-production crew finalizes them. This year, I hired a post-production team to come to the venue with us so they could commence work onsite as soon as the raw footage was ready. Given we had two halls instead of one, the volume of presentations to process was nearly double, so the team is diligently working to edit, render and upload four days of devcon sessions to the internet (compared to three days from last year).
Look out for a tweet (@ethereumproject) in the next 7-10 days!
Furthermore, as committed, we invested the necessary time and resources to collaborate with vendors who facilitated free live streaming of the main stage presentations, ensuring that individuals unable to attend the venue could watch the Main Hall sessions in real time. According to feedback, the live streaming was successful for those who had a good internet connection.
Additionally, the photographs captured by the official Devcon3 photographers are now ready! They are currently being compiled into albums to be shared online early next week.
In my role as Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, part of my responsibilities includes overseeing Devcon, and I take great pleasure in planning and executing our annual developers conference, particularly enjoying the opportunity to act as an emcee for the event, which allows me to connect more with our developer community at least once a year.
Meeting the lofty expectations our attending community held for Devcon3 was a significant challenge, which is why planning commenced 10-11 months prior. When we eventually launched the event, everyone felt the time, effort, and dedication invested in organizing such an occasion was worthwhile.
Personally, I returned to Cancun several times to expand the event capacity fourfold in response to high demand and to accommodate as many overflow participants as possible. Thankfully, we managed to safely and effectively increase capacity, making Cancun the most favored location we’ve had thus far. Ultimately, after multiple capacity expansions for Devcon, we safely accommodated nearly 2000 attendees.
This was achieved through substantial effort from all our event teams to host an event with 2.5 times as many attendees as the previous year while expanding the physical space from a single ballroom to utilizing a conference center encompassing three floors, occupying over 78,000 square feet of rooms, open areas, auditoriums, and halls.
For the first time, Devcon featured: a second presentation hall, allowing for 40% more sessions; a press room equipped with a live feed of the main stage presentations; multiple meeting rooms and open networking areas; larger customized sponsor “booths”; presenter workstations; devcon and internal team workspaces; and two scheduled breakout sessions (one focusing on zk-SNARKs research with Eli Ben Sassoon as the special guest speaker, and a breakout on P2P technologies organized by our Swarm team).
Initially, locations in US cities were contemplated, but many emails to the Foundation expressed that we should not conduct Devcon in the US due to difficulties in obtaining visas. The prevailing unwelcoming immigration policies and significant delays travelers have faced, even just in transiting through or laying over in the US, were not conducive either. We hope the situation improves moving forward.
Nonetheless, I am pleased to report that not only was our Devcon3 venue free from security incidents, but many attendees shared their photos and stories of meetups, excursions, and enjoyment of the world-class beaches, visits to Mayan ruins, and days spent in the sun and warm blue waters of the Caribbean beyond the venue. The Cancun hotel zone was ideal for providing necessary services in the area, including accommodations, capacity, internet access, and amenities to host a conference like Devcon. As Devcon is anticipated to grow in size, venues will likely remain in developed and/or more urban regions.
Even though I have been in the crypto sphere since 2010, it wasn’t until I managed Devcon1 that I recognized what made the Ethereum community so distinctive and essential to the broader blockchain ecosystem. It became apparent that the Foundation’s R&D-centered program would best support developers with a specialized R&D-focused agenda to allow developers to convene in real-time, face-to-face at least once every year.
The Devcon experience inherently fosters a kind of unity despite a landscape that generally communicates virtually/remotely and asynchronously.
In any event, the energy and enthusiasm present at Devcon can only be fully grasped by those physically attending. For individuals unable to be there, this year we ensured dedicated bandwidth for live streaming. As a side note, we were advised last year’s venue that dependable live streaming was unavailable in China regardless of cost, but this is part of hosting events in certain countries, which we still deemed well worth it, particularly as the previous year was significant for supporting the interest, growth, and momentum emerging from the expanding Chinese community.
Numerous events are now occurring in the Ethereum, crypto, and blockchain sectors, with an increasing number tailored to various industries and special interest groups such as events for enterprise, insurance, banking, fintech, financial services, investors/VCs, the energy sector, government, education, and associated hackathons, pitch-offs, etc. As Ethereum approaches wider adoption, it is increasingly vital for the Foundation’s developers conference (Devcon) to remain focused on core platform, foundational layer development, and research.
The endeavors of our developers and others working at the platform development and research level are crucial in shaping the work executed by application developers, business personnel, executives who support and innovate in emerging technologies, and inventors, technology systems designers, and other forward-thinking individuals integrating or utilizing the Ethereum platform in their enterprises and organizations. Our R&D projects have steadily increased from about six development areas two years ago, to around
“`twenty initiatives and sub-projects today. Refer to the periodic roundup summaries on the Ethereum blog for details.
It’s common knowledge that the need for Ethereum developers significantly surpasses the available talent. Consequently, we intentionally allocated a portion of passes this year for students, professors, researchers, and university personnel, who generally may lack the means or time to conveniently attend events like Devcon, yet play a crucial role in sustaining a robust pipeline for developers while contributing to scholarly research, thought, and inquiry, all of which benefits the community and ecosystem as a whole. I’m delighted to share that Devcon3 showcased the largest and most diverse international representation of students and university attendees to date.
Undoubtedly, there is always potential for enhancement, and the finest event could still become even better. For next year, we are exploring the adoption of RFID passes employed by events such as Comicon to refine registration processes, and we will likely expand the capacity of the second hall and possibly introduce additional “tracks”. The venue is influenced by various logistical elements, and while we appreciate suggestions as we did last year, our community is global, making it challenging for any single location to stand out prominently.
Devcon has made significant strides over the past three years. Devcon0 was an internal developer meetup in Berlin with around fifty attendees. Devcon1 took place in a ballroom in London with a capacity of 300, although nearly 400 participated. Devcon2 occurred in an elegant ballroom at a hotel in Shanghai that accommodated 700, reaching close to 800 attendees. This year, we gathered a remarkable group of 2000 participants!
To minimize the carbon footprint of such a substantial event and to aid the local economy, we procured everything locally, from printing to manufacturing and production of event materials, and prioritized local individuals for volunteer roles. Most, if not all, of the Mexican residents and Spanish-speaking volunteers from neighboring countries might not have been able to attend if they were required to pay for a US or European-priced event. The average monthly salary in the Yucatan Peninsula approximates the cost of a heavily discounted student pass.
Devcon3 volunteers were students, community developers and organizers, researchers, or Ethereum aficionados who underwent a review, approval, and interview process to join the event staff. It is through their support, the collaboration of our attending community, and our internal teams that we managed to create yet another successful outcome.
Despite the challenges, distinct expressions, and dramatic nature of the crypto universe, Devcon, as a non-profit developers conference, has been a distinctive occasion that enhances the best our community and organization have to offer.
Acknowledgments:
Heartfelt thanks to all the groups and individuals who contributed to this year’s planning and execution, without any particular order: PR and external relations, graphic design and art direction; web development, A/V, photography, and post-production team members; Foundation directors, legal team, executive and administrative assistants; program and agenda team members; local Mexican and Spanish-speaking volunteers who assisted with translations, communications with Mexican vendors, and served as volunteers working with the press, emceeing, aiding with internal security, and managing t-shirt and registration; and our Mexican venue and vendor team leaders and primary contacts.
Many thanks to all our team leaders, researchers, and developers for showcasing their projects and sharing their work, insights, and time at Devcon3, as well as helping coordinate their teams for panels and group presentations. A special thanks goes out to all agenda presenters who offered valuable information, insights, explanations, and clarity regarding their Ethereum research, development initiatives, projects, and endeavors. A special mention to Toya, who dedicated the most time assisting me with the planning and implementation of Devcon3.
I would also like to express gratitude to all the top-level sponsors of Devcon3 who engaged in a rather intricate process to participate in and support the event, along with our community sponsors. For a second consecutive year, our initiative to involve small enterprises and startups proved so popular that it was oversubscribed several months prior to the event. Should we continue to offer sponsorships next year, we’ll increase the number of slots for community sponsors to facilitate more startups and emerging companies with limited financial resources to take part.
Lastly and crucially, it’s the attending community interested in Ethereum development and research who not only make up the majority of participants at Devcon but also embody the positive, constructive, and high energy that Devcon fosters. Our event significantly serves this community of individuals, which has been expanding, evolving, and gaining momentum through the years (all three of them)!
“With love from Cancun”
The ED (Executive Doge)
Ming Chan
