I spent about a week in Buenos Aires recently for Ethereum Devconnect. Devcon and Devconnect are a great opportunity each year to catch up on the latest in the Ethereum ecosystem, and the broader crypto ecosystem.

Here are some broad themes that I witnessed.

Thing #1: Privacy Is Having Its Moment 🔒

Privacy isn’t new and private blockchain and cryptocurrency projects aren’t new. Zcash and Monero have both been around for about a decade. But it’s been a very bumpy road for privacy projects over the years, for a host of reasons. Most people don’t value privacy very highly, so this narrative didn’t resonate strongly on its own. There was a chilling effect across the ecosystem in the wake of the Tornado Cash sanctions in 2022, when a number of privacy-focused projects pivoted or shut down. Several major privacy wallets, such as Samourai and Wasabi, shut down or left the US market. Several privacy coins and tokens were also delisted from major exchanges.

In short, privacy projects have gotten very little love or attention over the past few years from any but the most hardcore cypherpunks. I helped organize some privacy events two or three years ago and it was quite a hard sell at the time. Since then, however, the privacy cause has been revitalized.

It has especially taken off recently. For a variety of reasons, including the recent integration of Zcash into NEAR Intents, leading to a lot of on chain flow into and out of Zcash, the price and market cap of Zcash have been on a tear lately. The project and ecosystem are getting a lot of much-needed attention and capital. Private mobile wallets have always been challenging, but Zcash now has a viable mobile wallet called Zashi. It includes a seamless swap experience powered by NEAR Intents, which is also helping.

Other reasons include changes in the regulatory landscape, and an emphasis on privacy by Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation. Coin Center and a few others contested the Tornado Cash ruling, and won. The sanctions were successfully challenged and rolled back, and the court affirmed that Americans have the right to use strong privacy tools in their day to day life, to protect financial and transactional privacy. Ethereum has a new privacy wallet, Kohaku, recently announced, which integrates strong privacy tools such as Railgun, privacy pools and, yes, Tornado Cash. OG privacy projects like Aztec, and newer ones like Aleo, are also getting more attention, and are, finally, very close to shipping workable, usable private smart contracts and stable coins (Aleo recently announced a private stable coin called USDx.)

There were tons of privacy-focused events at Devconnect this year, which was refreshing. It was especially nice to see that they were less focused on tech, e.g., cryptography, and more on privacy applications. I attended an event in Buenos Aires called the Cypherpunk Congress, which had an absolutely stacked line up of powerful speakers talking about privacy and why it matters. The venue was completely packed. I ran into a lot of old friends, and the energy and excitement around privacy were palpable. Cypherpunk values were on display everywhere. It was very exciting to experience. I also heard lots of random conversations about privacy over the following days, with many asking projects, what’s your privacy strategy?

The overall mood seems to be shifting towards one that’s more pro-privacy. There’s a widescale recognition that everyday users, and institutional/corporate users in particular, are simply not okay with all of their transaction data being open to the public for all time (“Twitter for your bank account”). Now that people are beginning to use stable coins for all sorts of use cases, they’re beginning to complain about privacy, too, which has lit a fire.

As someone who deeply values privacy, and believes that it’s a fundamental human right, it’s incredibly exciting and rewarding to see that privacy is having its moment at last. May it continue.

Thing #2: Building, Not Shilling 🛠️

I had almost forgotten what a shill-free event could be like. I think I’ve spent too much time in Asia, and too much time at events like Token2049. That’s primarily a bizdev event, and I can’t stand bizdev events. They tend to consist of a bunch of bizdev types doing their utmost to shill their project to as many people as they can in the limited time they have. It seems as if the only KPI that matters is how many people you can connect with on Telegram and LinkedIn, and how many rows you can add to the CRM. Of course I always do connect with a few builders and have some substantive conversations at those events, but the majority of the conversations tend to be a waste of time: typically, someone trying to shill me on something I’m not at all interested in.

Devconnect was different. I met almost exclusively builders and had tons of substantive conversations, one after another. I can only recall meeting one VC, which was refreshing. (No offense to VCs, but I typically vibe better with fellow builders.) I had conversations about infrastructure, wallets, intents and interop, and a bunch of other technical topics. And privacy: lots of conversations about privacy. But almost none about DeFi or finance.

It’s fascinating how the culture of Devcon and Devconnect has stayed this way for so many years. It’s not that investors, marketers, and bizdev types aren’t welcome or aren’t allowed to attend. I think it’s that they largely self-select not to. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that bizdev events tend to be held in easily accessible places like New York, Dubai, and Singapore, whereas Devcon tends to be held in out of the way places like Bogota, Istanbul, or Buenos Aires. Maybe it’s the content, which skews highly technical.

So many of the people and projects that make the most noise, and get most of the attention and stage time, in general and at large crypto events tend to be those same marketing types: big budgets, loud voices, but in many cases very little to speak of technically. As a builder, that can be frustrating. This is an aspect of Ethereum culture that I’ve always appreciated: a relentless focus on builders, and on tech. It’s good to see that this value persists to this day, and is very much on display at events like Devconnect.

The flipside is that Ethereum projects are too focused on tech, especially infrastructure, at the expense of finding a workable business model. In fact, it would probably do Ethereum some good to have a few more bizdev types in the crowd. But builders and bizdev types are like oil and water: they do not mix. And if there are lots of investors and bizdev types at an event, builders will tend to steer clear. It’s important for builders to have places like Devcon that are “safe spaces” for builders to come and be awkward and autistic around one another.

Thing #3: LatAm is Hungry for Change 🌎

I’ve noticed this theme several times over the past few years. The friend who first held my hand and introduced me to Bitcoin eight years ago is from Argentina. I first visited Argentina in 2018, and at the time I began to understand why Latin Americans in general, and Argentinians in particular, understood Bitcoin before pretty much anyone else. I saw very similar things on subsequent visits to other Latin American countries.

Basically, things are broken there in some big ways. This is doubly true of anything financial or economic, and triply true of Argentina. Back home it’s easy to write off new tech, especially financial tech like crypto, because the financial system there works pretty well. Banks aren’t perfect, they’re obnoxious and annoying, but mostly they work pretty well for most people. The USD, even though it’s lost a lot of purchasing power, is still a relatively stable currency by global standards.

By contrast, the Argentine economy has collapsed multiple times. Argentina is famous for having defaulted on its debt more times than any other country on earth. Anyone my age or older remembers El Corralito, a devaluation event in 2001 during which the population was prevented from accessing their own money, bank deposits were forcibly converted from dollars to pesos, Argentina abandoned its dollar peg, and the country defaulted (again) on its sovereign debt.

It’s far from the only time this happened, even in Argentina. Argentina (a country whose name means “land of silver” and, by extension, “money”, by the way) is a particularly extreme example, but similar themes exist across Latin America and, indeed, around the world: bad governance and terrible economic policy doing real harm to the lives and livelihood of millions of ordinary people. Just over 100 years ago, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries on earth, a fact that’s still visible walking around town in Buenos Aires. What happened after that cursed Argentina for generations.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that, as a result of this mad dysfunction, Argentines are hungry for change. They cottoned on to the promise of Bitcoin before just about anyone else. They also understood Ethereum very early on. Some of the most active early Ethereum builders were, and still are, based here. They now have a new president who shares their appetite for change, some of it painful and unpopular, and they’re on a better track. We’ll see how long it lasts.

The net result is a society where people really are open to new ideas, because it’s so painfully obvious that the current ideas aren’t working. This manifests in big and small ways: changes of government and radical, rapid policy about faces, but also novel financial infrastructure.

Argentina has as many as four distinct US dollar markets, although they’re much closer to one another than they used to be. Today, there’s one official exchange rate, but in practice you pay substantially more when you use a credit card. Yes, cash is still an option, but there’s also a popular digital payment network called Mercado Pago that also offers better rates. The best part is that there are crypto-based apps such as Peanut that integrate with it, which means I was able to pay for nearly everything around town using USDC. (And, when that failed, I used my Metamask card to pay with USDC staked in Aave, which is even better.)

Change tends to come slowly back home; it comes faster in places like Argentina. I find this refreshing. It’s a good place to build, because you’ll find a much more receptive audience here than you will in most places. Argentina has attracted amazing builders, and punched far above its weight, for a long time, and I’m sure it will continue to do so for this reason.