John Paller discusses ETHDenver 2022 conference plans

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have john pauler the founder of denver john welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time thanks for having me appreciate it i'm excited so much going on in the ethereum ecosystem so many people want to get together and speak

0:22about these things and i know that f denver is the place to do so uh and it's coming up in the near future here and i would love for you to just kick us off by just telling us about f denver and what makes it so special so the main difference between um whether you say at denver or eat denver by the way it's fine it's potato potato around around here but

0:44you'll hear me say eat denver a lot so whichever works for you denver was was um spawned out of the meetup scene and the original reason for it was we had in the summer of 17 you know something like 300 people showing up to our meetups with a wait list in addition so there's like a ton of interest in dapps and this this new technology blockchains

1:13and specifically ethereum was peaking the interest of a lot of people here in the community and after a while though you know myself personally i was sort of bored with the the meetup format of backslaps beer and you know takitaki not a lot of walkie wacky so yeah um i i approached the meetup organizers who i knew who i know i knew at the time for a

1:37while and i was like hey you know we should we should do like a hackathon like to you know actually build some things and they're like oh you know we already tried that once and you know nobody came and all this and like what do you mean nobody came i was like there's like a gazillion people here i'm not just talking about like local there's always been a lot of talk about

1:59colorado be you know being showcased as this destination of choice for emerging technology capital investments you know startup scene and i don't know i mean it's never really coming to its own so i just said look like what if we're gonna do it why not you know why not be us and like why not you know let's create something cool so the goal in 2017 was to have our first

2:26installation in february 2018 which we did and we wanted to have three 400 people we thought would be a cool number mostly because east waterloo which was the first one ever to be done had 400 people so we're like 401 people just to be the biggest right it was sort of a silly metric at the time but like it you know but whatever it was it was um it was interesting so

2:51anyway 1500 people later we had hosted the biggest ethereum hackathon ever and you know some of it was our timing was right some of it was just market-based some of it was geocentric like colorado is really easy to get to people like it here so you know visiting colorado isn't something that we have to twist a lot of arms on um and then the international community

3:14really grabbed hold so in four installations we've had you know about 40 000 people from 104 countries attend either in person or virtually even during the pandemic we had 31 000 people from like 90 countries participate so it was it's it's really kind of come into its own that the name eat denver

3:41doesn't really describe what it is in comparison to most other events or conferences if you will um we don't prefer the conference moniker because we don't think it really gives justice to what it is that we do because the build-a-thon um biddle-a-thon the meme biddle is that was actually started at the denver in 2018 the biddle-a-thon is the main event

4:08so most other conferences who host a hackathon it's sort of afterthought it's like after the conference or whatever ours is the main event it's the reason for getting together so we're the only ones in the world of our size that do that so there are usually just hackathon events and then usually just conference events but you don't see much hybrids so

4:31we also layer in things like maker spaces and art galleries we were the first folks to do crypto art gallery in 2018 we were the first people doing nfts we were the first people doing scavenger hunts for nfts we were the first people doing uh crypto enabled food truck purchases we were the first people doing a bunch of stuff like so we're known for doing

4:50like a lot of dog fooding and you know tech exam you know like tech experiences for attendees so it's very i would say experiential which is why we call it a community innovation festival and not just a build-a-thon and not just a conference right it's it's something completely different there's a reason why we've got almost 12 000 people that have applied

5:16to come and that's because the experience of eat thunder is unlike anything else you can find and there's a huge pen-up demand for getting together in person based on um just the pandemic right a lot of people have been holed up in their places for two years now and the last time they got together was east denver 2020 right so they're like man i gotta get back to this so

5:42i've never seen anything quite as as is um accentuated as the fomo that we're seeing right now i've never seen it um but it's it seems to be very good fomo not just you know like hey i don't want to miss out on this but like hey i really want to come build because that's really what we encourage you know the the a little uh you know pro tip is if you're trying to get in to eat denver

6:09come hack come back not everybody wants to hack but the priority is on on builders so um anyway yeah hopefully that gives you a good good idea definitely john yeah thank you for all the backstory and it's amazing to hear even back in 2018 you know expecting just to be a little bit larger and it's exploded and now you know practically five years later uh it's

6:37gigantic and i think yeah it's it's you know probably a big turning point for getting more people involved that aren't necessarily devs as well you know i think the nft space really helped and and and d5 yield farming uh on ethereum has brought a lot more eyes into hey what can ethereum actually do for me as well yeah no for sure so on that track uh

7:01we've we've had this knack for predicting um sort of the narrative so a lot of people look to eat denver as sort of the alpha drop right i'm like what's gonna happen this year it's the first big event on the calendar uh certainly as far as like building communities go like we have nine layer ones coming so it's not just related you know it's it's uh

7:23building the decentralized future so whether you're harmony or cello or near or ethereum or even the folks from solana like there's people from everywhere that are coming to this and so in 2019 we we call it we called it the year of d5 so a lot of our content and such was was like organized around d5 topics and summer of 2020 we were a little late or

7:48early excuse me we were one year early in 2020 it was the year of the dao we we we called it the year of the dow two years ago and um we i i kind of take a mulligan on the pandemic for 2020 so like we're a year late or early excuse me i keep saying it we're a year early so and then you you look at um 2022 and we're calling it the year of mass adoption

8:16mainstream adoption and uh 21 we actually called the year of the creator economy so we uh capturing nfts and metaverse and stuff like that and we were spot on with that one actually um so this year we're calling it uh as i mentioned the year of mainstream adoption and we think this is the year that a combination of things like nfts deep by gaming um and other sort of like

8:44uh mass adoption tools are really going to take traction i mean we've already seen the the silly attempt of corporations to sort of you know co-op the concept of the metaverse and you know certain memes like gm and all this other crypto stuff that we do tokens you know i mean shoot would would i see radio shacks doing a token like yeah yeah so i mean i i think this is going to be a

9:11formidable year and a huge one when it comes to mass adoption in fact i do think that in part the reason for our swelling attendance demand is because it's already happening right mass adoption we didn't even have that many people in 2018 to get 12 000 applications i don't think you know like where were we going to get that many people now it's it's just

9:40you know it's going somewhat bananas definitely i agree and you mentioned uh 12 000 which is incredible but you were also talking about virtually and i saw that there's like 30 000 plus people that are planning on attending virtually as well that's incredible and you know not everybody can get to denver um maybe you could remind us when exactly you know how many days is

10:04it and when can people start attending virtually and in person so the we have a a a space actually called our virtual hub sort of ironic in a way but um we have six stages that will be running concurrently during the main event but then biddle week middleweek is sort of the umbrella for everything so bid a week eat denver the main event sits under a biddleweek so biddleweek is our

10:28version of blockchain week but we we named it to be more focused on building creating versus just the conferency format so what's happening in denver is we've got a ton of co-working spaces that sponsors and other groups have put up to work together we've got different workshops parties meetups groups uh events that are being hosted on an open source calendar through

10:52uh you can actually you'll be able to find the calendar at ether.com um but there's a ton of stuff happening we will be broadcasting the hackathon kickoff on the 11th of february amazing and there will be virtual content technical technical workshops and you know other things that people want to consume virtually starting on the 11th running up all the

11:15way to the main event and the main event itself will also be live streamed virtually so you'll be able to consume every piece of content that we have virtually well not every piece not every stage will be running concurrently live stream but most of them will um so anything of a major note will be available for consumption online as just as equally as in person

11:40so the reason we did this is because we understand we have we have an ethos very squarely aligned with you know low barriers to entry for education so we do think that what's happening in the ethereum and decentralized community web 3 is very important and a lot of people don't have access to it they're going to they're not going to spend 500 to come to a

12:02conference listen to a bunch of people talk about it so we're just giving it away we give it away for free in fact attendance at each number's free too so there's no charge to attend um it's it's entirely community funded and we plan on keeping it that way because eat denver has been and always will be a giant on-ramp for new people that want to come and build and want to come and

12:26be a participating voice in building this decentralized world so go it starts on the 11th and then the main event kicks off really on the evening of the 17th is when opening ceremonies will be and then it'll run through the weekend through the 20th so the again all of it live streamed you can even participate in the build-a-thon virtually the virtual build-a-thon will extend

12:54past the 20th into the third week of march i think it's the 25th wow and that's because we've got we've got over a million dollars of bounties and prizes plus two million dollars of investment capital that we're handing out wow amazing and i was going to ask you about that as well with the build-a-thon and for people that are not blockchain developers already

13:19you know there's so many people still yet to become blockchain developers compared to regular developers that know traditional programming languages and people that are just interested in starting to develop or work with developers is that kind of content available for developers of all levels and entry yes yes yes as i mentioned we're a big on-ramp

13:43for new people so we have the best and brightest educators in the world i mean austin griffith is one of my favorite teachers when it comes to early you know learning early tooling for ethereum and smart contracts he'll be there we have a whole series of what we call blockchain 101 content that will be produced and distributed to the community you can

14:04already find a ton of it on our youtube channel for free right so it's all these different technical workshops and things that have been done historically but yeah there's even more and new cutting edge things that are coming out new tool sets new things to help people get calibrated look it's it's very intimidating crypto especially if you're sitting in sort of

14:26a web 2 job and you're like maybe let's say you're a developer and you're like you know you got eight ten years experience and you're like man this crypto is really calling me you know like i really want to be a part of this but i don't know where to start started eat denver austin griffith got us started eat denver he showed up at the 2018 installation in a suit in a bow tie i

14:49remember and he didn't know anybody in the space and now he works with the ethereum foundation and he's one of the the highest regarded uh ethereum educators and tool set creators in the world right and this is a this like i said it's a big on-ramp for people to come and learn without high barriers and costs right i mean the education that we're giving out

15:12would cost you thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to get it um privately and we're just giving it away and the community is happy to do it i mean this this effort has never been about making money um we we raise a significant amount of funds but we re purpose it to go back to build systems and mechanisms to support the community we're a community-owned

15:39venture now um through spork dao so sport dao was launched in june of 2021 so like all of these efforts are directly designed to create circular benefit for the community just rinse and repeat just let's bring as many people as we can very cool i appreciate you taking all the time to uh explain this to us john and i'm looking forward to attending virtually i

16:02won't be there in person this year but um i know that there's a huge wait list everyone is always welcome to attend virtually um for the people that are looking to get it in their calendars and and get registered what is the best way for them to get on that yeah go to eatdenver.com and click on the apply button and like i said if you're really interested in attending

16:24you know come and build right like general attendance right now is going to be very difficult but if you apply as a builder we still have space there and um yeah it's amazing how many people just want to come and hang out which is fine we don't we don't we don't say that you can't do that but you know the whole point behind sport down and accruing value back to the community is building

16:45right so um that's the that's the alpha drop on how to do that and but then when you do that don't just say you're going to do it i mean come and do it you know come build a team find a team there's going to be plenty of opportunities to meet people lots of idea generation opportunities icebreakers all sorts of different things and vectors for people to get

17:06connected so um we also have our weekly live stream to keep up on sort of current events of the um of the event that happens every friday morning i think it's 10 a.m mountain um so yeah tune in and check it out amazing great to know about that as well i will leave a link to the youtube channel eth denver website all of those links you mentioned in the description

17:29box below thank you so much for taking the time all the best with biddle week and eat denver and let's follow up in the near future oh thanks uh one last thing don't forget there's another thing that you're going to want to get and that's your uh the buffet corn bill brigade pfp so if you go to buffakornbittlebrigade.com you can still mint your pfp these are utility pfps

17:55that actually there will be private spaces private parties rare swag other things that you'll be able to access only if you're a holder of one of these particular pfps so that's the buffer corner it's this guy right here but it's the actual profile picture generative art project that there's 10 000 rare versions of of of them that you can get so thanks a bunch

18:16for the time i appreciate it very cool thanks for that as well all the best john and and i'll talk to you soon take care you