Before flying into Prague, I started to have my doubts. I changed career role from Technical Director to Advisor in March 2018 at an incredible broker-dealer startup called Bumped to travel the world and focus 95% on blockchain. I was now living the dream. Seven months later in September, I had built over thirty small decentralized projects, playing with Plasma, Swarm, IPFS, Dai, Web3, and any other buzzword I could muster up. All of my projects ended up at a dead end due to limitations to the Ethereum ecosystem and I began to grow anxious of my decision. I had the uneasy impression that if Vitalik Buterin left, the house of cards would fold. Below addresses exactly this.

Have you ever tried to build a fire the cold and rain with only a lighter? It’s hard, but not impossible. So picture Vitalik Buterin, Joe Lubin, and a few others huddled together stacking small fresh cut slivers of dryish wood shavings to get some sort of foundation going. Once a sliver burns enough, you begin to delicately place the correct size of wood over the tiny flame, focusing on how not to suffocate it, increasing the size of wood bit-by-bit exorcising extreme patience.

Devcon4 was big, really big. The number of tickets sold was 2,764, which sold out in eighteen minutes of posting, each ticket costing of $1,024. I was lucky enough to get an early “builder” first wave ticket described as:

“We’re reserving the majority of tickets for recipients of the Builder Discount, and will carefully review each application to ensure we’re curating an inclusive and diverse group of builders from our community.”

This concept paid out in spades. I couldn’t turn around with out having some in-the-weeds conversation about the ecosystem. The words “ICO” and “price” was virtually nonexistent. My scam meter only started to tick when heading to the Blockchains LLC launch, but that aside, these conversations were aha factories.

Here is me (left) Evgeny Shavkunov (middle) and Brendan Nagelin (right) met at Devcon4

The house of cards vision moment that I wanted to disprove occurred during the vyper talk, given by Jacues Wagener, who works for Status. The room was packed like much of the other rooms, with folks sitting on the ground, leaning on walls, or occupying a much-desired seat. Vitalik himself was on the ground as you can see in the below image, quietly listening to the talk. At this point there are over 2,700 people all over the Prague Congress Center running around, either networking in the lobbies, pitching to the Ethereum Grant Team, chilling out in the much needed beautiful meditation room, programming in bean bags overlooking the Prague landscape, or attending other equally as important talks in some other overpacked room on various floors. It wasn't just Consensys or the Ethereum Foundation that people were looking up to, but the seemingly endless new groups all building up the ecosystem.