1) Collaboration 🤝

As far as I could tell, most of the Ethereal attendees were from the industry. So while we had booths, swag, presentations, and all the other typical artifacts of a conference, the undertone of the event was actually much more focused around projects discussing how they could work together. There weren’t many elevator pitches at all.

Every project, platform, or protocol is basically a building block. Most folks in blockchain understand that if theses building blocks can’t play nicely together to build something that’s even bigger and better than its individual parts, then this grand experiment of decentralized applications ought to be deemed a total failure. Consequently, just about everyone at Ethereal was very focused on collaborating.

MakerDAOs, Golems, and Cellarius, oh my!

The collaborative energy was exceptionally exciting for Hoard. We were able to see many old friends and meet with a number of exciting new projects. We felt privileged to be able to contribute to the efforts of other teams and humbled to received so much support from them in return. If you ever want to take inventory of who is at the core of the Ethereum community, take a look at the builders who attend events like Ethereal.

2) Adjacent Infrastructure 🏗

Joseph Lubin used this term during his afternoon presentation on Saturday. He used it to describe a few of his spokes including Ujo, which is building adjacent music industry infrastructure. Of course, he also discussed crypto as a whole as being adjacent financial industry infrastructure — which is nothing too fundamentally earth-shattering for those of us who are part of blockchain; most people are aware of this. However. Joe’s focus on the term “adjacent infrastructure” really suggested a subtle insight into our identity as a community. We are building something like a parallel society for people to opt into. From the ground up.

Joe Lubin discussing Adjacent Music Industry Infrastrucure

Hoard is proudly focused on building an adjacent virtual entertainment infrastructure. Many aspects of the video game industry are broken — gamers spend money on items they don’t own, developers struggle to fundraise effectively, publishers combat DRM issues regularly — and decentralized networks have the power to fix them.

3) Governance ⚖️

Ethereal was refreshing because, during a live podcast recording of Laura Shin’s Unchained, Vlad Zamfir and Nick Dodson dove into the often overlooked topic of Ethereum’s governance. The episode is well worth listening to in its entirety, but here is a brief summary of a few of the topics:

Formal on-chain models vs ad-hoc off-chain processes

The formal EIP process (or lack thereof)

The power dynamic the developers have over the direction of Ethereum vs the community vs the media

The incentives and unintended consequences of on-chain governance

EIP is pronounced Eep!

Hoard is particularly interested in governance models because they are often a critical component to video games — especially multiplayers. We believe that blockchain-powered games with true ownership will become a sandbox for formal governance and will meaningfully inform the larger Ethereum ecosystem through iterative experiments designed by creative game makers.

4) Culture & Art 🎭

There’s really no way to get around saying it — Ethereum is magical 🔮It has a culture of its own which transcends the technology itself. Come to an Ethereum event like Ethereal and you step into a world of perpetual optimism and uninhibited creativity. I met more than a few people who told me that they were drawn to attend Ethereal simply because they “felt like they might find their purpose there.” With such an emotional draw to a community, it’s no wonder that art played such an important role in this event. An entire wing of the venue was dedicated to music, paintings, statues, visualizers, drawings, physical installments, and digital displays.

The first ever physical Cryptokitty, which was auctioned for $140,000 🤯

Hoard believes art and culture are as fundamental to the Ethereum community as all the new financial instruments it has and will continue to produce. Video games are a major source of entertainment — a part of life. They tell us stories and move in ways that are unique to the medium itself. We are proud to empower the art form by enabling true ownership — for the gamers and creators.