As a fully decentralized team, it’s nice to get together IRL once in awhile. It’s especially nice to be able to get together for a conference such as EDCON where individuals and teams building for or on the Ethereum network get to meet, learn from and discuss with other passionate individuals in the community.

We went from this…

Team meetings across more than 5 timezones.

To this…

The red-shoe crew outside the conference venue.

“Never forget why you started”

This was the theme of this year’s conference and a sobering reminder to the community that, despite all the speculation, all the token sales and all the challenges we are still facing in building a truly scalable and widely used network, there are deeply ideological reasons why Ethereum, and blockchain technology in general, was developed.

From Aya Miyaguchi’s outline of the reasons why she joined the Ethereum Foundation, to Jon Choi’s impassioned plea that we need to grow Ethereum’s ‘real economy’, and the persistence of the work on scalability that refuses to compromise on network security and decentralization, it’s clear that the Ethereum community has not forgotten the reasons why it started.

The 4 main themes that we observed at the conference were: