ETHDenver 2025 news: VC presence decreases, AI dominates the topic

Author: Anthurine Source: X, @Anthurine

1. Changes in scale and atmosphere

ETHDenver was just a small gathering before the epidemic, but three years after the epidemic, it has become the most attended conference in the Ethereum ecosystem besides Devcon. Especially the first session after the epidemic was impressive-everyone arrived early, and many peripheral activities in the week before the meeting were full. Almost all activities required advance registration and approval before admission. This scene is very rare in industry conferences. After all, most activities hope that the more people there are, the better. I remember that at zkday, there were more than 1,000 people on the scene at the same time, and the scene was very spectacular. The number of people decreased in 2024, but high-quality activities can still attract hundreds of people at the same time. The only one that needs to queue up for admission is Berachain's activities. This year, the number of peripheral activities has decreased significantly. Except for social activities in the evening, the number of people attending daytime activities is very small, and activities with more than 100 people are considered top-notch.

2. Changes in topic popularity

2023 is the year of ZK. ZK has a wide range of topics to talk about, so topics related to ZK are still wide and diverse. In addition, topics such as Chain, DeFi, GameFi, and NFT are also attracting much attention. In 2024, the popularity of ZK has declined, and the focus has shifted to areas such as Restaking, Data Availability, Layer2, AI, and Account Abstraction. This year, apart from AI, especially AI Agent, there seems to be no other new topics. Unlike other conferences, ETHDenver has a lower proportion of social activities, and more are hardcore technical lectures. However, this year, due to the lack of attractiveness of the theme, not only are there few people present, but there are also very few people willing to listen carefully. There are only a few people in the audience at many events. The meme content of this session is very low, even lower than last year, whether from special events or panels. I personally don’t oppose memes, but if an industry only has memes and nothing else, it will not last long.

3. VC’s presence weakened

In previous years, many VCs would hold peripheral activities, but this year, the number of VCs has obviously decreased. Although they still send representatives to the conference, it is rare to see VCs sponsoring and holding events as loudly as in the previous two years.

4. Changes in booths

The number of booths this year is not inferior to that of previous years, mainly because the sponsorship plan was determined as early as Q2-Q3 last year. However, most of the booths are infrastructure-related projects, and there are few pure DApp projects. The popular Web3 games in previous years are almost nowhere to be seen. However, robots and robot dogs appeared on many booths for the first time this year. I think the most interesting booth design is the room where Polygon is arranged to look like a storage room. The cutest one is the kitten doll of ZircuitL2.

5. The attraction of peripherals has weakened

EthDevner peripherals have always been the most creative and exciting activity in my opinion. It is also the only activity that I am willing to take a lot of peripherals back. This year, there are fewer surprises in the peripherals, especially hats. In the past two years, I couldn't help but take a hat competition, so this year we specially prepared hats as peripherals. As a result, the competition was too weak, and 75% of them were distributed on the first morning.

6. The proportion of developers has decreased

The most impressive thing about ETHDenver in previous years is that there are many developers. There are very few people who know nothing about blockchain and Ethereum among the people who are received at the booth. More than 30% are developers (it may also be because our booth is related to infrastructure, so we have more programmers). Everyone will ask a lot of high-quality technical questions. This year, the number of developers received has decreased by half, and more are BDs and marketing personnel of other projects (such as node service providers, audit companies, traffic platforms, etc.).

7. Mistakes in the arrangement of the speech venue

This year, the speech stage was moved from the booth area to another building (in the same area as the hackathon), which was a very bad arrangement. The flow of people was mainly concentrated in the booth area. In previous years, people could switch freely between visiting the exhibition and listening to lectures. When they were tired of visiting, they would listen to the speeches they were interested in. However, this year, the speech venue was difficult to find and the distance was far, resulting in an average audience of only single digits for each speech, and the sponsorship effect was greatly reduced.

8. Practical tips for Denver

Although the trough was confusing, it was gratifying that there were still many builders willing to stay in this industry. Many of the project parties participating in the exhibition were also long-termists. After all, this industry needs some people with a long-term spirit. Finally, here are some practical tips: In Denver, it is recommended to use Lyft instead of Uber. For the same route, a normal $10 trip will soar to $50 during peak hours for Uber, while Lyft is around $20, which is not that outrageous. In addition, Chinese food in Denver is expensive and not tasty, but Thai food is surprisingly good, especially Aloy Modern Thai, which is worth a try.