“Erm.that is actually a strip club,” one of them sheepishly replied-a step too far, even for a journalist willing to brave a crypto rave. First, though, she checked it was a good idea with the crowd who had gathered for a weekly bitcoin brunch at a Haitian restaurant. The area is home to the headquarters of, a crypto-trading platform, and will soon host the American base of ftx, an exchange run by Sam Bankman-Fried, a well-known crypto billionaire. It would have been in a nightclub in Wynwood, a neighbourhood filled with pastel-coloured buildings and crypto firms. A few days before Devcon, during a visit to Miami, your columnist considered attending another crypto party-this one favoured by bitcoin bros. Still, it would be unwise to assume that a pocket of maturity reflects the entire crypto community. The next technological improvements are likely to increase the scale and reduce the cost of transactions, which should make Ethereum useful for more than just financial applications. The change essentially eliminated Ethereum’s carbon footprint overnight. Devcon came on the heels of “the merge”, when Ethereum switched the mechanism by which it adds data to its blockchain. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that the tech is getting better, too. Established venture-capital firms, like Andreessen Horowitz, which participated in the fundraising round, are sticking with crypto.

UniSwap Labs, founded by the creator of UniSwap, another successful DeFi protocol, raised $165m at a $1.7bn valuation. At Devcon several firms announced that, despite the crash, they had raised capital from venture firms. Slumps no longer lead to questions about whether the end is nigh. Despite prices plunging into another so-called “crypto winter”, the market capitalisation of all tokens is still around $1trn, the same as in early 2020. The party is not the only evidence crypto is a more mature industry now. Its founder is working on his next venture, a social-media protocol called “lens”, which will allow users to “own” their followers, taking them from one social-media application to the next, and thus switch apps without losing clout. Aave is a five-year-old company with a successful project it has spun off to be run by the community, through what is known as a “decentralised autonomous organisation” (or “dao”). It was a grown-up event-one which reflects a newfound maturity among a community more commonly known as anything but. Attendees included a Colombian girl who had participated in a hackathon before the conference kicked off, a French programmer who was working on a method to distribute aid via Ethereum and a cheerful Mexican guy waiting in line for a raave t-shirt, emblazoned with a “friendly ghost” logo in headphones. There were even taxis waiting outside to take tired raavers to bed.įar from being rammed with nerds, the crowd was a mixed bunch. Veronika Fleyta, a British dj, manned the decks. The party took place in a converted warehouse filled with plants to evoke a jungle theme. This year the conference was in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. The raave was held on the sidelines of Devcon, an annual conference hosted by the Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organisation that brings together developers working on Ethereum, the second-most valuable blockchain. Mr Kulechov hails from Finland and the word “aave” is Finnish for “ghost”, which is the protocol’s logo. The protocol is one of the more successful decentralised-finance (DeFi) applications. The rave-or “raave” as it was marketed to partygoers-she attended was thrown by Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave, an open-source protocol through which people are able to lend or borrow various cryptocurrencies. However the reality, as your columnist discovered on October 12th, is a little different. Given the crypto community’s penchant for spectacular hacks, rug-pulls and general calamity, something, somewhere is surely going dangerously awry. What springs to mind when you hear the words “crypto rave in Colombia”? Perhaps an image of sweaty programmers swaying out of sync to thumping house music, some boorishly shouting over it to discuss the latest crypto-token they are flogging, their enthusiasm amplified by illicit substances.

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