The weirdness hit you right as you walked in the door of Denver's P S Lounge.
They were handing out energy drinks called "NFT Energy Explosion" that claimed to have zero sugar and featured a Pudgy Penguins character named with "Huddle" written on its T-shirt. In the background, an artist was detailing a mural that was supposedly going to be tokenized.
Crypto side events typically provide rich imagery, and this scene at a gathering titled, "Pre-Parti Gras," hosted by an organizer called LeDrop With Cheese, was no exception.
What was different about this year's ETHDenver, historically one of the most popular annual events on the Ethereum conference circuit, is that another conference, EthBoulder, was scheduled on the weekend before – providing an alternative vibe that was markedly smaller, and decidedly less corporate.
The conferences had in common a near-obsession with AI, evidenced in the content programming, the conversations, the side-events, the event-management tools.
Indeed, with Ethereum's price in the doldrums and sponsorship budgets cut, most of the excitement came from looking forward to what comes next.
In this issue of Ethereum Conference News:
Panelists at a Stanford blockchain event debated whether crypto startups have hurt their credibility by launching so many crypto tokens so early in their development, with one founder bluntly admitting "we fucked up."
A self-described sex worker evangelizes Zcash wallets.
Somehow dozens of Ethereum conference goers schlepped many miles out to the mountains for an early-morning hike to the famous Red Rocks outdoor amphitheatre.
Ethereum's head of developer growth says his job has morphed into teaching people how to use AI to build blockchain apps, instead of just teaching people how to write the code for blockchain apps.
Walking robots may be the most interesting to watch, but the most useful ones probably won't have legs, at least for a while longer.
At the Boulder Ethereum event, an experimental "knowledge graph" was rigged up so that all participants contributed everything they learned and discuss and thought of – all queryable in a Telegram channel where an AI sherpa-bot answered your most pressing questions, including where happy hour is going down. We did a Q&A with it.