“DevConnect 2025 was about touching and feeling Ethereum IRL”Nathan Sexer, lead of the DevConnect 2025 and Events team at the Ethereum Foundation, gives a peek into the largest iteration of Devconnect ever, with 20,000 attendees, and why the team pivoted to a "World's Fair" format, creating tangible districts for DeFi and Privacy to let attendees truly "touch and feel" the ecosystem.

The conversation gets real about the friction of the physical world. He explained why Argentina’s crypto-native culture makes it the perfect host, how hyperinflation fueled bottom-up adoption, and even the venue-wide internet failure became an accidental "feature," breaking the on-screen silos and pushing genuine face-to-face connections.

A massive geopolitical win was how the team worked with the government to issue 1,000+ visas for attendees from over 130 nationalities to make this event in the true spirit of borderless crypto.

The Ethereum Foundation is heading to Mumbai in 2026! The goal for India is to unify a fragmented developer diaspora and bring regulatory attention to one of the world's most critical tech hubs.

Topics

• 00:00 Intro & Scale
• 04:15 World's Fair Concept
• 09:50 Why Argentina?
• 14:30 Operational Challenges
• 18:15 Internet Blackout
• 22:00 Booth Renaissance
• 28:30 Privacy Priority
• 33:00 Devcon Mumbai
• 37:40 Indian Developers

Links

• Devcon Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/EFDevcon
• Nathan Sexer on X: https://x.com/nethan_eth
• Ethereum Foundation: https://ethereum.org
• Gnosis: https://gnosis.io/

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