BUIDLWeek Welcome & Camp BUIDL | John Paller | Nader Dabit | Austin Griffith | Kevin Marek |

[Music] including Austin Griffith our o one and only homegrown boy he's technically Wyoming but we'll count it and matter to bit both super Builders or I should say bidders we've got a bunch of really important information to share with you regarding the bathon our Dev folio Partners will be here to share all of that information make your way to the captain ethereum stage now you can also tune in we're live streaming so there's lots of ways to watch okay you guys want to throw up my first slide there there we go we're going to get going so we're two minutes behind so we're going to kind of try to move through things we are historically terrible at keeping time we always seem to go too long so we're going to try to keep this to about an hour today maybe a little over after the kickoff is going to be Bounty presentations by our sponsors and uh so you want to stick around for that because in the end our sponsors are the ones who are actually funding e Denver as you know it's free to attend and we don't uh we we we have a kind of a hard non-extraction rule from our community and our sponsors are generous and collaborative and helping us sustain this thing every year so we're very grateful for that so as bidders these bounties is how you get paid so you definitely want to be paying attention to that also it's great to connect with them after their talks so they'll have mentors and Community people here as well that you can connect with so that your team can get assistance if you need it or just you know make friends and build community so welcome to bidle [Music] week so bidle week I'll just I'll say a couple quick things about that and I'm going to run through this really fast because I only got a few minutes to do this but um bidle week is sort of the the Prelude or the pregame party the tailgating party for eth Denver now why do we do bit a week well we found that having really two days to create a project at a hackathon was just not enough we basically found that people rush into town they build really fast and then there's just too much to do too much to see too many distractions too many parties and they couldn't get their projects done so instead of having that as a problem we expanded to bidle week now we also wanted to give partners nonp partners other communities the space to be able to come and host side events and do other things we are not the Arbiters of everything in Denver we absolutely care about giving an open permissionless space so bidle week you're going to find all sorts of things happening in addition to team formation and workshops and all sorts of things bidle related you're going to find a ton of things around town that you can get yourself involved in again building Community Making Connections learning and in in case of e Denver and and bid week here at the bid Hub all for free so I'm John I'm the spor founder and E Denver founder um we have an incredible team this is not about me I'm up here as the kind of spokesman for the this Collective event which is hundreds of people that come around this to provide this space and place for you to express your creativity in a way that's meaningful for you um I'm also the founder of a project called opis which is um an employment platform for web two and web 3 workers we're also going to be doing some fun announcements this week about bringing Healthcare on chain so Humane and onchain opis 2.0 is coming and you can reach me at uh po John on Twitter so let's talk about the regenerates the regenerates are our meme if you will will or our characterization of all of the different characters that we've made up to this point and we've we've made Heroes out of them now they've all got superhero they've all got superpowers but think like Voltron or Avengers like we're actually taking it to the next level now so we've got whale poool and ether Knight Professor guay captain ethereum sporman and mighty Marmet they're a ton of fun choose your regen choose your hero okay so everybody can kind of pick who you like you know I happen to be wearing whale poool right now which is an obvious parallel to you know who but uh we MD all of it for fun and you know these guys are these guys are out fighting the regenerate or the degenerates I should say and they're together kind of like similar to Voltron regenerator so this is the this is the combination power of business to that creates the most awesome Biddle projects so again just a lot of fun a lot of memes you don't need to read too much into it but you can if you want read a lot into it because we have a whole bunch of lore that we created around this that you'll be pleased to know that in the future we'll be kind of pulling on these strings and doing more with it so if you haven't scanned it scan it and check it out it's kind of fun fun but or do other things it's open source around here so our ethos as you should know is we want to include as many people as we can in our big tent and blank canvas we're the most creatively diverse community in web 3 by a long shot we have free admission keep the economic barriers low if you can get your butt to Denver you can come and participate in learning and Community with the best Minds on the planet running to the likes of Austin and add the our bid week Heroes that are going to come up and give some pep talks I mean these guys have been in the trenches of doing these things where else do you get to run into people like them and others who can give that kind of insight you just can't do it free swag and free food subsidized child care and scholarships to try to help get people here if they can't afford it the world's largest liveaction web 3 experiment is Spork Dow you can earn your Spork by submitting projects you can stake your Spork and then we got a big announcement at Opening Ceremonies coming up on Thursday but you can actually get distributions in the form of actual money for your contributions to spor dow we're legally a Colorado Cooperative that's the legal rapper that we use for our Dow and this is how we actually like create this regenerative game so let's go through just the general high level calendar we got bidle week that's starts today it goes through Wednesday technically the whole thing is Bid week but we really just call bidle week through Wednesday to be clear that that is kind of the open source permissionless P part of it the main weekend starts on Thursday the 27th and goes through March 2nd at the spork Castle which is just next door if you happen to go over there you'll find that there's a wedding and bridal expo happening right now that is not us uh they're actually done pretty soon they'll be done I I think tomorrow and then we build out over there so you'll be able to find all the typical things over there and the bidle Hub will continue here during that time so this isn't going anywhere we just sort of yes and over there then we go to the mountains we go to Breen Ridge which has been our tradition here for the past six years and we're going to hang out and do a bunch of Colorado things like ski or whatever you can think of that might be Colorado is now the coming back to the bidle hub we've got registration up front We Got The Concourse ring the bidle floor we've got actually two stages sorry about that well there's really three The Paddock stage is the third one and then the paddock is well we I just mentioned that so the paddock is through here that will have content on it during the week but the two stages here in the main Arena are going to be programmed starting tomorrow so um today we we have um The Bounty presentations which is the primary focus we really want to put the emphasis on the projects that are um incentivizing you to help build on their project so this collaborative creativity is really what we're focused on now all right so with that I'm going to hand the microphone off and give my deepest gratitudes to you guys for being here Kevin Merrick and soloni are going to come on up so Camp bidle I'm going to let them explain it but Camp bidle is happening at the CSU Campus at the spur campus which is just adjacent to us there is time to still get involved but Kevin and solanji are our deans of Education um and solanji is one of the co-founders of that effort she and I were in Paris three years ago and we were like you know so many people come to eat Denver by themselves they don't know anybody and they don't know anything like how do we help with that so that's where Camp it was spawn so I'm going to hand the microphone to these guys and let them tell you a lot more thanks John is there yeah hey guys I'm Kevin Merrick I'm the lead tech Steward at eth Denver um I'm here to introduce Camp Biddle though it's kind of been a passion project of ours for multiple years together um it's really a curated curriculum that's delivered by uh the best of the best in the industry um where you can go and learn and become from like zero to one and it really prepares you with all the skills necessary to to Really submit a hackathon project um also to to form a team um and to really generate ideas um so that's happening up at the spur like John said um you can walk directly through the gate to get there it's not too far of a walk but feel free to just hop in um even if you didn't register and you want to check it out feel free to stop by there's plenty of room um not only do we have an engineering track that teaches you all the ins and outs and all the you know gotas and everything about how to build on top of this amazing layer um we also have a design and UI track uh specifically for people that uh might not the coding might be too advanced for them so there's constantly lectures upstairs uh you know just to to really get the the Baseline of UI and ux principles um obviously in our industry we all know that that's something that's really struggling um so if you're on the creative side please like stop in come hang out check out one of the workshops um all the schedules are up online uh if you go to the camp bidle tab on the website um so you can see the lectures the workshops um but it's it's meant for you guys so uh please feel free to dive in um let me switch a slide here am I going the wrong way I might be um but yeah now this is Solange my my good friend and I'm going to let her talk for a little bit about Camp B so hello everyone imagine that you came here and you don't know uh related to blockchain related to arry and You' like to start from zero and if you saw how they schedule you can see different talks but it's hard to go here and over there and over there and you can be lost so the idea of K build is that you can go to one place it's a classroom style and you can be over there all the days for days today until wedness day and you are learning step by step you are learning one topic then the other one then the other one and the increasing your difficult and increasing your knowledgement and this is our goal over there you can also uh start to think about your project start to think what you are building here and be a hacker and subit a project but this is a structur track for beginners and all of you are welcome even if you didn't uh apply it yet like Kevin told you must cross the gate and go to the other side in the CSU is for building hro building and this this I I wait you over there thank you and now let's see what we have now we have Austin atin what are you thank you here we go okay yeah sure just go huh all good pep talk time okay GM uh thank you for attending this Sunday service for the Church of cold hard decentralization yeah there we go there's some love all right all right so I I need to uh do a pep talk here so I need to be kind of Coach Griff a little bit kind of like boys my vision ain't what it used to be I can barely see the scoreboard I can't tell if it's the end of the fourth quarter of this bowl run or just getting started we've been sweating like crazy we got to get out there and finish this game off the too long didn't read is that now is the time to build and I will explain that more but the too long didn't read of the toool long didn't read is that figuring out what to build is actually still very hard so what kind of apps need a world computer what kind of things can you program when you can program money what does an application store for money apps look like well ethereum is a lot of things to a lot of different people Economic Security tamperproof credible neutrality global settlement layer it's a lot of things ethereum is easy to get though we have this uh idea at build Guild where I work where we're trying to work on something called start ethereum that helps people get started with ethereum and I've always had this Persona in my head that is my cousin and I'm always thinking of how he would click through things how do I go about making sure that the ux flow is is good for him and we've been doing this for about a month now putting together this ux and the other day the president's son tweeted something about ethereum and that one bullish tweet was enough to get my cousin to call me and ask me hey it sounds like this ethereum thing is something and all I had to say was the word coinbase and he was able to get 10 grand of ethereum instantly so ethereum is easy to get it's very accessible people can go to binance or to to Kraken or to coinbase and they can get Eve but ethereum is hard to use and getting people over the hump of this isn't something that you just hold this is something that you use is the kind of difficult part and I think that maybe the Trojan Horse could be something like thinking of your savings account thinking of something that is safe that is earning against inflation barely and giving you a better solution to that so I would love to see a hacker build a better savings account that's so super easy that even my cousin who doesn't know anything about using eth could YOLO some eth to an address and it sits there and earns as much or more as his highin savings account and it's basically a stable that's locked up and when he's ready he can hit a button and it ejects it back to his receive address very very smooth ux it's up to you to build but really the thing that's gotten product Market fit is tokens like almost 908 % of the product Market fit on chain is tokens and they're like 15 lines of code any of you can write them uh but they they represent so many different things and I think digging into that a little bit helps us kind of get an understanding for what kinds of things we can put on chain so you can deploy a token to represent a company you can deploy a token to represent a content creator you can deploy a token to represent a frog with a hat sitting on a rock. jpeg tokens Can represent all sorts of things tokens Can represent $1 worth of treasury bills from the most powerful nation in the world they can represent the yes likelihood of a flu breaking out globally they can represent a stable currency providing safety from badly inflated local currency tokens Can represent remittances sit home across borders they can represent a new way of transferring value in Emerging Markets tokens can even represent levered positions on a low cap yeah there we go or they can represent a Max Extract 30 minute cycle round tripping enough money to retire your bloodline don't do that though please tokens Can represent many many things and they're actually just stupid simple code there's a mapping for what address owns what amount and there's a function that allows people to transfer that amount between things it's very very very very very simple code and you can write it to anyone can write it and this is basically the small little sliver of product Market fit that we have now basically the thing I'm saying is that there is a big pie to be eaten here for anybody who can think of good products that people will actually use and Implement them anyone with an internet connection and some Pocket Change can deploy an app onchain that will never go down not even they can stop it not even a nation state can stop it right now we have the combination of AI GPT cursor and a good starter kit and a bunch of awesome tools like Foundry or hard hat uh VM or wagy or VM and wagy or ether's JS a whole host of different rpcs or run your own node there's a diverse set of of tooling available along with AI that anybody can basically prompt cursor and build an app and it's that simple good coders need to speedrun ethereum though you need to figure out what kinds of things you need to build a lot of things build something that has Randomness build something that has tokens swaps vaults build a a fancy auction uh and remember the auction your goal is not to make the most money in the auction your goal is to make the most efficient auction the person who makes the most efficient auction that lets both sides of the market work together coordinate successfully that's the kind of thing you're trying to build so go to speedrun ethereum.org guild.com if you'd like to and it's bidle giddle spilled all weird good luck trying to find bid.

com but that's that's the that's the website super good marketing uh and I'll be giving a bunch of talks about scaffold eth and honestly like the camp Biddle stuff there's so many good projects here there's so much good curriculum in the space it's easy to learn you just have to spend the time learning and building the things and remember the Dunning Krueger is is violent in this space you don't know what you don't know there's a great ecosystem of so many smart people uh but you have to spend some time getting in and learning and getting uh you know into the trenches so do stuff you love make friends ship early ship often get feedback and repeat so reasons for optimism the whole pep talk in the first place right at three minutes I'm hitting the reasons for optimism they're actually really good everything is all coming together here changes uh at L1 changes at L2 are leading to scalability that gives us cheap and fast transactions almost like a web 2 like experience or better is happening the the pattern of not having to put in your email address at every new product is still sort of failing companies out there Building Products on chain still ask for your email address when you first land that's an anti-pattern please stop doing that let me connect my wallet and Yeet uh anyways things are scaling things are getting faster and cheaper uh we're also getting at the same time smart contract wallets and account abstraction 4337 and 7702 are going to give us things like batch transactions sponsored transactions instant onboarding ethereum literally at your fingerprint like at your fingertips you can have a smart contract wallet you can have a pass key with a fingerprint have that solve or settle to a Smart contract wallet your enduser never has to have a private key or a seed phrase all they're using is the crypto that's built into their phone they're verifying it with a fingerprint so anytime they want to buy a coin or take an action on chain they just go there and they hit the button and they put in their fingerprint and that's it normes can totally do that it's app season baby the infrastructure is ready the president of the United States just yeed a coin the Overton window has shifted and regulation is lightening they're even freeing the Privacy nerds wrongly jailed for writing code our culture is looking for a better internet and it's up to you to build it there's no barriers to entry the tools are great the education is great the infrastructure is great and the reg regulation is lightning there's no bottleneck here smart contract wallet ux might need a little bit of help it's almost there the the user experience could use a little bit more but it's basically mainstream knowing what to build and ship is the hard part and that's something that you're going to have to figure out but look at all the things that are currently have product Market fit on chain and work backwards from some users experience to the chain don't just hold go freak and build it's time for your War modor Arc as a mean says it's not us verse them there is no them if you have that in your head you're wrong it's just us and we're failing to coordinate and as comrade aaki says you need to Pivot to sensemaking and Truth seeking the ticker is eth go build thank you thank you Austin we appreciate you man if you guys have an opportunity to chat with Austin he's kind of a scarce resource around here because he he's busy bidding most of the time but uh he is local he's one of our favorite Builders and in fact I'll tell a little story Austin shows up to eat Denver 2018 in a suit in a bow tie and I'm like who is that guy and then we cross past at eth Wyoming when his team beat my team by like two t0 of a point and I didn't know I didn't really know him yet until after that but I was like man this guy is going to go do big things and then the following eth Denver we did the burner wallet for the food trucks so thanks Austin thanks for the pep talk we appreciate you man all right so we're going to do the bleon kick off so I'm going to bring up my good friend Denver where you at and team whoever come on up guys so Denver is uh part of the he's the co-founder of De folio has anybody been to eth India Patricio of course so eth India is um we really like to think our counterpart in Asia and these guys do an incredibly good job at hackathons and honestly we've struggled some to scale both this big event and the hackathon one of the things that we set out to do this year was really improve the bidler experience and to really improve the flow the technology and just the overall execution of the hackathon because we are a hackathon first the main event is the hackathon we're the only Main Event globally that looks like a conference I hate that word we're at Community Innovation Festival if you don't know but we have some conferenc things but that's not the point of being here the bathon doing something productive and building something meaningful expressing your creativity in a way that the community can benefit that's why we're here so the rest of it fun and we do it but back to the basics is what we're doing here so Denver is going to spend a bunch of time talking about the ins and outs in the guts of the hack on and how it's going to work and take it away sir all right thanks John right as we get set up uh okay the first thing I'd like to address the elephant or rather the I mean Spork whale in the room uh Denver is actually my real name totally organic 100% grass-fed non Aon real name is Denver um is probably the most easiest name to remember uh this week and I'm here to talk about the buildon uh as John said the main event all right cool uh so I'm Denver I'm the co-founder of De folio your friendly neighborhood hackathon platform where uh I'd like to start off with talking a bit about the buildon so four quick things to remember for the buildon uh um as a hacker build aons are a place where you can innovate right but that's where uh you have some constraints you have S days to Showcase your potential and in these seven days make sure that you really focus on why you're building people need to know why you're building what you're building right and make sure that whatever you're building resonates with your audience remember clarity is much more important than complexity like nobody's going to get going to care if you build like a 100 mid features but that one standout feature that you build will make the difference between um okay project and a great project all right and lastly remember that you're here to have fun and in-person hackathons are the best place to build relationships as they say your network is actually your net worth so this is your your best place to build your network all right next up some important days to remember so we're kicking off the build athon today the checking started today at 9:00 a.m. they're going to be open uh throughout and the ne the last day to uh check in here with us is going to be on Wednesday uh we are going to have the build Hub venue open every day from 9:00 a.m. to 10: p.

m. MST except for February 28th where we're just going to go overnight we going to give go all wild and give you overnight access to the venue all right the application deadline in case you haven't still put in an application is February 24th which is tomorrow and on March 1st which is Saturday 10:00 a.m. is the project submission deadline as soon as the project submission deadline we have an additional parallel sort of judging sort of system that we have put together um so like how many of you are familiar with quadratic funding Okay cool so this is uh a simpler version of that so this is quadratic voting so basically if you submit a project you get 100 votes on the front end and you can vote for other projects uh vote for your uh you know vote for your friends vote for projects that you really like and then as long as those uh votes add up to 100 you'll be you you'll be able to uh put up the vote uh on chain and then there's 1 million in Spork that will be distributed on the basis of your votes all right we will also have team formation and ice breaker sessions every day from today till the 27th at 6: p.m.

MST right here the sponsor judging will take off on March 1st on Saturday between 10:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. MST the track judging the first phase of the organizer tracks will be from 10:30 a.

m. to 2: p.m. on Saturday after that we'll have the second phase uh on Saturday itself the finalists get to pitch on the main stage on Sunday between 12:00 p.m.

to 300 p.m. all right let's get into how these tracks and prizes work to submit a project and present uh your project you will have to you must be accepted to attend e Denver and uh you must be physically checked in at the de folio desk uh by February 28th you should submit your project before the submission deadline which is Saturday March 1st before 10:00 a.m. MST you should also be part of a team the minimum uh number of team members is two and you can have up to four team members all right we have five uh build official buildon tracks so we have defi G nfts and gaming we have infrastructure and scalability we have identity privacy and security we also have impact plus public goods and Dows and communities all right for the E Denver track you can apply to one of the five build athon tracks and you can apply to up to 10 sponsor bounties remember that the team size again is between two to four members all right for the phase one of the E Denver track judging um just again the date and time is March 1st so we'll have five tracks each with uh three judging stations and the top teams the top 10 teams per track advance to phase two and we'll announce the results for that by 2:30 p.

m. MST for the phase 2 we'll do that between 400 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

MST um and the judges will pick the top three teams per track um each winning team gets $5,000 and a main stage showcase opportunity to present on the main stage on March 2nd the winners for this will be announced at 7:30 p.m. MST on March 1st cool on Sunday we'll have the top 15 judging the top 15 finalists will present long format demos we will also exclusively coach these teams at 9:00 a.m. MST to refine uh their pitches and ensure you're coming of cross you're putting your best leg forward on stage each judge we'll have like celebrity judge pick their favorite projects and each judge is also going to award $1,000 cash price and a special title all finalists will earn the prestigious e Denver finalist designation all right let's get you set up on de folio I'll just take a minute to talk about that so if you're wondering how to get that done uh you should be checked in on De folio if you're wondering how to do that if you have bu received a builder uh bidler ticket from Eed denver.

com and also rsvped on Def folio you're done nothing else to do you're automatically checked into the buildon by the end of the day if you have checked in on moon gate but haven't yet signed up to build you can still do so by visiting eat Denver 2025 . deol you.co you will then be again checked in automatically by the end of the day all right remember the deadline for checking in physically is February 28th 10: a.m. MST all right and before I sign off I'd like to Showcase one more thing this year when you submit your project you'll notice uh uh sort of we try to make it inconspicuous but like it's going to be like pretty visible um button on your project submission uh page so now that is a new product that we are calling Whiplash um not sure how many of you have seen the movie okay if any of you have like it's on similar lines it's an AI Mentor which helps helps you build better okay so Whiplash is um like our initiative from uh deio which we are debuting exclusively for uh e Denver for the very first time so we've been like hosting like hackathon since a while since 2018 we have hosted like over thousand hackathons on our platform and then you know after a while you kind of get jaded watching all of uh all of the projects optimizing for just you know short-term building so we wanted to figure out how can we head help like um every project get to the next level and for that something key that we figured out was giving people feedback at the right time now whatever you might think about AI one thing that it's good at it's being accessible when you need it um so we have built an AI uh agent uh which uh trolls through uh the entire internet in real time it also cross checks def folio GitHub and the um the entire internet to find similar projects and to also give you feedback on what you can build better so Whiplash is for Builders uh it's also for judges uh we have also integrated into our judging platform now every judge will also be able to uh check in uh it will be able to better evaluate your projects uh checking it across all the projects that are there all the like protocols or project that are there on the internet so we're quite excited to see this in action uh remember that it's in beta like it might hallucinate here and there but like hope you uh forgive it for that all right cool uh some last things to keep in mind uh submit your projects in draft early to allow to avoid last minute rushes before uh the submission deadline you can continue editing your projects even after submitting it but note that once you submit your project and draft you can't edit your team right for more information all of this information is available on the bidler guide you can check it out on this QR code and in case you haven't registered already here's another QR code basically goes to e Denver 2025.

deol you.co where you can complete your registration at any point if you are stuck feel free to reach out to the de folio team we are all here at hand to help so we have shria anik me siril Ashwin kot PR Anish and vanika who will be here to help you throughout the weekend and yeah with that we can't wait to see what you build right thank you thank you Denver all right lost to remember right how about that new Whiplash pretty sick what I like about it is it's interesting because all he people will have ideas about projects and they'll be like hey we should build like a decentralized Uber or something and it's like you guys might want to researched that this makes it at your fingertips to do that thanks St folio thanks Denver you guys are great uh now it's my pleasure to introduce to you one of our sportd members and also our lead steart on comms and PR Hannah oreskovich L she's been around the eth Denver Community a long time if you don't know she was first uh Vice news right 2018 and then we recruited her to come and actually work internally and then she joined the core team in 2019 joined the board in 2021 and here we are so here you go Hannah all right thank you hey everyone so excited to have you here uh and this week you know my job is to really encourage you to engage with all of our social platforms we want to see what you're building on Twitter on Discord uh on all of our other platforms where you can tag us you can share you can reply guy you can do all of the above uh I highly encourage you especially if you're building to join our Discord so that is the spork Dow Discord uh and we have all of help and FAQ mentorship that that's all available to you in those channels as well as speaking with sponsors and different community members so always go there for help everything else we're so excited to see you share please hash eth Denver 2025 and bidle week this week which is kicking off we're so excited uh I'm actually going to turn it over to one of our Community Partners as John paler has mentioned multiple times at eth Denver we're a community of communities and so I've been fortunate to be advising a few teams on this front this year our partners um with the folio with the app global uh and then of course uh with Geno as well so I'm happy to bring up two members from genzo here uh we've got Zach Nelson the founder and then Jason Wilson they're here to talk to you a little bit about the eth de treasure hunt this year thank you Hannah yeah super excited to be here um as a founder of genio and this is our third year working with eth Denver and I just want to say I think The Branding gets even better every year which is pretty hard to do because it is so cool um and for us really working with eth Denver is all about Community as the event is itself and as John always says it's not a conference it's an event which I think is a huge importance difference here and this event is the longest running bleon uh Community Run Festival in web 3 and the reason it's been going on for so many years is because the community who comes always returns and that makes it really special to work with and as we see we have a crowd here there's also thousands from all over the world tuning in online which is really amazing to see um so I'm super excited to be working with the team Hannah melum John everybody at the team has just been so fantastic and if you're watching online I I definitely encourage you to to invite your friends to check it out come to the event as they mentioned it's free which is a huge uh advantage to really learn I think for me I got into web 3 in college and the first event I went to and the team was ethereum Denver and the large reason for that was because of the accessibility if you're a college student or you know it's sometimes hard to get into a lot of these companies or find ways to make connections and I think ethereum Denver is that Gateway into web 3 which is again why it's been so successful so I just want to thank everybody uh on the team everybody who's watching uh online and then uh to introduce our next team member who's going to be speaking more about the web 3 uh treasure hunt so here you go Jason thank you Zach uh many of you may know and if you don't this is your perfect opportunity obviously earlier we talked about our re our Regens that you could choose to be a part of you know the heroes of Biddle City now we want you all to be as Incorporated with our community with the bleon as well as with the education that comes with eth Denver and to truly fulfill this we really urge you guys hop in the Discord hop on telegram but more so than anything we wanted to give we wanted to let there be a treat for today and for the whole eth Denver experience through our amazing team and through our amazing uh supporters we have po utilizing poap as well as drip we will be doing a regen regen treasure hunt where people will be able to earn up to $3,000 in eth and up to $600 in merch credits anyone who wants to participate through this please join the Discord ask about it we will have all things pained in the announcements and the best way to participate is to show up to events at key events that we will be identifying in the Discord and on the telegram you all will be able to be utilizing your phones to listen for a QR code that's going to be generated through audio your phones will automatically be able to earn you a PO app to be able to participate in this regen hunt so I truly truly wish you guys the best in completing the treasure hunt and I look forward to seeing you all in the server thank you so much and good luck this week everyone thank you back to to John yeah and good luck on the treasure hunt I mean that's somebody's going to win it so there's some treasure around here so and the the sound is absolutely incredible I've never heard of sound generating a QR code so definitely look into that it's pretty mind-blowing fun time so as we always talk about it's not just a conference it's a community Innovation Festival it's an experience it's immersive it's artistic it's creative there's cool stuff everywhere explore engage too these guys as they said I mean we've got all this different social channels it's a little bit much in my opinion I might be too old for the whole social game too much but definitely on X Discord of course to connect hook it up all right so next is talking about content and how we do this so I'm going to bring up the lovely Waverly Maven Danny asorio she's also on the board of stewards for Denver and sporal and she's been a part of the community since very very early 2018 yeah you were with INF fura at the time right yeah so she's uh been all over the place she now lives in Denver makes a lot of sense that she came here permanently and uh we'll talk a little bit about our community strategy we've always been sensitive to the idea that a lot of conferences are only pay to play but then you have to balance that with well we got sponsors that want to get on stage so how do we do that so 50% of our content is Merit based is it more this here how much is it do you know so the main weekend is almost 70% Merit which means we're balancing the needs of both the sponsors and the community yes and positive sum games regenerative outcomes so with that I'm going to hand you the the the mic Danny and go for it thank you thank you um hey everyone I am uh one of your meta stewards on the content team so very excited to actually be here today um for us it's really important that East Denver stays true to his roots as an event by the community for the community it's really important to us that there's a democratic access process and that um anyone who is part of the community can apply to participate can apply to speak essentially contribute in any way that they'd like and so we are probably one of the very very few events out there definitely the only one of our size that has a completely open application process for speaking and we've actually you know over the past few years built a very very cool decentralized content system so you'll notice that in a lot of places a lot of conferences um a lot of those decisions are very centralized and and actually when it comes to us we are a collective of over 40 people that puts together the speakers program for E Denver and we intake all applications as they come through and uh this year we received uh over 2,000 speaker applications and a person sometimes two reads every single one of them and then from there we have a process where the expert reviewers will give their opinion and rank a proposal and then it moves to the next stage right and so the idea is that no human can be an expert in everything and that you know it was going to be me or someone else making a decision ultimately like we just know the areas that we know and then we'd be making guesses in other areas so instead you know we bring really extraordinary humans like you know Lane reic to really think about privacy or like Greg Maru to really evaluate infrastructure right um and and so we really think about like bringing the people who are at the very top of their category to be the ones who decide is this a good proposal or not and like is this a merit-based talk that should go forward and so every year we refine it further and further we get some incredible help from the team over at ypr that helps us pming the process which is the process of assigning proposals as they come in to the expert reviewer and then we work with a team of another five Meda curators who go in and kind of figure out the final selections and put the program together so we have some really really cool talks ready for you this weekend I recommend looking at the website looking through the different um content pieces I would say some of the highlights this being the year of the regenerates uh David VOR uh from galow is going to be talking about their initiatives with uh solar panels in India and um other countries you have jell James from Parable talking about building crypto powerered mesh Networks uh to provide internet across Africa and South America you have um Joshua talking about sustainable carbon credits and how crypto markets can actually help offset carbon impact um and then many many more I think we uh we have a secret surprise speaker coming for you at the opening ceremony who is one of the you know great technical Minds in the space we really really excited to welcome them I'm going to leave that one as a surprise but we're so grateful that you're all here that you're all participating we love to get your feedback and we're always excited um to hear what you think about our content program so thanks everyone the work never stops thank you Danny so what I think is really cool about our content uh strategy is we get so much surface area covered in topics breadth and depth of to of just intellectual genius quite frankly and we're able to do it in a way that's very Community Driven and the fact that we don't charge for tickets a lot of anybody who's going to do that normally has a big problem because the sponsors want to dominate everything then it becomes kind of a shill Fest so we're very proud of our ability to like do this so thanks Danny all right so without further Ado I'm going to introduce our next pep talk All-Star bidler Nat debat from Igan Lair so if you don't know Igan La then you've been living under a rock and he's gonna talk about his tips and his ideas around how to survive and thrive in a hackathon awesome thank you for the intro I just got this uh scarf and I had it on I'm just going to take it off for a second here so yeah one of the things that I'm supposed to be doing is kind of like hyping people up so I'm going to attempt to do that but I'm kind of winging it and I'm only going to be here for about 5 minutes so I'm not going to take too much of your time so I'm just going to talk about like three main ideas ideas or topics to kind of hopefully get you excited about the week uh first of all e Inver is like to me it was the first blockchain conference I'd ever been to and every time I come here so many doors like open up for me every year I have so many opportunities and not just me pretty much everybody I've talked to um so I feel like this is just such an incredible event and I guess not just e Denver but I think some of these big events around the around the world we get to come here we get to meet and talk to people that are like industry leaders and everyone here is so accessible like you can literally be standing next to vitalic or the CEO of some really big successful company and everyone is just so cool so I would just um encourage people even if you're an introvert to go out of your way to talk to people ask them questions get their telegram connect to them there's so many doors that will open up for you because you're you're going to go home and you're going to have questions and then if you have these people's connections you can just go and ask them questions and I think e Denver in general just has so many opportunities that go beyond that as well like we're here we're able to hack we're able to make money on bounties there's just so much um there's so many bounties available so it's like a cool opportunity to hack to learn to to connect to build and to go home with some money in our pocket maybe and I think crypto in general is kind of like obviously and all of us are here because we love it but it's just so much different and there's so much potential for for like outsized impact from any other industry in Tech that I've ever worked I would say AI would probably be another one that that is similar at this moment but if you kind of look at the rest of the software industry it's kind of stagnating uh to it to to an extent in the sense of all of the big software companies are kind of like uh downsizing they're cutting jobs there's if you're just a regular software developer it's kind of tough times I know a lot of them and they're having a lot of challenges on the other hand everyone that I know that is deep into crypto if you've been working in the blockchain space for a year or two um most of the people I know have uh like opportunities lined up out the door and I think one of the best ways to get your foot in the door is an event like this because again you're going to be meeting these Founders you're going to be making connections and even if you're not here to start a new company and build something to launch and be a Founder you're going to have so many opportunities to meet with people that you can ultimately work with in the future and to me like as someone that would like to be a Founder at some point having the opportunity to to work alongside all these really smart people is the best way to kind of understand how to be a Founder sometimes so some people have like that founder mode them in them already some people like myself I feel like I need to learn all these different things before I dive in but I know they say that you should dive in before you're ready but you know it's kind of like a balance I guess but there are just a lot of companies that are looking for good people so if you're looking for a job my my advice is to find the earlier stage companies because they're growing extremely fast so a lot of these companies have 10 20 $50 million in funding and they're expand expanding their team and those are the best teams in my opinion to kind of get uh get involved with because uh you can recognize the opportunity uh based on your own thoughts and like what you're interested in and then get in early on a company and you can often have a lot of opportunities to have equity and things like that as well so if you're here to be a Founder that's cool but if you're here to kind of get a job it's also a good opportunity for that and then the last thing I'll kind of leave with uh Austin Griffith talked about this a little bit Austin is actually the person that really opened the door to me to get into this space I remember dming him and asking him a bunch of questions he didn't know who I was and he answered them and he he always was just like really helpful anyway I just wanted to to speak on that for a second but but in general I think like what he was talking about earlier in the sense of there's never been a better time to build in this space he's completely right I mean things have changed so much in the past four years since I've been here the developer experience is so much better AI can help you write most of your code you have so many great sdks for the uh 50% of the broken ux in my opinion was all around the identity piece like everything was an EA and you had to sign stuff and all this stuff it was a huge barrier to entry for the average person now with the more advanced uh like wallets and sdks that allow you to implement the stuff like account abstraction with social signin and things like that it just it removes like the 50% of the biggest challenge in building applications was onboarding the average person having like a smooth ux and then we have the other 50% was the whole scalability issue that hasn't 100% been solved but we do have a lot of really great networks that have low latency high throughput low cost networks so in general if you kind of combine the two you look at all the opport unities there are like uh combining crypto with other software Primitives like AI there's just an incredible amount of opportunity today and there's this idea of like the hedonistic treadmill is anyone familiar with the hedonistic treadmill the hedonistic treadmill is basically like when you get something that you've always wanted then your mind like basically starts taking it for granted so like you wanted this next job you wanted to get into this school you wanted to achieve this goal but after you achieve it that sense of excitement kind of goes away and you kind of move on to the next thing and that's why people get caught up in this like idea of the Rat Race where you're never happy you're always trying to find the next thing and you don't really appreciate what you have so I think like one thing to just remember it's like we are here at this moment in this beautiful place with all these amazing people with all these opportunities like Embrace that understand all the opportunity that we have here and how incredible like this is and just take advantage of it so I'm really excited to be here I'm going to be here all week my team will be here all week if you want to have questions about building software my whole team is here with the iGun team you don't even have to ask us about Igan L you can ask us about anything we're happy to help and that's it thank you okay so oh not that yet so we have one more um you could say expert at bidding so Nelson lie is uh this year already five hackathons is that right this year five hackathons already this year he comes from University of watero just he graduated early and he's going to share a bunch of tip tip and tricks on how to be successful in a very real world real-time way so if you're looking to understand like what are the shortcuts you know less about just the inspiration from Austin and nater but like the the the real intricate details he's going to give you the hacks so Nelson you ready all right come on up and you need to plug in right yes thank you it work it's on the screen okay so hey everyone I'm Nelson and normally hackathons are kind of like the squid games why I'm out here sharing all my tips and tricks well the thing is it's a collaborative environment it's about like having fun and cooperating with others so we're actually going to go into hackathons for noobs how to build so what do you need to actually build successfully at hackathon you only need one skill and that's problem solving you don't need prior coding experience you don't need like any special education all you need is like a desire to solve problems because of all the tooling out there right now being able to problem solve is 95% of the way there there's a few tools that are very useful for hackathons and those tools are just like getting to know how to install packages how to like upload to GitHub if you don't know how to do this chaty PT will have you so like don't worry like these are all the only steps you need to know the process of going through hackathon is you find a sponsor that you actually want to build on Whose technology seems kind of cool and then you read their docs to how to get started and a lot of them will have like a Yeezy guide for having a template start there build the basic one that works and then make it more advanced from there and the reason I say that is because you don't want to have like this really big vision and then get stuck halfway and kind of go like oh I don't know what to do next but by having a small working version first and then iterating from there you can actually make a really good project and feel like you're accomplishing something along the way as well as for why hackathons you want to you can learn new skills you can see what out there and like get out of your normal Tech stack bubble and explore like different Tech stacks and you have fun and also get some Chinese food because prize money equals redeemable for Chinese food at restaurants and now we go into a bit of a live uh demo so uh here's what like a quick intro of what you would actually do at hackathon you make your GitHub repo let's just create a new repo right now um create new repository live demo create publish always keep your code private because in case you publish any uh private Keys you never want them public once it's public for like even 5 Seconds you're gone so like always keep your private until the last minute and then let's try uh looking through the prize list this is kind of what you do to find like the prize that you actually want to do find out details that the sponsors that you want to go for if you want to win bounties are like good prize money but not a lot of competition and then talk to the actual sponsors themselves to kind of get a leg up on it but let's just say we want to make like a basic uh nft mentor on like some uh L2 side chain you can start with like AI so let's say um I just put down this mic for a second while I type this actually Jo to the front end for you and then you can kind of use like any other tool you want and be like uh let's say chbt it you can use the free version by the way there's like you don't have to pay for it just make a lot of accounts and you can never run out of coda this makes the backend contract and then what you do is just copy this code put it over into let's and then this you can deploy uh using any tool of your choice like hard hat or there's like a web based tool called remix super easy to do you don't even need how to code a lot of this uh as you can tell like these open Zepplin contracts are just pretty standardized contracts in the uh solidity space they're pre- audited so you kind of just extend it with like your parameters inputs and by this time our nft Mentor is actually already created um this actually not what we want we want a pre-existing one so um but we can just copy the code from here as well and then we just make some changes and then we'll actually have that ready as our own nft Minter solution so let's just uh call it sorry typing with one hand is hard it's the nextjs app because we're using uh vzer Dev but from here you can kind of change like uh all the stuff that you need to change to make it actually work so let me just uh do a different chat give me a sec I made this one earlier where we have demo let's use this one so we just have like nft Mentor we copy that code in and notice that we have a contract that we deploy uh this solidity contract once we deploy it on uh remix which is like a web- based uh ethereum deployment uh system or using hard hat uh you can just replace that uh contract ID that you get into uh here and this is really bad security but like if you put your private key here this whole front end will actually make the nft mint to your address of your choice never do this by the way but this is just for demo um and in literally like what 3 minutes we have a full nft minting solution that will look like this and you have a contract deployed as well so hackathons are actually not that hard to get started on um there's a variety of tooling as someone said earlier the tooling has gotten a lot better since before before you would have to like kind of read like the NF uh nfts how they work how to write solidity how to deploy solidity how to use hard hat but there's a lot of tooling right now that just lets you kind of automate all of that so pretty much anyone can get started and the remix site I was talking about was this so there's like a online IDE uh you paste that uh City contract that you generated into here and then you actually deploy onchain to like various test environments um and yeah that's like a basic scaffolding of a project that you can use to like make your own nfts of whatever so it's actually not too hard to get started uh some tips and tricks to remember is one um try to isolate your environment sometimes people will try to like uh say just install a package and test it out we'll actually pay you if they're not an official sponsor like don't trust them this hack this laptop is actually just for hackathons I use nothing on this laptop except for hackathons so on these wallets there's only test and tokens does not connect to Discord does not connect to telegram this laptop is just for hackathon so make sure you stay safe by keeping things secure never publish your environment uh variables onto your GitHub uh those are private Keys keep them private and then if someone ask you to do something your laptop you can always say no so like staying safe is the main thing because I met someone at hackathon last fall they published their private wallet key they got drained in like 10 seconds so yeah make sure you stay safe and that's SP all the tooling that you have it's I don't work for any of these companies but um yeah like uh you can use chaty BT or uh thropic or deep seek uh just to like any questions you have they'll actually generate all the code for you uh GitHub is kind of standard you do need to GI up to upload and compete for the hackathon just find out how it works you don't need to know like all the advanced GitHub stuff like rebase just need to know how to like push merge add done uh remix is very useful for smart contracts I think you need do smart contracts just uh look for remix ethereum.org um and then vzer nextjs that's like a full SCA like pretty much starting a full stack project that way you can make your front end and your back end uh they have their own generator that's really good for starting initially after it uh makes your initial project any editing it's probably better with chat gbt so yeah there's all kind of tools out there but as you can see we in four minutes we got like a basic uh App working that was like this where you click mint it'll actually call like uh this contract address which we would have made on uh remix uh with your private key and would have actually meant the contract to you using ether's JS there's lots of toolings out there um main thing is have fun get started the best time to start is yesterday the second best time to start is today so thank you very much that's the end of my Pres presentation if you have any questions uh yeah feel free to say hi or chh BT will also answer other questions good stuff give him a round of applause guys this is I mean this is kind of professional hacker stuff just blows my mind all right in again let's do it so we're going to take it down the home stretch you guys ready for this see did it get on there not yet uh yep nope yep okay where's my phone what did I do with it so what I'm doing right now is I just posted on X I'm going to randomly pick from people who like follow me and E Denver and comment all four like follow me e Denver and comment I'm going to randomly pick people to upgrade you to Spork whell status now if you don't know what Spork whell status is it's our version of V even though we don't like that term because it's kind of um I don't know played out so Spork whes where it's at there's a spork whell Lounge at the Main Event Hall there's also things that you get to do if you're a spork whale that you don't otherwise get to do so do that now otherwise what I do with my bag here okay so the swag stores y'all notice that we have more swag this year no nobody so I'm going to give away some swag after we're done here and we have really pretty cashmere scarves you see these there's uh several characters that we have I've got some Captain ethereum uh Plushies with me in my bag and I've also got oh man I I put it down there I gave it away I got some more here so everybody knows about Spork dough yes Spork to so we've done the gold sporks and we've done the iridescent or rainbow sporks so this year we have the dark spork so this is the magical tool that the regenerates use to fight off the DG and to actually bidle the decentralized future so if you want these you got to go up to the to the swag store and pick them up but I will be down here for 15 minutes or so after this is done and I'm going to give away my swag for free until it's gone so come talk to me come say hello and we'll do that so that's all we've got for kickoff folks we appreciate you uh we love our community we're so glad that you're here um we can't wait to hear about your experiences of exploration and where you go and what you do and all the cool things so let's Biddle Kick It Off