ETHGlobal New York 2025 Opening Ceremonies I Kartik Talwar

[Music] Good evening everybody. My name is Cartek. I'm one of the co-founders of ETH Global and I'm super excited to welcome all of you to ETH Global New York 2025. This is not a conference. You are at an ETH Global event.

Our mission is to onboard thousands of developers into the Web3 ecosystem and we are here this weekend to build cool stuff at this hackathon. We started seven and a half years ago and the principles that got us together were around making sure that we do something for the builders in our space and make this community more robust and make the foundation even stronger. This whole weekend is about building things and actually making ideas come to life. The best part about how we structure this is that this is an opportunity for you to learn, get help, and just grow as builders. Whether it's getting technical help to understanding how something works or going deeper into fully understanding how something was constructed or the problems that might be still unsolved that you get to contribute to.

And the most important thing about this weekend is that we believe showing is way more important than telling. Which means you should be showing off what you built and not just talking about ideas. Slide decks are not allowed. You cannot submit a project with just slides as well. You have to show people functional code.

Get people's feedback and actually put thoughts into actions. All of this started in 2017 when we did our very first event in Waterlue. People loved it so much that we basically had to make this a real thing and do more the year after. And things kept kind of growing so naturally that it became more than just a fun thing for us. And we had to set this up as a much bigger operation.

We went across all different parts of the world, scaled things up, got to this weird place in 2020 where we did things in person and async. The next year was all async, but the best part about it was we could 10x our race immediately and we ended up going from hosting a few thousand people to tens of thousands in a single year. Things continued right after COVID. We got to check off a few other continents, few other cities, got more and more people involved, got to super big in scale and finally kind of made this in operation. We got to really bring thousands of people per month into this space.

Last year was such an amazing thing for us because not only did we do six events, but we also hit off our sixth continent and hosted our biggest ever event in Bangkok with 3,000 builders. I know that's big. Whoever shouted, thank you. And the part that is amazing to me is that over the last seven and a half years, we've done over 210 events, got over 150,000 people in this space who've come in from 152 different countries. We've kept everything free for everybody who's attending.

Got more people to get into education. There's been 2,700 videos that we produce on how to use different protocols, technical deep dives, interviews with founders. The builders have created 14.7,000 projects so far. We're definitely going to hit 15,000 this week.

We've given $15 million in prizes and the companies that have come out of Eat Global since our beginning have raised collectively over $500 million. And that's just the ones we can count. And come to 2025, we're already on a roll with 50% of the event calendar done. We started the year with Taipei, went to Prague. Last month, we were at HCC in Khan.

And for our fourth event of the year, we're back in New York. There's over 950 attendees here. 690 of them are hackers. They're here from 210 unique cities from 51 countries, six continents, and 37 of bu percent of builders are brand new to web 3, which means they're builders and engineers and existing web 2 ecosystem, and they're trying crypto contracts for the first time. You can see where everybody's coming from.

I constantly am amazed that people travel to where we are when our entire value prop is will go to where you are. And uh seeing people from six continents and so many different countries is absolutely incredible. I personally get to meet people who come from our online events and meet us in person for the first time. So if you're one of them, come say hi to me. Chances are we've already talked somewhere online and would love to say hi in person.

Not only just the hackers, 192 partner representatives and 21 dedicated technical mentors are here to help you this entire weekend 247. and we did 22 workshops today on how to use the latest protocols. And because this is not a conference, there are exactly zero talks. The best part about all this thing is that we're giving away over $275,000 in prizes. We're going to cover how you can win these prizes and I'm going to cover some important things you need to know in just a couple minutes.

There's 27 amazing partners that are helping make this possible. So, I'm going to give everybody a massive shout. So please join me in giving a massive round of applause to some of our partners starting with Coinbase developer platform flow layer zero uh artificial superintendent alliance chainling chili circle dynamic ens flare hyera hyperlink katana ledger nora openc pipd the graph unis swaw foundation walrus circuits fern gemini hard hat lid privy and saga all of them are here you get to talk to them you get to learn from them you get to use their stack to simplify your building and they're also giving away so many prizes that Uh it's going to be very hard to list all of them. So I'll try my best. Now I want to take the next few minutes to cover all the important things you need to know for this weekend.

Uh we're going to start off with the most obvious thing which is the hackathon has kicked off. You can start hacking on your projects. Now the rules are very simple. You can start working on anything you want. There's no theme.

There is no list of things that you can build or you should build. Anything that you're excited about, you get to build and we want to support you. And you can work on your projects with up to five members. That means you can have yourself or four other people join you in submitting a project. You have the next 36 and a half hours to hack, give or take 10 minutes.

And submissions are due at 9:00 a.m. on Sunday to qualify for any prizes. Everything you're doing must start from scratch, which means that everybody is starting from the same place. And you cannot add features to something you've been working on in the past.

So no pre-existing work is allowed. We of course recommend that you use a lot of boilerplate code and open source software that's properly licensed is allowed. So you don't have to start everything from scratch. So you still get to use a lot of the SDKs. Any of our partners who have boilerplate codes that you get to clone and add things to, totally allowed.

Any open source things you've seen, whether it's a D5 protocols interface or any React library, boiler plate, all those things totally fine for you to use as long as you can trace how you got to those commits. And if you're not RSVPd, you don't get to win any prizes. So make sure that if you are working on a team, your team members are listed on the team page because the second you press submit and somebody was not there, if you win a prize, they will not get that share. We of course want to make sure that this event is open to anybody for any skill set. So there's a lot of things that you get to learn from for depending on where you are in in your development of building on Solidity and EVM.

So there's all this content for builders who are brand new to this, which is all the workshops if there's there's expert content for everybody else. And we have literally 2,000 plus videos on how you can use almost every single protocol out there. And all that is available for you on our YouTube channel, including the 22 workshops that happened just a couple hours ago. We also have a lot of links for getting started on best practices for smart contract development, security practices, deploying things, using multi-chain, making safe kind of code, and all that is on your info center. You can just see the links to our curated list of resources.

Now, let's talk about some of the venue stuff. Security. This venue is going to be open 24/7 and these wristbands are your entry into this building. If you don't have these wristbands on you, you will not be allowed back in the building, especially at night. So, please make sure you don't take these wristbands off.

And please make sure you also have your event badges because security will be tight given that all of your valuables are here. Simple rule. If you don't have your wristband, you will not be allowed. Doesn't matter who you are. Doesn't matter what happened to it.

Doesn't matter if your wrist was itching. Something happened. Come with a wristband. We can swap things. We can change things.

Don't lose it and don't forget it. Also, do not leave your stuff unattended. Again, this is open 24/7. While there is security, we recommend that you still keep your valuables and just don't go leave and come back assuming everything is going to be where you put it. And don't make a mess.

Please keep things tidy. Yes, we're going to be cleaning up stuff, especially if it's not properly disposed of, but try to treat this like your own home. And if your home is dirty, try to treat it like someone else's home. I don't know. Don't make a mess.

On the internet piece, we are putting a lot of time and effort in making sure the internet does not slow down for anybody. So, do not use hotspots because the second you do that, you turn that band on on your phone, it affects the entire Wi-Fi region around you and it's going to impact the signal ratio for our own Wi-Fi and the person sitting next to you will now have impacted speeds. If the internet is not working for you, just tell us where you're sitting. We're going to send one of our network engineers who are here 24/7 to literally monitor and fix and test it and we'll just prove that it's working slowly or working as expected. And one other note for all of you is that if you move places with your laptop, your computer will try to connect to the last access point you were.

So if you move 10 feet away, you're going to still be trying to on the connect to the router. So if you change places, just turn the Wi-Fi off and on again. It'll connect to the closest router and the speed will go back to where it was. Other things about the schedule, the website is going to be the source of truth. If something is running behind, we update the website first and then we tell everybody that this thing has changed.

All that is on the website. This is our HQ for managing the entire event. So if you're curious about when something happens, website will always be the latest information. And the communication for this weekend will be on Discord. All of our official announcements are put there and the discord channels are only open to people who are attending and are in this building which means the permissions are automatically set and you can freely talk to anybody who's here including our partners and our mentors and you just get support directly.

So if you have questions about how to use certain protocol you get to put those questions in in that channel. And the best thing about that is not only are people who are in the building from that protocol reading those they also have other employees who are remotely reading those and still helping you. So, you can still get super high coverage on time if you use Discord and ask for help with all those things. And don't forget that you're in person. You can talk to each other.

Um, shout if you want to get somebody to help you with React or some other bug. Chances are the person sitting next to you has done something similar or the person sitting next to them has and you actually get to learn from each other. But I would recommend using Discord. Uh, on to venue, food, and activities. This venue is three floors.

All the hacking is here with the main stage. That's where you are now. Upstairs, second floor is food and the third floor is where the workshops were, but also where judging is going to be on Sunday. That's all you need to remember. You can still work out of there on the third floor over the weekend, but Sunday is where judging will be.

And everything else happens all over in this floor. We're obviously going to make sure you're all well fed. There's snack stations that are available 247, sn hot and cold beverages, all those things. And and the thing I'm noticing is that the only people putting their cameras up or to take a photo of this slide and no other slide I've given all the event information for. So I know where everybody's priorities are, but you're going to have brunch, dinner, and a midnight snack tomorrow.

And then Sunday will be breakfast and lunch. And for our midnight snack, we'll be doing New York style pretzels uh tomorrow at midnight. So, if you're still around, get to enjoy some special treats from New York City. There's also a gaming lounge on the third floor now, so you get to play some retro games, uh, especially from NES and GBA. So, give that a try if you're bored or if you're done your project early and just have some fun.

And if you haven't already taken a photo yet with your team, check out the photo booth. It's right next to uh the registration area on my right and your left. And you get a digital version of uh this photo on the spot. So, you get to email this to yourself. And uh I would recommend taking a photo now and then the same people on Sunday just to see how you slept.

And if you also haven't taken your swag bags yet, you can go back to the registration and collect your swag bag, which includes not only just the amazing tote, but some basic self-care stuff, a sweater that you can use, of course, in in the summer in New York, and a really amazing set of stickers that our team built, and uh you get to enjoy some really creative memor memorabilia of the city and Ethereum. Now, quickly talking about being on chain, there's two things that we're doing to help make this entire space cool for us, but also to show you that things are actually ready and possible. Every wristband on your in here and on your wrist is a special chip that is sec 256 compatible, which means that every wristband is a proper Ethereum wallet. It can sign transactions, it can receive money, and you can just go to arcs.org or to actually program and use the SDK and do things on the browser.

This also means that every wristband actually is unique to the person that's holding it. And it's personalized to you. So if you meet a hacker, if you meet a sponsor, if you meet a judge, if you meet somebody from the global team, you can tap the wristband on someone's phone. You just need the browser. It'll open up a link and you get to connect with them directly and they get to choose if they want to share some information or all information about them.

So you can get their Discord, Telegram, email based on their own settings. and you can see who have you met and uh you don't have to worry about exchanging contacts and this is awesome and all these things become attestations on chain and we publish this thing on the EES network on optimism and you can kind of see how the events were done there's also a faucet for all the developers here so you don't have to worry about understanding how do I get test net tokens and we have that for 18 different chains you can just head over to eglobal.com/faucet let's talk about prizes a lot of prizes are being given $275,000 to be exact. And when you have to summit your projects on Sunday, you'll be asked to make a choice between which prize track you want to go for. You can pick the partner only track, which means only the prizes from our partners.

And there's also a finalist track which lets you get additional prizes on top of the partners. This is not really a choice. It means that if you're going the finalist track, you can get you you automatically qualify for both. But if you only pick the partner one, you only get the partner prizes. The way partner prizes work is fairly straightforward.

You can choose up to three partners to win prizes for. It doesn't mean you can't use more than three. You can use as many integrations as possible, but you can only qualify for three partner prizes. And that means three protocols and companies, not three individual prizes. If a company is doing seven different prizes, you get to qualify for all seven of them, but it's just still one company as a selection.

All that happens on your dashboard. All you have to do is just make sure to click the right logos to see which three are you picking and they will get notified of your team name and you get to be looked at from their project directly. The finalist track however lets you qualify to be one of the top 10 projects from this hackathon. Finalist projects are like the be the best projects that come out of this event and they get to showcase what they build to everybody on Sunday and do live demos on stage. And this has no effect on you being qualified for the partner prize, which means that you can still try to be a finalist even if you use zero partner prizes because those are entirely separate processes and entirely different things in terms of how the criteria is going to be set.

So not only do you get bragging rights for being one of the top 10 projects from this event, you also get to win a lot more cool things and that's part of the finalist pack that's minted on chain. If you are a finalist, every finalist team member will get ETH global access plus access for 12 months. A,000 USDC on top of any other prizes they win, a $500 flight credit to the next hackathon. We're throwing onchain proof of being a finalist which ends up getting access to different protocols with early access through NFT whitelisting. We also do a lot of events with different founders to help them help you showcase and learn about how to grow from a hackathon project to something more.

So you get to join those events all across the world. And for those of you who are interested in taking your projects to more than just a hackathon thing, then we have a lot of credits for you to do so, which includes thousands of dollars of AWS credits, other web3 integrations, and even discounts for getting security audits. And the re the way you get to qualify for being a finalist is you must follow these four conditions. You must start from scratch, which every project, every team has to. There must be a very audible repository on GitHub.

So you can't just commit two commits with a million lines and put an initial commit. That's not auditable. We don't know where that came from. We need to be able to see how things started from the very first boiler plate to the last thing. And it must be open source, deployed, and live so that people can actually use it and test it.

And you have to physically be here to demo what you built. That's the qualification. And all that happens on Sunday. And if you haven't already talked to our spotlight teams yet, we have four boots on your left at the back who are our spotlight projects. And these are some of our finalists from the last couple of events.

And we're giving them space and this will apply to all of you in the future events to actually showcase what what you did at the hackathon and where things are now. A lot of things are becoming more than just fun projects. So you get to talk to these, you get to play with some of these tools. A lot of them I mean they are live and uh you get to give them feedback to help improve these things to be more accessible by the market. Now after you figure out what the prizes, I want to talk about how judging is going to work.

Submissions are due at 9:00 a.m. and that's when you have to pick all the prizes. And when you do so, you're going to have to pick which track you're going for. Do you want to go for partner only or partner and the finalist track?

The thing to keep in mind is that all these things happen at the same time from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. So if you're going for the partner judging route, you have to present to every company that you're selecting for.

But if you do the finalist one, you have to do the partners plus one of a separate judging route. So max four demos allowed per team. So you have to make sure that you get to watch for your timing and go in to the right place. To repeat, partner judging lets you qualify only the partner and all of that. And finally, judging lets you also qualify all partners, but then additional prizes to be one of the top 10 teams for this event.

The way partner judging works is that you just have to select the three logos and the partners will get a list of who to expect at the tables. All partners will have a table here on Sunday and you'll also be able to see where to find each other companies. And because it's a three-hour window, you can go in and out whenever in any order you want. So if you see a smaller line somewhere, you go and present to them, change the order, go to the next place. Everything behaves on first come first serve.

So if you're doing the finalist judging upstairs, if you're in front of the line, you're should be ready to demo. And the second you get there, you will plug your laptop in, we'll do those demos. So the order doesn't matter as long as you check off all the demos you wanted to do. But the thing to keep in mind is that the the sponsors here, our partners are going to be looking at the submission page more than the thing that you're going to show at their booth. So doing a demo is great, but make sure that you do a really really good job of talking about how something works with the description talking about how you're integrating certain things and possibly including a demo that they can watch on their own.

And also look at the code because if something doesn't work or if your project stops working or if the internet's slow or you don't get to them because you're waiting on the other demos, you don't want that to be affected. So they'll look at the submission page, not what you show at the desk. The way finalist judging works is that you have to also do a live demo which is going to be four minutes and you'll get three more minutes for Q&A. We require you to do a video submission as part of this the process. So you have to record a video demo that you get to put on your showcase page and that becomes a supplemental way for the judges to look at and revisit a project as they're making their final selection.

Doesn't matter if you're finalist judge or if you're going for the finalist track or just a partner only track. It'll take you at least 45 minutes to finish the submission process. So we really recommend that you don't do this thing last minute. Submissions are open now. You can see all the things that you need to fill out and you really have to go in a lot more detail.

We ask you to link specific lines in your code where you're using a different protocol. It'll take you some time because you have to be thorough in explaining how you use something. So don't do this thing last minute. Check things out now and then be ready for this on Sunday. and add all the details.

All that happens on your dashboard. And from doing this thing for almost 15,000 projects, I can tell you that the best odds you're going to have in getting your point across for what you built is if you record a video that shows a functional demo. Do more demo and less slides, whether you're presenting to our finalist judges or partners, and use get and get properly. If a partner or our judges for the finalist track don't really know how you did something or what was done before or after or they're not sure if you actually did everything over the weekend, they're going to look at GitHub and if they don't see a good trace, then you automatically get disqualified. And add as much description as you can and screenshots because it gives you and them a lot more visibility.

So kind of to summarize all these things, make the submission good. That one page not only represents you the best on just the internet, but it helps simplify so many cases where there is a follow-up that's needed and you can just save a lot of back and forth by being more thorough on the submission process. I said a lot of things and I'm sure you're going to have some questions. So, if you have any other follow-ups or if I didn't cover anything, you can find me or anybody else on our team to uh to clarify those things. And to quickly talk about how you can get help, we have mentors basically in the audience and they're going to be here all this time.

And there's a mentor station is a physical desk and you can also message them on Discord. They'll be monitoring those channels. They'll be taking shifts. So, you can literally find somebody at 3 p.m.

and at 3:00 a.m. How do you identify a mentor? These construction workers are actually helping you build your projects. So, anybody with this vest on is a mentor and you can get help from them on any topic.

You can also see who they are on your hacker dashboard and uh reach out to specific people if you'd like. You can email us, you can find us on Discord, and you can also find somebody on our team at the registration desk the entire time. So, don't hesitate to ping us to get any clarification. Now, I want to quickly also talk about our code of conduct. Everything that you need to know is on ethglobal.

com/ruules, but the summary of it is please be respectful to everybody here. Harassment and abuse in any form will not be tolerated towards anybody. And the most important part here is that anything that you build here is going to be equally owned by the whole team for the IP rights, which means neither ETH global, none of our partners nor anybody else has any rights to your work. So you get to do whatever you want with your project and if you have five people on your team, all five of them have the same rights to do whatever they'd like from the point of submission onwards. Now I want to bring on a few people here on stage to tell you about who they are, what excites them, and how you can save a lot of time using their SDKs to simplify some building process for you.

So I'm going to bring some of them on. They'll get a minute or two to talk about their protocols and the work they're doing. And without further ado, I'd like to first invite Josh from the Coinbase developer platform to share a few words. Please give Josh a big round of applause. [Applause] All right, I got two minutes to help you win $5,000 this weekend.

So, let's go. Uh, I'm here with Coinbase Developer Platform. We are putting up four $5,000 prizes this weekend. And just like our developer experience, we're keeping this dead simple. Just build something awesome using our platform.

Build something that's going to bring the world on chain. You can use any of the products that we have that are listed on the slide here. I'm not going to go through them all. You're welcome to come talk to us. Check out our docs.

I would love to talk about them with you. We've got everything that you need to build an awesome onchain app. Um, if you want to boost your chances, use multiple products. Each of our products, whether it's wallets or data or X42, is an amazing product and an amazing developer tool in its own right. We think they're even better when you use them together.

And we've built them very thoughtfully in a way that makes them delightful for you to use together. Um, give us great feedback. We're we're here because there's no substitute for being on the ground with you with onchain builders, aspiring onchain builders, uh, wherever you're at in your journey. We want to hear what are you struggling with? what can we do to improve our products and make your developer experience really great.

So give us great feedback that's going to count towards, you know, kind of boosting your score and and your odds of winning. And then lastly, t post your whatever you're building, post it on socials, tag us. We'd love to see it. We'd love to amplify you. Um, that's all I got.

Excited to see what you build. LFB. Thanks. [Applause]

Thanks, Josh. Next up, I want to bring on to talk about flow. Please give him a big round of applause. [Applause]

Thanks so much, Cartik. Uh, guys, this never gets old coming to these events, seeing all these amazing builders here. So, very excited to be here. Um, oh, is my clicker not clicking? There we go.

Um, build on flow. That's my message. Uh so uh flow is the home for killer apps and the best builders. Uh flow is the only blockchain built by people who built decentralized apps and then decided they needed a better tool for them to build better applications. So we truly believe that you can build applications on flow that are impossible elsewhere.

Last year we released we did a major release called Crescendo. Um and uh since that has happened, we have seen massive adoption. We have been the number one growing ecosystem uh by developer count um over the last uh year. Um we've doubled our TVL this year. We've had I think more finalists than anybody else at ETH global events over the last year.

Um and we just love uh working with the hackers here. Um what we see is that people who are at ETH global they love to take make use of Cadence. Cadence is a programming language again designed and built by people who written smart contracts which shockingly enough no other smart contract programming language can say. Um but of course we also have full EVM experience if you're coming in with a bunch of solidity uh experience or you want to uh extend some existing solidity code uh flow is right there with you with full EVM equivalents. Um and one of the features people love taking advantage of is our native random function.

Um, so you get a full VR off onchain um instantly uh available uh synchronously. Um we're very excited this year and we want super pe people to get super pumped and excited about uh actions and agents. Um actions and actions enable really effortless um composability and agents are onchain triggers. Very excited about this stuff. Actions are ready to build with today and we'll be giving out prizes for people using actions.

So please go and check those out and uh agents will not be coming until the mainet upgrade which is coming in September uh sorry October end of September. Um so please get ready for the Forte update and uh we have three big prizes. We're going to have just the best killer app on Flow. You decide what you want. Uh the best use of actions and we have a pool prize for everyone building on Flow.

We just share that equally. Um, so thanks to everyone uh who comes out and enjoy yourselves and please uh talk to myself or the rest of the team uh to build on flow. Um we'd love to help you.

Amazing. And last but not least, I want to bring on Matt to tell you all about layer zero. Please give him a big round of applause. Hello, ETH Global New York. All right.

Uh for those of you who don't know, layer 0ero is crypto's largest interoperability standard. Layer zero has been around now for four years just making it easier to move any type of state value information between blockchain networks. We account for 86% right now of all value transferred between chains today. So very very excited to allow you the builders here at ETH global to experiment more with how we move information between blockchains whether that's NFT transfers ERC20 tokens you know the list goes on and on with how you can use layer zero for any type of pointto-point communication between some of the lovely partners that we have here this week. So very very excited.

If you're building on Flow, Hideera, Flare, Coinbase, Zirket, any of the other partners that you see listed here, feel free to integrate layer zero as a way to move messages between blockchains and use it as a way to really abstract user experience in a way that helps a lot of developers keep moving forward. um some of the things that you can build with layer zero. If you're looking for ideas still to get started, you can build on the chain tokens, governance, uh lots and lots and lots of different application use cases up here on the board. And starting today, you are actually the first to hear about omni chain vaults. Um omni chain vaults is a new standard that layer zero is releasing for ERC 4626 vaults.

Uh before if you were to interact with a ERC 4626 vault, you would have to make sure that your vault is on the chain that you want to interact with and then only deposit assets on that single chain. With OAL, the ERC 4626 standard we released today, you can now deposit assets on any chain into a vault on what you define as your hub. So if my vault is deployed on base, I can deposit from arbitum and receive those shares on any connected chain all in a single transaction from the user uh experience. Uh for those of you who are interested in building on OAL, we have some lovely prize categories. We're giving out $12,000 to best omni chain interaction and 7500 for best def.

So best of luck. Come find us at the booth in the back. Thank you guys. So

thanks Matt. All right, before we wrap things up, there's a lot more other prizes that we're giving away. There's $275,000 to be exact. CDP Flow and Lzor are giving up to $20,000 each. These 18 companies are giving up to $10,000 each.

And then you have these six companies giving 5,000 each. All the information here is on the price page, which is on the website. Not only can you see what qualifies for a prize and what they're looking for, what definitely does not count for a valid submission, you can see boilerplate codes, you can see workshop videos, you can see direct links to documentation, and you also get to see what others might be building. So, you also get to understand what others are using directly on the prizes page. So, check all of that out.

If you're still looking for a team or looking for ideas in just 15 minutes on the third floor, we're going to be doing a team building session where you get to meet up with others who are also looking to get people for specific skills or looking for ideas. And the last thing I want to mention is you should pace yourself. We don't want this thing to be an exhausting weekend for you. The goal here is to have fun and learn new things. If you end the weekend with just a little bit more information on how to do something slightly better than you did today, that's still a success.

And you can absolutely show not fully finished projects to the judges because our goal is to give you feedback. So don't use that as a reason to feel like you didn't get to where you wanted to be. We want to show incremental things um and be proud of the things that we were able to achieve in the next 36 hours. So this is very much about learning. And with that, happy hacking.

We'll see you all on Sunday. [Music]