HodlerCon: a Layer Zero Decentralized Vacation

Hi everyone. We are here to talk about our decentralized vacation a slideshow. So we are from Luoda and I'm Dar Fire and I'm Ken uh or Dar and uh we are here to talk about HodlerCon. So some of you guys have probably never heard of that and that's cool but some of you have and that's cool too. So, uh, with that being said, I'm gonna have Jonathan Man sing us in [Music] with your bags intact.

Yeah. Did you remember the plans we made? It was a dream. It was a pack. In fact, June 15th, 2021.

If ETH was above the previous all time, then you sell a couple E packing family up to H A W A I I. Oh, so the battle is our honey. Oh, listen. I'll be somewhere. Thank you, Jonathan.

Man, so HodlerCon is a meme that became a reality. So, in the depths of crypto winter, we huddled together. Uh and our members are mostly from uh ETH staker, ETH finance and the Rocketpool Discord. Yeah, I think one of the key things that makes this unique is it's very much like this conference right here where um you know what what makes ETH Denver great is the community, right? That's what's bringing us here.

Uh it's the talk and the focus that we're so involved in. And what was really unique about this is that many people from the same community decided, wouldn't it be neat to go on vacation together? We could continue to talk all we want to about crypto. We could bring our family. We could do something fun along the way.

And we, you know, had the opportunity to meet a lot of people from these communities in a really great and exciting method. And these are people that we've known for years on the internet, right? And so the coolest thing was that we got to put faces to these anonymous identities that we had met on the internet over the course of our years in these different um Reddit communities and Discord communities. So like I said, I'm Doubt Stars. Um I'm the Hathercon program director and the community manager for Hathercon.

And I'm Ken. I'm part of the planning team with Lua Dao and also a very active member in the Rocket Pool discord. Yeah, you might have heard Ken's voice sometimes on the rocketpool calls. Uh he's a rocket scientist. I like how he just minimized like oh but uh it goes to show that our members are varied and diverse and especially from the communities that we come from.

But we wanted to tell you a little bit about Hathercon. So as Jonathan man said there's like a little bit of history for Hathercon. We love memes, uh, as a lot of people do in our community. And so it started out as a meme from Super Fizz. Some of you guys may know who he is, uh, to give us hope on Reddit uh, during the crypto winter.

And, uh, so the if we were going to actually go, right? Yep. If we were going to actually go was determined by the price of ETH on June 15th, 2021. And shockingly, ETH hit its all-time high. We hit the price.

And so, Hodlercon was a go. And I think this is one of the interesting things you'll see on it is that where we go and what we do is somewhat dependent upon the price of ETH, which makes it kind of a little bit of fun. Sometimes uh the the vacation part is out of our hands. But in this case, we did hit the all-time high, so it was definitely a go. uh people that had paid attention to the meme early on and just stacked away uh one ETH back then were able to afford a really nice family vacation.

Although the sad part is that ETH also hit its low when we were in Hawaii, but you know to each their own. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about some of the things that we learned. So what we learned uh spinning up a DAO is hard. Working with event planners as an anonymous organiz a a DAO and as anonymous people is hard. Uh planning an event for the first time is hard.

Uh getting sponsors is hard. But supporting people's right to be anonymous if they want to be anonymous. That's easy. And hanging out with our internet friends in Hawaii, that's pretty easy, too. That's pretty easy.

Yeah. So, uh, we had some really cool events. I'm going to show you some pictures. So, this is our WagMe pool party that was sponsored by Defi Saver. Um, we also had a welcome brunch when we first got there.

We were in Hawaii for 10 days. Do I should I like rub that in as we're braving the cold here in Colorado? Yeah. I think one of the interesting things is uh you know in in there that uh DS stars had mentioned is just you know it was really interesting to try to reach out to event planners and say hey we'd like to pay you in crypto and it was probably my first real world uh indication that it's hard to use crypto outside of this conference right um now it's getting much better right we've got the credit cards that are linked to the crypto accounts and for it but it was uh one of the challenges I don't think we fully anticipated uh as difficult as it was even though we were fully registered uh DAO in Wyoming um and an LLC. So, yeah, our DAO is an LLC.

It's a party planning LLC. Little did you know, but um we yeah, we went through like so many iterations of the DAO to like get where we are. And um the DAO itself is small, but the community is large and the community is what's important and the community is what's buil builds the event, right? Yep. Yep.

And and once the event came, you'll see from the photos here, it was actually a lot of fun. It went off with, I would say, without a hitch. Yeah. And we got these sweet Hawaiian shirts, as you guys can see in the picture. And there are other uh Hawaiian Hodler Con shirts floating around.

So, if you guys want to ask anyone that is wearing them, they will tell you about Hollercon. So, we had a Watch the Burn Sunset Party. Um, and we had the merge luau. Yeah. Yeah.

And it was great with uh you know the ability to kind of mass buy in bulk. We were able to get very um very good rates and discounts to have one of the best luau sites in all of uh Wy Ki or uh uh Aahu there. And it was great because uh the entire event we could just talk about all we wanted to talk about in the blockchain and web 3. Yeah. So obviously you can see a lot of our events were uh labeled based on like you know our own memes which made it really fun and uh each of the events.

So we didn't have events every day. It was an organic sort of thing. We had events every other day and then we had time for families to hang out and do their own thing in Hawaii, which is really cool because what happened was there just ended up being a bunch of organic plans between our attendees where people decided to go go have ramen, sing karaoke is always a big one, you know, uh go to the beach, go surfing. So, there were so many fun things that happened in Hawaii, but it was so much fun in 2022 that we want to do it again. We're doing it again.

So, this is where the beach bums come in. So, as a part of our Hodler Con tickets, um, we offered an NFT, uh, a Beachbomb NFT because one of the reasons was because of FOMO. Yeah. Everybody was launching an NFT project, so why would we not, right? Well, not just our FOMO, but a lot of people were uh they were like, "Oh, we can't make it to Hawaii for XYZ reason."

And they were like, "But we'd love to buy you a beer. We'd love to support you guys." And so, we created the Beach Bums just for that reason. Uh, but the cool thing too was that it was a part of our ticket offering. So if you bought a ticket to Hodler Con, you got a Beachbum NFT.

Um, and it actually proved to be quite useful because we needed some type of governance or voting thing as to what to what to do, where to go. And so this is kind of your voting ticket in terms of uh your your opinion in the Dow. So it's actually turned out to be quite useful. Yeah. So we still have Beach Bumps to mint.

Uh if you guys want to check it out, you can find them at hodlercon.com and click on the beach bumps. Uh but it's important like Ken said because we're using the beach bums as our voting tool for our DAO. So Hawaii was the original meme that created HodlerCon, but in 2024 we didn't have another meme, so we had to come up with it. Yeah.

So So the the the next one's going to be pretty interesting. You'll see where we where we get to go, right? it still depended upon the um the price of ETH and the vote. So um we decided to take some historic numbers from the price of ETH and we have three price bands that we're using and all of our locations were submitted by our u from our Reddit community and from our Discord. But so these three price bands are based on the historic numbers.

So, the first price band, the lowest one, is up to $1,400. Uh, what this means, so I think I need to back up a little bit. What this means is that HodlerCon is happening no matter what. No matter what the price of ETH is. So, the original plan was that HodlerCon was going to happen if the price of ETH hit $1,400.

Now, it's Hollercon's happening. What's the price going to be? So, we have different um options for each of these price bands. So, 1400 was the previous all-time high. Then 4,800 is the most recent all-time high, which is our middle price span.

And then 4,800 to 31250. Yeah. What's 31250? So, so 31250 uh is is set based upon the price of a validator, right? Yeah.

31250 is a million dollar validator. So if p the price hits 40 o anything over that validators will be worth a million dollars and then uh we might just buy a private island and name it loud or hollercon or something. So um if you want to see those locations I'm not going to read them all out. Um but you can visit holllercon.com.

You can click on uh the website. There's a link to our new locations. There's a link to information about voting. Um, so this is where I kind of like shill a little bit. If you guys want to join us, if you want to join our DAO, if you want to join our organization, if you want to come vacation with us, uh, we're pretty cool people.

We talk about crypto a lot. We do. We do. And I got to tell you on those price bands, if you get a chance to look at look at the website, uh, one of our members wrote up some of the most creative descriptions about a vacation using Ethereum and blockchain terms. And it's actually just kind of fun to to read the copy on it, but there's there's one that was again started out as a meme.

Hopefully, we don't we don't we don't go there because of the price, but uh there there's one called Goblin Town. There's actually a place called Goblin Town, a real place. And it turns out that it's actually pretty interesting place to visit. And what I find interesting, at least in our family when we were voting because everybody had a had their uh their um their beach bums and was was voting on it that it actually turned out to be our number one choice out of all of them. So part of the family hopes the price reaches that thing.

The other part of the family, myself, doesn't doesn't want the price to reach there. But maybe we'll have to visit um Goblin Town, Virginia. Is it Goblin Town Creek, Virginia? There it is. Uh there's a state park there.

But um so if you want to join us, you can join our discord. The link is on our website. You could buy a beach bomb. Like I said, still available to mint. Um you can once you buy that beach bomb, you can vote for a location like I don't know, Portugal.

I would love to go to Portugal. Um there's a lot of really crypto friendly locations in our in our price bands. So I also would like to thank our sponsors. So, we had three sponsors from for HodlerCon 2022. Um, DeFi Saver, as you saw, they gave us some really sweet swag.

Those Defi Saver towels are awesome. I told Nicola that. Um, East Stagger and EY. Yeah. And I think this was kind of an interesting thing.

It was it was an odd pitch to go to a you know, a firm and say, "Hey, would you sponsor a Ethereum conference that may look a lot like a vacation?" Um we we we we didn't know quite quite what would the response what the response would be but um one of the things we found is they actually really appreciated the small kind of intimate crowd and the ability to uh get feedback from them. Yeah. So that was really cool. And it's also really hard to ask sponsors to sponsor you when you don't have any like rep.

So at least we have some rep now. We've actually had a conference. We had attendees. it happened and it's gonna happen again. So, if you would like to sponsor us, we're great.

We would love that. Um, you can reach out to HodlerCon on Twitter in their DMs or you can reach out to us. We have a sponsor form that you can submit that will be linked on our website later today. So, I have one last thing before we end. Um, Hollercon is helping sponsor a pizza party.

So, we are co-sponsoring with Pizza Dow uh pizza party here at ETH Denver. If you want to come and talk to us and ask us more about the DAO, about Leo DAO, about HolllerCon, uh we'll be there repping in our Hawaiian shirts. Uh we are excited to partner with them to uh sponsor HodlerCon Hawaiian Drink Happy Hour. One of the things you can do, we don't have the QR code up here, but if you just simply go to Eventbrite and type in uh pizza dow in Eventbrite, uh it should pull up. You can grab your tickets for it.

Just kind of do that now. Grab a ticket. There's going to be some other really unique dows there. But certainly spend time, enjoy some of the Hawaiian drinks that we're providing and come talk to us a little bit if uh this talk piqu your interest about a decentralized vacation that's very crypto friendly. Thank you guys so much.