Jerome de Tychey - EthCC Opening Ceremony

[Music] Star again. create a new start again. I started again adventure New starting again. Christmas. Hey, hey, hey.

hey, hey. Hey. Hey. [Music] Wow. And the sound is amazing.

Okay. Welcome to HCC. Damn, we made it again. ETC, welcome. Yep.

Every year it gets more intimidating. So now we have one of the most beautiful venue in the world. Um, and I want to take this time to say thank you to my producer. Uh, thank you to my mom who without whom I wouldn't be there today. Uh I I envisioned that I could do this uh opening talk in a tuxedo but as you seen outside it's pretty hot.

Uh but the air conditioning this year is pretty good as well. So I'm uh delighted to be in t-shirt anyway. So guys welcome to K. You heard it already. If you're from France he's a nonprofit uh based in France since active since 2015.

Um we're we're independent. Uh ETC is a nonprofit conference and we work relentlessly every year since 2015 to give you Ethereum contents and host ETCC. So please if you want to contribute, if you want to chat even if you are not French speakaking uh we are English speaking as well. Come talk to us. The association France has membership for €10 per year.

It's a small contribution to help us pay for the beers at the meetups. Uh but also like if you just want to join the discord and uh and vent that you like or what you don't like about HCC, please come talk to us. We are very open and very glad to have direct feedback. Nevertheless, when you go to HCC, at the end of HCC, you get a feedback form where you can tell us everything that went right, everything that went wrong, and we take really, really, really, really, really good care about those feedbacks and make sure that we implement the in-n-outs for next years. So yes, we can.

We are here today and I hope you have uh had a tremendous time picking up your badges, walking on the red carpet and see what we are bringing to this community in GAN. Uh there's thousands of people that are not really accustomed into crypto. They don't know anything about blockchain. They don't know anything about Ethereum. And suddenly boom, we're in the middle of that town.

This is a great occasion for them to understand and um discover what blockchain is about. We were looking for a very modular space to be able to uh adapt to our needs here. Uh we were looking for something to reach outside of the EU and I know that a lot of people flew into Nice. It's one of the largest airports in Europe. Uh hopefully the border went right and you didn't have any trouble to get in.

As if you're from France, we try to be close to French speaking countries because it's our core communities and can really match that. If you have kids, do know there is a kindergarten to um welcome your kids and uh and keep them uh uh hydrated and entertained for the for the day when you are walking around the conference. And what's beautiful with this place is that it can it can accommodate thousands and thousands of people. One thing that we got in the in the in the feedback from the previous years was the side events are too spread out. We cannot walk around.

It's impossible to reach. We spend our time in the traffic jams and so on. So hopefully in can you also get this sense of everything is close by. Everything is easily reachable. Everything can be walked to uh for about 30 minutes or you can take a cab for uh 3 to 5 minutes to reach it.

And many of you are looking at dcc as the way to end their years or almost end their years and get ready to kickstart September or finish July and kickstart September. Well, the south of France also give you a pretty good place to do a team retreat or to go on holiday uh if you are into that. Anyway, we're trying to keep the conference accessible to everyone. And I give you some um some insights about how we do it. But we wouldn't be in K if it wasn't for the pal festival, the festival palace that is hosting us today.

Uh they've been extremely kind and extremely welcoming and made our life really really easy. Uh so we are really really grateful for them to help us out on this on this conference with also the help of the city the town of K the can desert. So please give a round of applause for those two big partners of us. The mayor of K will give a a small welcome at the at the appitivo for the speakers later today. Uh make sure you get to to speak to him.

He is extremely crypto friendly and you may see this sticker here um on different shops inside of K. In preparation for um the conference we went to host a small uh get together of all the the brick and mortar shops in KN. They were like do you accept crypto? What do you think about crypto? And amazingly enough 40% of them were already accepting crypto and very friendly to uh to this new form of payment to this new form of assets.

So you will find friendly people to talk about crypto in every place it can. But ECC wouldn't be what it is without Crypto Life and Robin Hood, our two main sponsor for this conference. So please give it up. Thank you for both of them for supporting us. This year we have several Ruby sponsors that have been for some of them recurring for some of them coming to the first time.

Latitude, Polygon, Lido, OKX, Somnia, Baze, Ledger, lots of returning sponsors. One in circles, Zirwit, World and Treasure this year. Um, yeah, Cryptolife and Robin Hood and the Ruby sponsors, they have amazing booths uh all over the palace. Please walk around, come to say hi, collect some swag, ask them about what they are doing. uh some teras also in the same space like coffees specialty coffees, foods and uh even um even ice creams and so on.

So make sure you visit the palace. It's really beautiful. And we also have the wagme sponsors which I'm not going to go through all of them because it's a little bit tiny from where I'm sitting. Uh those ones have booths that are uh standing for a few days over the four days. Uh so you get to meet different people and you get to see different swag different booths all over the place.

So again, round of applause for them. They are really making this conference possible. [Applause] Okay, let's look a bit back because um usually at this um at this opening talk I'm like this is the Wi-Fi and this year the Wi-Fi is working so smoothly that you wouldn't have to to get it on the slides anyway. So over the last eight years we went from this to that. Ah quite a quite a journey if you ask me.

Um I want to give you a sense about what it is to build a conference like this as a nonprofit. What is the budgeting rational? Well, pretty simple. We look at the dates that we are thinking that we can organize in. So maybe 12 months in advance, 10 months in advance, 8 months in advance if we are really crazy.

We find a venue. We start to have a budget of what it would cost to host the people, to live stream everything, to give you catering everything and so on. And as a nonprofit uh we cannot declare any profit otherwise we get reclassified and everything goes to taxes. So we try to make sure that we are at cost. We divide by the number of um of attendees and here you go you get a you get a breakdown between what you ask for the sponsor and what you ask to the to the attendees.

So when I say this conference is brought to you by the sponsors I mean it they are the one that help us keep this conference price friendly and also that help us uh offer tickets to students. So we have about u 400 um students that got a ticket for free to this conference and as we grow the conference we try to make sure that we can host the same conference every year. So the rational in term of growth for us is that we we keep 20% extra of eventually selling more sponsors selling more tickets and we use those extra to grow for the next year. So how do we plan for next year? We look at how many people came to the actual HCC of this year and we say, "Hey, we're going to do the same, but let's keep room for 20% more and try to grow from one year to the next."

And we look at the price point, uh, €125 per day on a on a full tickets 500. It's roughly the same for other community conference. If you look at what's going on in Prague, what's going on in Berlin and different Ephraim events all over the Europe, this is what is normal to charge to the attendees if you want to give them snacks all day and food and so on. So, our journey uh this production year has been quite challenging. The max capacity of the venue is what we have to struggle with.

Funnily enough, in Paris, it's quite hard to find the place that can host more than 2,000 people. um you go immediately into the 20k plus people write up uh finding an in between is pretty hard and also the city of Paris wasn't too crypto friendly and it still not so we have some we had some tryyous we were even able to host the conference during the covid years and it trust me it was pretty difficult to handle the handle the situation then the year after covid we had a huge heat wave in France uh and then we had a pretty good time and another time a pretty good I'm in Brussels and then we thought about going to Khan and what a challenging years. We started with a war. We started with uh lots of infighting inside the community on social media. We had a Mica, the new regulation in Europe that made a lot of the sponsors a bit shaky about doing advertisement in in Europe.

And then we had the tariffs from Trump and then we had another war, another war and then again an eat wave and then here we are still you were able this morning to collect your badge and walk the red carpet and feel the magic of what is CCC and what is it CCC in can. So hope we will get a good opportunity to again create a lot of memories and mark down that Ethereum is part of the culture where it is happening. So looking back we have many stories and breakthroughs that happened at ECC. Um all the videos that we took over the last eight years are available on the YouTube channel of uh if France and we have also an archive website where you can find and see everything. So for those of you that are interested in the history of Ethereum or that are doing research in what happened over the past years, this is an extremely good snapshot of what happened every year.

Lots of announcements every year. Lots of memories being brought every year. Lots of good side events where you had tremendous time. Some people met their partners, some people met their co-founders, some people met their researchers. Everything happened at at um at CCC.

And over the years with our community evolving, we also had different content available, not only research, something more tuned in into venture capital and how to raise, something more tuned in into building a good product and finding product market fit. And now we have a community that is so and still we all wave the same shirts, we all wave the same swag, the same flag and we all brief and live for Ethereum. So I want you to understand that ECC is not only our conference. Etherum friends is an association that you can join again. Please join and come talk to us.

We think about it as a public good that will be ever standing. We have eight years of track record of organizing this conference and we have the capacity to continue organizing whatever happened to the price. Whatever happened to the community, we will still be there for you and match what the community is expecting for the ETCC conference. So if you want to break the ice with someone that's sitting next to you like hey is it your first HCC? What do you remember of HCC?

What do you like about HCC? It's a very easy way to uh share and uh get to know the people that you are uh sitting next to. So again thank you for coming to HCC. This is our conference that we host but this is a conference that we host for you and this is a conference that we think belong to you in the first place. So yeah, this is my closing uh closing slide.

ECC is you. It's your conference. It's your public good. It's your public good to nurture and grow. If you have good feedback, if you have bad feedback, come talk to us.

If you think people are talking about HCC in the wrong way, tell them they are wrong. Uh this is how we keep this conference ongoing in this conference growing otherwise it will just be business conference about blockchain everywhere every time that are just kicking out the little guys and the research that is being done. ETC has always been open to everyone. Uh we have people that are not purely iter but EVM. We welcome them.

We want to talk and we want to discuss what they are doing. It's open to everyone and that is willing to contribute and to collaborate. Again, thank you for coming and enjoy HCC in CAN.