Ethereum BA recap 2018-2020
Ethereum Buenos Aires meetup origins and birth. What we built in the past 18 months. On the campaign trail for #DevconBA2020. Where we are heading.
Ethereum BA Meetup origins: ETHBuenosAires
ETHBuenosAires hackathon was held in our city in 2018. This was the first ETH Global Community hackathon and the first of its kind to be held in Latin America. You can watch the awesome video recap here.
The hackathon had a massive impact on the local community. Just to mention a few highlights (and this is not an exhaustive list):
Sponsors hired attendees and volunteers.
Attending companies hired employees.
An attending company joined the ecosystem and kickstarted the
Ethereum BA meetup 6 months later!Volunteers from other countries launched their own local hackathons.
And there are many more that we can leave for another occasion 😺.
The Ethereum BA meetup is born
Months after the hackathon was held, and while many were still recovering from an epic experience, the community started getting together and talking about the massive opportunity to continue developing the Ethereum ecosystem in the region. This time, as it would continue to happen, the community took ownership of the challenge: the Ethereum BA Meetup Group was created, a venue was booked, and invitations were sent. Suddenly, 80 people were sharing and enjoying the first gathering in November 2018, kickstarting 18 months of amazing stories, friendships, and projects that would bring us all together in Buenos Aires and around the world.
“Suddenly, 80 people were sharing and enjoying the first gathering in November 2018, kickstarting 18 months of amazing stories, friendships, and projects”.
What we built in the past 18 months
Today we are proud to say that in the past 18 months, we have laid a solid groundwork for a vibrant Buenos Aires Ethereum community.
Amazing and diverse content: we hosted +30 different local speakers and international ones too!
Consistency: we hosted 18 events, one every month. We believe consistency is critical, so unless something out of the ordinary happened, we always hosted a gathering on the last Thursday of every month for the past year and a half 😁.
Growth: we started small but grew steadily. Today Ethereum BA’s Meetup Group has +1600 members! And between 70 to 100 people attend regularly!
Access: you can find all our events’ videos (except for the first edition 😅), and many of the presentations on Ethereum BA’s website!
All of this couldn’t have happened without the participation of our amazing speakers. In no specific order: Andreas Antonopoulos, Patricio Palladino, Glen Weyl, Agustin Aguilar, Evgeny Yurtaev, Mariano Conti, Luis Cuende, Jorge Izquierdo, Facundo Spagnuolo, Federico Bond, Nicolás Venturo, Juan Bautista Carpanelli, Mariano Cortesi, Manuel García, Rodrigo Irarrazaval, Mariano DiPietrantonio, Martin Abbatemarco, Santiago Sánchez, Aníbal Salazar, Lucas Palomeque, Brian Prilick, Alejo Amiras, Luciano Bertenasco, Nicolás Ayala, Agustín Modugno, Sebastián Perez, Manuel Gvirtz, Alejo Salles, Sebastián Aldasoro, Pablo Candela and Patricio Worthalter.
So, without further ado, here’s a recap of a few of our wonderful gatherings 🎉🥳🎊
Andreas Antonopoulos.
Patricio Palladino, Co-Founder & CTO @ Nomic Labs, presenting Buidler.
Agustin Aguilar, UniswapEX Founder & former CTO @ RCN presenting Marmo SDK.
Evgeny Yurtaev, CEO & Founder @ Zerion.
Glen Weyl, Founder @ RadicalxChange Foundation
Jorge Izquierdo, CEO @ Aragon One.
Can you prove you attended one of our amazing gatherings 👀?
We started handing out POAPs at the Ethereum BA Meetup in June 2019, a few months after the project was born, so everyone can prove their attendance and collect cool NFTs at the same time. As it was mentioned in POAP’s 2019 retro, they have been running all sorts of experiments at our gatherings to help make their product better. One such experiment was when we hosted a raffle for the Ethereum for Web Developers book. We want to onboard as many people to the ecosystem as we can, and using a novel product developed by members of our local community to do so, felt, and still feels quite special. At the end of the day, one of our goals is for community members to be able to learn while experiencing new technologies, so we are proud to always count on POAP’s team at our events!
The#DevconBA2020 Campaign Trail
One of the many ideas that were ignited by members of our community
The idea to host Devcon 2020 in Buenos Aires was born during a conversation between Martin Tellechea and Franco Zeoli, two of our community members, at Web3 Summit’s garden in Berlin. Since the previous Devcon editions had been hosted in London, Shanghai, Cancun, Prague, and Osaka, Latin America appeared to be a no-brainer for the next edition. And if Latin America was the most likely destination: what other better place than Buenos Aires?
A foundational tweet was posted and conversations escalated rapidly through Telegram groups:
Which was picked up by the community very quickly!
But a few posts were not going to be enough, so we got organized, and various Telegram groups were created to handle marketing efforts, negotiations with potential venues, conversations with the EF, and general brainstorming.
We started having conversations with all the key stakeholders and refining our marketing campaign. As a first step, we created our own set of amazing memes. Name at least one decent crypto campaign that doesn’t have memes.
#DevconBA2020 memes
The designs were inspired by our one and only Santiago Palladino’s tweet above, who also happened to publish the amazing book Ethereum for Web Developers at around the same time. Xivis took responsibility for the task and executed quickly and beautifully, as usual.
The game was on; we were going to push for it during DeVcon, in Osaka.
On the campaign trail: Osaka
Plane tickets were issued, messages were sent, and, with a couple of suitcases full of #DevconBA2020 t-shirts, the trip to the ultimate shill began.
Once in Osaka, t-shirts were quickly distributed, and the community started walking around the conference wearing them:
Martin & Franco in Osaka, two months after their idea of proposing Buenos Aires for Devcon 6.
Santi Siri, at DeVcon, shilling like a boss.
Rumors escalated quickly, and many attendees started thinking that #DevconBA2020 was not a proposal, but the actual location soon to be announced. And that was not all. Two days later, something amazing would happen, something spontaneous that not even we were aware of.
The ultimate shill
All the Argentinian speakers had agreed to include one slide in their presentations to shill Buenos Aires as the next Devcon location. But the ultimate highlight was going to be during Mariano Conti’s talk at the mainstage on day three since it would probably be one of the talks with the largest audiences in the whole conference. A single slide in his talk would represent the climax for all these weeks of hard work. But Mariano had something up his sleeve.
“We’re all trying to get Devcon 2020 in Buenos Aires because we know what it is to live off of crypto”.
Once his amazing talk about Living on DeFi in Argentina was reaching towards the end, he asked all of the Argentinians to stand up. The audience roared and clapped. Right after that, as his last slide, he revealed the #DevconBA2020 slide and said: “We’re all trying to get Devcon 2020 in Buenos Aires because we know what it is to live off of crypto”. The audience roared again.
Part of the Argentinian crew at DeVcon’s main stage right after the Q&A was over.
Argentinians during DeVcon at Osaka, Japan (yeah, we haven't checked, but everything suggests that Hels changed her nationality after she had steak and wine during ETHBuenosAires 2018).
The community’s response was overwhelming. And not only by the usual Latin American suspects but also by members of the global community. Take a look at this cool piece by David Hoffman: We need Devcon Buenos Aires, for example.
Ethereum BA meetup continued: some cool highlights
The meetup’s impact
Just like ETH Buenos Aires before, the Ethereum BA meetup has also had a great impact on the local community.
Just to mention a few highlights (and this not an exhaustive list either):
Attending companies hired attendees.
Attending companies became meetup sponsors.
Community members helped launch their company’s blockchain vertical.
Business partnerships took place.
New crypto communities were born.
Attendees became partners in life.
Over 2500 beers were drunk 😄.
A community that’s in love with all the possibilities that Ethereum
brings to the world 💜
Besides our community achievements mentioned in the sections above, we are proud to share that the meetup has become a place of belonging for many community members. You would think that the gatherings end once the meetups are over, but no, they’re not, we also have asados, beers, and drinks in bars, crypto-bike rides, and we even share 🧉 with everyone in hackathons and conferences around the world (and had bounties about it!).
Overwhelming CryptoTwitter love
We have been blessed with massive support on CryptoTwitter by the community and non-community members alike. For all of you who haven’t attended one of our gatherings yet, you’re welcome to join us next time you’re in Buenos Aires or, in the meantime, in our upcoming meetup coming this Thursday, April the 30th, with stellar talks by Mariano Conti and Esteban Ordano!
Ethereum BA Meetup reloaded: where we are heading
It’s been two years since the ETHBuenosAires hackathon and a year and a half since we launched the Ethereum BA meetup. We have grown Ethereum’s adoption and community in Argentina and the region, but we’re just getting started…
As communities evolve roles change, new blood joins the trenches with fresh ideas and energy, and the old guard switches priorities and looks for new challenges. It is within this context that we are now ready to kickstart the new phase of this fantastic journey.
To make all of this possible, our team has been working hard. We have brought in new collaborators, organized internal documentation, brainstormed new initiatives, and documented every task required to carry on a meetup so that everything can be self-sustained in the long term.
We have plenty of new initiatives: more online and offline events, content in different formats, and who knows, maybe even a big event too 👀.
“We have plenty of new initiatives: more online and offline events, content in different formats, and who knows, maybe even a big event too 👀”
Without further ado, the efforts that we can already share with the community
Ethereum BA website update: the website is now available in three languages.
Podcast: we will start publishing our meetup audios in podcast format in case you prefer listening instead of watching.
Newsletter: this post gives birth to our newsletter, and it will be the first one of many to come 😁.
New events: TBC when, how, or the topics that we’ll cover 😬.
See you soon in the next mined block, online in a zoom call, in person at the next event, or -for all of you who live abroad- maybe even in Buenos Aires very soon 😉.
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Get involved in the community
Feel free to submit your application to volunteer at the Ethereum BA meetup!
Volunteer to help translate ethereum.org and other Ethereum-related materials into Spanish. Reach out to us, and we’ll connect you with the person leading this effort at the Ethereum Foundation.
Contact us
Get in touch and follow our updates through any of the following channels!
Special thanks
All of this was possible thanks to the fantastic energy and dedication of members of our community. Although we can't list them all since this article would never end, we still feel obliged to name our core contributors during these past 18 months.
Without further ado, and any particular order:
And of course our current and previous sponsors!
Growing the Ethereum community with <3, from Buenos Aires to the world 🚀