Thoughts on Web3 Event Culture

June was all about events, kicking off with Istanbul Fintech Week and rolling into Istanbul Blockchain Week. Both were global, broad in scope and concept, drawing international participants. They’re different, yet quite similar. I’ve been attending both for years, and I’ve seen them evolve and change in many ways. I’ve had the chance to observe their growth and transformation over time.

I shared a lot about these events and the smaller side events surrounding them on LinkedIn, but those posts also got me thinking.

The first Web3 event I attended was nearly three years ago at the first DevConnect in Amsterdam. It was a massive collaborative and event space set up by the Ethereum Foundation, bringing developers from all over the world together to expand their social and professional networks. If you had a project in the Web3 world, you could even organize your own event within this framework. That same week, there was also the ETH Amsterdam hackathon.

Of course, I found out about it too late (back then, my relationship with this ecosystem was mostly about buying and selling coins/tokens), so I couldn’t attend the official workshops or conferences at DevConnect. But there were plenty of other events. I got to know the NEAR ecosystem, discovered DeSci, and learned more about DAOs during that week. Since I was so new to the topic, DevConnect week became my gateway into this ecosystem, a realization that only deepened over time.

DevConnect - Amsterdam While sharing about the June events, I thought about these experiences. As I dive deeper into this world, and as the number of events within the ecosystem grows, and considering how the financial balance of the entire ecosystem revolves around Bitcoin’s USD price at any given moment, among other reasons that could fill pages, I’ve realized that despite these events being great places to expand social and professional networks, I learn less from them now.

This seems like something worth pondering, because at the core of these events, the original purpose was to build communities and create environments where those communities could contribute to developments and changes.

I want to write extensively about events in the Web3 ecosystem because I think it’s a multi-layered topic.

Projects that started with the goal of community building, but gradually got a taste of marketing budgets, or large conferences held for more commercial purposes, don’t seem to be as effective in bringing communities together or involving users in the ecosystem as they used to be. Their purposes and impacts are changing, evolving over time, and will continue to evolve.

As blockchain infrastructure touches people’s lives more deeply, these events will surely evolve further. The concept of community will change, renew, or events held just for marketing purposes, with the anxiety of “we must have an event there that week,” will also gradually transform and become more effective.

And I think the value of humble and sincere, community-based events like our KriptoCuma, which has been going on since 2018, will be more appreciated. These are recurring, warm, and open to creating and sharing cozy environments, though there are very few of them.

I’ll continue writing about the most important Web3 events, their impacts, types, and also what #KriptoCuma is, how it started, and how it continues. But this week, I just wanted to share my thoughts.