Lessons From ETH Dublin: The Crypto Community Grows Up

Forbes

27-05-2025

Hackathon teams present their projects at ETH Dublin, with one team explaining how their solution ... More addresses doom-scrolling and screen-time goals.
Paul Dylan Ennis, an Irish academic, sits in front of the stage next to Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. They are sat in a Dublin cellar, flanked by pictures of padron peppers and tomatoes. A professor at University College Dublin, Ennis does not look like a stereotypical academic. He is covered in tattoos, including a prominent Ethereum logo inked on his skin. As the conference unfolds around him, he finds himself thinking about a sci-fi essay he once wrote exploring what the world would look like if everyone lived as sovereign individuals. His thought experiment asked: what if we took the ideals that the crypto community holds sacred and made them universal?
The world we live in today would have seemed like strange science fiction to many of the people who attended ETH Berlin in 2018, when I first saw Buterin in person. Or at least I think I saw him, because he may have been wearing a fur suit during what was then a fringe gathering of crypto enthusiasts. But here's an even more sci-fi twist: many of the hackathon projects at ETH Dublin were built using AI coding tools that didn't exist seven years ago, creating better minimum viable products faster than anyone could have imagined.
What strikes me about Ennis's reflection is the apparent lack of recognition from many in crypto circles that, in many ways, this vision has already materialized. Yet here they are, trapped in an odd dynamic of discussing the same topics they debated seven years ago, seemingly oblivious to how dramatically reality has shifted since then.
Paul Dylan Ennis (left) and Vitalik Buterin during a talk at ETH Dublin, discussing crypto's ... More evolution in the venue's atmospheric stone cellar.
I sat through a panel called "Can we onboard the masses?" where "IrishNFTGal" spoke about onboarding her 90-year-old grandmother to nonfungible tokens (NFTs), admitting that she "didn't get much out of it." The conversation felt like a time warp. The same earnest discussions about user experience and mass adoption that dominated Berlin 2018, as if nothing had changed.
But here's the uncomfortable truth the crypto community struggles to acknowledge: average users are much more interested in speculation than in vague concepts like "individual sovereignty" and "privacy," which remain abstract, ideological and political to most people. Crypto delivered exactly what users actually wanted, easy access to financial speculation, rather than what idealists preached they should want.
The adoption Buterin does celebrate represents crypto's quieter victory. EU and Taiwan digital ID systems based on zero-knowledge proofs, the seeping of open source culture from crypto-adjacent circles to broader tech, crypto principles shaping AI conversations. This infrastructure and ideological influence spread even as the community obsessed over pictures of monkeys on a blockchain. These examples showcase crypto's philosophical wins, where decentralized thinking has permeated traditional institutions and shaped how governments and technologists approach digital systems.
But there's another kind of adoption story that Buterin doesn't highlight, one that tells a different tale about what users actually want. Bitcoin exchange-traded funds allow mainstream investors to speculate without understanding keys or wallets. TrumpCoin and other memecoins let millions participate in speculative theater through financial markets. Prediction market Polymarket is widely cited on the news. Apps like Revolut enable instant crypto speculation from your phone. This is mass adoption too, just not the kind that makes crypto conferences feel good about themselves.
Judges deliberate on hackathon submissions at ETH Dublin, reviewing projects in the venue's historic ... More stone cellar spaces.
The most telling sign of crypto's maturation wasn't found in any panel discussion, but in the venue logistics. ETH Dublin and a major Solana event shared the same space. This is an acknowledgment of how massive Solana has become and how the ecosystem has evolved beyond ideological purity.
Many submissions at ETH Dublin had also been pitched at various Solana hackathons. Builders now follow opportunity across chains rather than pledging allegiance to single ecosystems. One of the speakers on the ETH Dublin stage, Dr. Nick Almond, announced that he had recently changed employers to Jito, a Solana restaking protocol. Alejandro Gutierrez, one of the founders of ETH Dublin, was the butt of several jokes for also participating in the Solana ecosystem. While it's somewhat new for speakers to be openly "curious" about which chains they support, the people in the crowd have always been 'multi-chain curious', except at some bitcoin events, where some attendees are genuinely monotheistic about their chosen cryptocurrency (even if the speakers aren't). A person I met who pitched at ETH Dublin was an ambassador for Avalanche and also built an open source bitcoin wallet. Crypto factions seem important from within, but all crypto people are the same to outsiders.
Perhaps most tellingly, Base (Coinbase's layer-2 on Ethereum) had a prominent presence sponsoring workshops. Base is self-admittedly early on its journey to decentralization, which is corporate speak for "not decentralized at all yet." But it serves user needs easily and efficiently. The community's embrace of Base represents a fundamental shift: a recognition of pragmatism over purity, whatever works for users over ideological consistency. Or a betrayal of ideals, depending on who you ask.
ETH Dublin attendees collaborate on a project during the hackathon
The hackathon results revealed both continuity and transformation. The overall quality was dramatically higher than previous years, largely thanks to AI-assisted development tools that allow teams to build better minimum viable products faster. Yet the themes remained disparate, with sophisticated AI integration sitting alongside retro ideas like putting ancestry records on blockchain.
The winning projects told the story of crypto's practical evolution. RecEth, which took first place, generates confirmation emails for crypto transactions, a simple solution bridging the expected user experience of traditional finance with crypto's reality. Latinum, the second-place winner, provides payment middleware enabling Model Context Protocol builders to monetize their services, allowing AI agents to manage budgets and make autonomous payments. Fundraisly aims to become a global platform for legally compliant fundraising, while my personal favorite LockedIn creates a social platform where users stake ether to combat doom-scrolling habits.
These projects address real behavioral and infrastructure problems rather than chasing ideological goals. Some ideas remained stuck in 2018's mindset, but the execution was powered by 2025's technology stack. Perhaps a metaphor for some of the crypto space.
Many of the participants were the same people who were around 7 years ago, but the conference's introspective mood reflected more than just aging. There's a palpable sense of disillusionment with crypto's own governance experiments. The journey from DAOFest 2018's optimism to Buterin's suggestion to "burn decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to the ground" in 2025 represents one of crypto's most sobering lessons.
Instead of becoming digital cooperatives for the 21st century, DAOs largely devolved into digital homeowners' association meetings complete with petty politics, bureaucratic inefficiency and governance theater. The very people who believed most deeply in decentralized governance are now its harshest critics.
This disillusionment extends beyond DAOs to the broader growing pains accompanying crypto's success. Internal politics and bureaucratic struggles now characterize organizations that once prided themselves on revolutionary simplicity. The demographics have shifted from young idealists to seasoned veterans grappling with institutional weight and responsibility.
The community has grown up, but growth brought unexpected burdens. Privacy technology has experienced a renaissance (evident in Monero's price action and advances in zero-knowledge research) partly as a course correction against crypto's uncomfortable proximity to establishment power.
Buterin himself has been pushing privacy tools with renewed urgency, recognizing that the original cypherpunk ethos of crypto has been overshadowed by mainstream financial adoption. The recent power changes in the US have made privacy feel fundamentally important again to many in the more libertarian leaning community. What was once dismissed as paranoid libertarian fantasy now feels prescient as crypto finds itself caught between regulatory embrace and surveillance concerns. Zero-knowledge proofs, once a niche academic pursuit, have become a rallying cry for preserving crypto's original promise of financial sovereignty even as the industry courts institutional adoption.
A panel discussion on "The Essence of Ethereum" at ETH Dublin, featuring industry leaders in a ... More relaxed conversation format typical of crypto conferences.
Crypto succeeded by serving user desires rather than imposing ideological goals. The revolution arrived quietly through practical applications, not just manifestos about sovereign individuals, but apps that let people speculate on their phones. Not decentralized utopias for the techno-literate, but centralized solutions like Base that actually work for everyday users.
The global nature of the crypto community remains its greatest strength. Attendees understand cross-border financial friction from lived experience, driving practical solutions for real problems like credit score portability and international payments. Their perspectives come from navigating multiple financial systems, not theoretical knowledge. Seven years of development have taught the Ethereum community hard lessons about the gap between technological possibility and human adoption patterns. The most successful technologies rarely fulfill their creators' original visions; instead, they find unexpected applications that prove more valuable than anyone anticipated.
As crypto conferences continue grappling with the same fundamental questions, perhaps the persistence of these conversations isn't a failure, it's recognition that some problems are worth discussing for decades because they're genuinely important (and difficult) to solve. The revolution may not have arrived as promised, but evolution continues daily, one practical application at a time.
The community's maturation from revolutionary idealism to pragmatic incrementalism might disappoint early believers, but it represents natural growth. What struck me most about ETH Dublin wasn't the technology discussions, but how much everyone genuinely loved the community itself. The conversations were deeply introspective, with attendees reflecting not just on code and protocols, but on meaning and purpose.
In many ways, crypto has become a secular religion for the 21st century, a rare space where young people can gather to earnestly discuss how to improve the world and actually build solutions. It's one of the few communities that combines philosophical idealism with practical engineering, offering both a sense of purpose and a path to create change. The hackathon projects weren't just technical exercises; they were expressions of hope about fixing real problems, from reducing doom-scrolling to enabling fair fundraising.
Paul Dylan Ennis, with his Ethereum tattoo and academic credentials, embodies this evolution in a unique way. He studies these communities professionally, intimately aware of the nuances of bitcoin governance discussions and the internal politics and drama that most Bitcoin ETF holders never see. His sci-fi essay wasn't just a thought experiment; it was a sprawling academic paper disguised as (amateur) fantasy fiction, exploring how the world transforms as crypto's influence grows. The movement may have evolved beyond its original vision, but it has retained something perhaps more valuable: a community that still believes technology can make the world better, and is willing to spend their weekends proving it.