Consensus 2024 by CoinDesk

GM GM. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell gang. If you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or have been building in Web3. This is going to be an awesome project you've been working on, demonstrating unit testing best practices, automation goodies, how to structure a project, how to build smart contracts, etc. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share it with the Web3 community. And today, I am very excited. We're going to be learning all about the Consensus 2024 conference being held at the end of the month from May 29th to the 31st from Brad, who is a Managing Editor at CoinDesk. So he's going to be giving us the rundown of what we can expect, some of the cool events that'll be hosted there, how you can get involved, whether you want to get involved with the hackathon or just come hang out at the conference for the vibes. But definitely you want to stick around if you're interested in coming out to this conference. So, before we get into it, just a little read from the sponsors of the show.

Hello, hello. Welcome Brad. Happy to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming on today and giving us the rundown of Consensus, arguably one of the largest and most popular crypto conferences of the year. Welcome.

Thank you Narb, thank you very much. Glad to be here. Happy Friday.

Happy Friday, happy Friday, that's right. No better than a Friday to learn about Consensus, in my opinion. But before we get into that, perhaps would you like to give a brief introduction about yourself, just in case folks aren't familiar?

Sure. My name's Brad Keoun, I am... my title is Managing Editor of Tech and Protocols coverage at CoinDesk and I oversee the tech and protocols coverage. So our team, which also consists of Sam Kessler and Margaux Niederkorn, we're covering news about blockchain development and we cover devs and we cover projects and so that's the part of CoinDesk that handles that type of coverage. And also I'm the editor of the Protocol Newsletter, which is a weekly email newsletter that you can subscribe to on CoinDesk.com. A little plug there. But and that is hardcore blockchain tech stuff and I think it's really good for what it's worth. But and it aims to be pretty comprehensive. And then separately we have a podcast, it's called The Protocol, and Margaux and Sam are my co-hosts and we have... we try to get really kind of big-name dev sources. We had Casey Rodarmor from Ordinals and Runes last week and we had Sreeram Kannan of EigenLayer a couple weeks before that and Brendan Farmer of Polygon and so anyway, that's what I do at CoinDesk.

Awesome, that sounds like quite the role. Quite the responsibility you got there but yeah, that's excellent. I suppose have you been a journalist and editor for quite a while, or is this something you pivoted into?

I... yes is the answer. I do... I have an electrical engineering degree and then I quickly... my joke to myself was that if I ever built bridges, people would die. And so I became a... but I always love to write and I love to learn and so I became a journalist and I started out... I got a master's degree in journalism and I started out at the Gainesville Florida Sun just doing general journalism stuff, police beat reporting basically, and then I worked for the Chicago Tribune and then I moved to New York and covered energy industry for Bloomberg News and then I started... I moved to cover Wall Street and I was covering Wall Street during the financial crisis of 2008, very much on the front lines and covering basically the collapse of all the biggest banks and then did a big project to sort of examine Federal Reserve lending in probably the 2011, 2012 time frame. I broke the big story of JPMorgan London Whale trader that's kind of like was like a big story in TradFi. And then I was in Mexico as an editor of Latin American markets news and then I moved back to... I moved to Austin and I was an economics reporter for The Street, their chief global finance and economics correspondent covering the Federal Reserve and economy during the Trump years. And then I joined CoinDesk in 2019 as a markets reporter and then became the markets editor and then it was early last year, 2023, that I moved to oversee the tech coverage.

Awesome. And I guess what drew you to Web3 in particular in the tech industry? Like what drove you to cover that?

Well, I mean, covering the economy and just seeing how none of the numbers in the traditional economy made any sense and just all sorts of things in traditional finance that made no sense, like private equity firms raising like 400 billion plus of so-called dry powder that they had just gotten money from basically pension funds and still needed it invested and didn't even have targets to invest in and so it's just like going to be a disaster that's still waiting to play out but so that's kind of and then I had a friend here in Austin who sort of was my crypto godfather and then and then covering the market stuff for a while and then I just kind of was feeling I love the development, the tech stuff, because it feels real. It feels like things that people are really doing and so that is like hardcore stuff that is makes my brain hurt and I love that so yeah, there was an opportunity, so I came over.

Excellent. Sounds a lot like how I got into it. My brain started to hurt reading all the cool tech and then just kept going and yeah. Feels like it's been quite a long time since I've only been in Web3 since 2021, but it feels like like 10 plus years to be honest. I think the saying goes like every year in crypto is kind of like a dog year or something like that, but...

Yes, so 2020... I'm just doing the math on that Narb. You've been in like 21 years almost.

Yeah, almost, yeah right. So already a grizzled vet, so. But yeah, that's excellent. I love to hear folks' origin stories and yours is a very fascinating one from the sounds of it. But yeah, this is awesome. Your journey has brought us... brought you here at this point to give us the rundown of all the goodies that we can expect from Consensus. So I guess I'm sure there are many many folks who are familiar with Consensus, but just in case there's some new crypto natives who are watching the show, maybe you can give a brief overview of what the conference is all about, why people should attend and yeah, why do people come together here?

Well, in general, CoinDesk or Consensus is definitely one of the most well-known crypto conferences and it's been around a long time and it's explicitly a big tent conference, so we include everything, Bitcoin and Ethereum and then, you know, all the other Layer 1s and Layer 2s and but also it is very there's a lot of investor-focused topics and regulatory topics and culture topics and really trying to capture the breadth of the industry. And you know, lots of parties, as with every crypto conference.

That's right, that's right. Come for the side events, right. Yeah, so it sounds like there's quite a broad set of topics, so something that might be available for everyone of every kind of skill level, somebody who might be just interested in learning about what this industry is about, somebody who's interested in perhaps investing. What about developers? Do you usually see a lot of developers come in?

Yes. Well, I mean, we're trying to get more developers to come in. But I mean, we've really worked hard on from a programming standpoint to make sure that they would get their money's worth, you know, or their time worth. We do, I mean as you saw in the thing, we have special special rates for devs because we really do want them to be a part of this conference. And we started something, I guess it was two years ago, last year, last year, called the Protocol Village Stage. And this is... the concept is we essentially turn over the stage to projects. We curate the selection of projects, who's going to get the stage, but then we let them run the show. It's not panels, you know, I mean we have obviously panels in a lot of other places in the conference, but for this Protocol Village stage, we want... we actually want it to be very high-level on a deep deep dives on a technical standpoint. High degree of technical, it's dev... it's basically, you know, their best dev people talking to our dev audience. That's kind of how we view Protocol Village. So and we've really worked hard on the schedule and we've got some of the top projects.

I just kind of made a list here, Narb. We're starting off with the Electrical Capital report. Their Electrical Capital report, they're the ones who sort of keep track of how many devs are working on any particular project and we look at that all the time for kind of like where, you know, which projects have kind of the most body count, mindshare. And but then we've got the first day XRPL, XRP Ledger, Avalanche, Chainlink, Solana, Near, Stellar. And then we have an Ethereum half-day planned, where it's going to be more Ethereum-focused, but we have a some of the Ethereum L2s. We've got Mantle, Arbitrum, Blast, which is, you know, blasted onto the scene, Optimism, Metis, which is known partly because Vitalik Buterin's mom works there. And we've got Bitcoin, a half-day focused on Bitcoin with Stacks, Ordinals, the CTO of Ordinals, Raph Japh, and Block, Lightspark, which is David Marcus's thing, and Brink. We have a restaking panel with Sreeram Kannan of EigenLayer and Mike Silagadze of Ether.fi, which is the biggest liquid restaking project. On Friday we've got Sei, Jay Jog, and we've got Cosmos with Ethan Buchman and Sunny Aggarwal. And we've got Microsoft's co-founder of blockchain.

So, and then we do have a separately... in addition to Protocol Village stage, we have separate workshops that have been planned, which is a lot of similar content to Protocol Village but we just didn't have enough space, so we created some more space, again, because, you know, we want good dev content. And we've got Fireblocks, Euler, which is a DeFi project, Redstone, which is an oracle project, we've got workshops for Hedera, Celestia, XRPL, Coreum, and Base and Optimism, I'm not sure if that one's confirmed, but I just said that during a live-stream podcast, but anyway. Potential alpha, potential alpha. Exactly. Rootstock, which by the way I just wrote about, they just announced a really cool project this week to enhance Robin Linus' BitVM to make it sort of production grade to build L2s on Bitcoin. And then there's the on some of the sessions we've got, you know, in the main stage or elsewhere in the conference, we've got Chainlink Sergey Nazarov, we've got Goon from Ava Labs, we've got Brad Garlinghouse from Ripple, and then we've got Munib Ali of Stacks, Bryan Bishop, who is who actually lives here in Austin and he was just named one of the new Bitcoin improvement proposal editors. So, oh, and I will be interviewing Casey Rodarmor on the main stage on Friday, so. I don't know if that's too much for you Narb, hopefully but...

That no, I mean, it just speaks to the heavy hitters, the star power that usually attend these conferences. and you certainly have the whole the whole set of of the top stars coming in, which is awesome. Usually in terms of the content that gets presented through these panels, I'm sure a lot of people have have kind of gone through like an information overload if they try to sit through all the things and get get their full money's worth. However, would you have do you have like a strategy in mind for how people can most effectively like get the most out of all these talks without having their minds explode with all the information?

You know, everybody's different probably, but I mean, I do like to sit through these things and just take advantage of the programming. A lot of people but I've also, I mean as a journalist I have lots of source meetings and I'm guessing people have lots of meetings planned to meet up with people. And there's the exhibition hall actually is super fun to walk through just because there's you just are bombarded with so much information and I don't know, you can maybe get some signal from who's who's paying up to advertise or you know who's got the bigger booths, who's spending their way in and I like to look at some of those kinds of things just to sort of get an idea of what's going on. You know, there's people a lot there's always the swag, I love the socks. The swag, people love the swag, so you protocols out there better step up your game, swag-wise. It's a lot, but I agree with you Narb, it can be a little overwhelming. I mean, I think just to get the maybe the best strategy is just go through the agenda and give yourself permission to miss things, you know.

Yeah, exactly. And these talks will get recorded, right? So people can go back and watch at their leisure from...

I'm sure. I don't know that for sure, but I'm pretty sure, Narb.

Gotcha, gotcha. So we got a star-studded lineup of speakers and I believe there's also a hackathon running called the EasyA hackathon, which is IRL. Could you perhaps share a bit more details around that and when people can expect from that? If you have that information.

Um, I have not been organizing that. And I also was told there's going to be an announcement about that on Monday and I'm not... I'm apparently not supposed to spill that tea. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. So folks have got to wait for Monday to hear... it's going to be about a lot of money though. Like I mean I... oh, I forgot to mention at the beginning, I do also run a column called the Protocol Village Column and it's kind of similar in concept to the Protocol Village stage, where I mean I do curate it, people I get a there's a system where people can submit on the website and they can put in, okay I limit it to 600 characters, but it's blockchain that's where we do a lot of the blockchain project updates. It's not like chaos or some kind of bad thing that's you know that's kind of how we see news, it's like unplanned stuff, surprises, you know and projects putting out updates, it's not you know, if it's huge, it might be news. But usually it's just important stuff and we want to get it on the record, but it's not like you know, CNN or the blockchain equivalent. But we have but we put it in this column that that I do called Protocol Village. Oh man, I'm blanking on how I got going down this rabbit hole, but what were we just talking about? We're talking about potential hackathon. Oh yeah, okay. So we get a lot of we get a lot of hackathon news that we prioritize putting hackathon like you know decent hackathon items in that Protocol Village column and just I can tell I can just say like the amount of money is not the smallest. It's not the biggest but it's not the smallest either.

Fair enough, that's fair, that's fair. where can people read that column? Is it on the website?

That's on CoinDesk.com. It's a tab at the top of our webpage. And it's also if you if you subscribe to the Protocol newsletter, I pick the top five again, I'm just picking it with my subjective judgment, but you know, I the top five I put in the newsletter and there's a link to the Protocol Village column there.

Excellent. And anybody can submit, like founders, you know, if people are listening to this call, I mean, you know, we get a lot of PR people working for the projects who submit those on behalf of the founders. But we get a lot of founders directly who find that column and they use our submission tool and it comes in it comes right in our back-end and so and we've run a lot of really cool items from that. Awesome. Yeah folks, definitely check that out after the call if you're interested and I'm sure I'm sure there's great content to be found in that newsletter there.

And I guess just want to get into the as you were as you were describing all the panel panel guests and different protocols that are coming in. I was very pleased to hear that there was no there was no so-called tribalism going on here at Consensus and it's very open to all every protocol so people aren't necessarily forced down one path to be just ETH-centric or just Bitcoiners, but rather it's a open open conference where everybody from every facet of the Web3 space can congregate together. I guess is that a more broader trend that you've noticed as the years have progressed that this the sense of like tribalism is starting to dissipate or yeah, just interested to hear your thoughts.

Well, I would say that all of these projects, the bigger projects all have their own conferences. And so that is what they're providing. There's lots of Ethereum conferences, I was just at a conference this week that was amazing that was put on by Lisa Neigut of who lives here, who's like one of the top Bitcoin devs she was working for Lightning, but she's kind of like she also does a base it's called Base58, she does a class for Bitcoin devs. And but there were some incredible speakers there, Andrew Poelstra was there and Christian Decker, like major Bitcoin devs were at this conference. But it's just Bitcoin, you know. And then Avalanche, you know, Stellar, all these L1s, they all have their own conferences and they're big, you know. They have their community goes there and they have a lot of alpha for their community or announcements. And there's a couple other probably big tent conferences out there, I guess like you know, Token49 and Token2049 and and Blockworks, I was at their Permissionless conference was here in Austin last year, it was really good. And but it's definitely not there's no there was no Bitcoin at that conference, you know. So it's I guess but you know I mean some Bitcoiners might not like mixing with other stuff and so yeah I mean it's that's kind of our decision that we that's that's kind of our brand is the big tent.

Love it. And just before we continue on, just a shout-out to the 2,000 plus folks that are watching us live here today. Real troopers joining us on a Friday morning learning about Consensus. I guess as we're approaching the end of the stream here, just want to get into the side events. So we know, as we all know, these conferences, you come for the talks, but you really stay for the side events here. Are there any particular side events that stand out to you or that you enjoy that you would want other folks to kind of experience as well?

I am not quite sure how to answer this question. I have not done a super deep dive on all the side events. I mean there's obviously the official Consensus side events and those are, you know, those are fun. and but you know, it's sort of like at least the a lot of it's serendipity. This person invites you to go over here and you follow them or you're invited to one thing and it's VIP and nobody's there so you leave and go to a different one that's like where everybody is. and I've done, you know, done that drill a few times the past couple years here in Austin. I mean, I live here in Austin, Austin's super fun place, there's so many great bars and restaurants where they hold all these side events and good barbecue everywhere. I think that's probably the problem, is just overeating and overdrinking and not sleeping.

But I just yeah go ahead. One thing that kind of sticks out to me, that's kind of non-tech related, is is this Karate Combat. perhaps maybe you want to touch a bit on that? I think that one is is quite interesting.

Oh yeah, right. I have well okay so there is I think there are going to be some real fights from actual pro fighters at this thing. And I don't know how it's set up or where in like the venue. I'm not I'm not I don't know that where where it's happening. But I mean the thing that everybody's talking about is David Hoffman from Bankless is apparently going to be like stepping into the ring with Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures. And I don't know if either of them... I mean, I think they're both training for this maybe, but I I think that is probably going to be somewhat entertaining. Yeah, somewhat. Very very interesting, yes. We actually tried to get a a a fight going at ETHDenver this year between a couple of our DevDAO members, but I think it kind of fell apart due to insurance and whatnot. but this is promising, this is promising to see it coming back kind of at this scale at at Consensus. Well let's just say I hope my overloads at at at CoinDesk have some pretty good waivers that they're going to get everybody to sign.

Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. And I guess coming towards the close of our show, how can people register for the conference and what types of different passes are available to them?

Let's see. There is okay, there's the the $299 dev pass. Number one, you can just probably just I don't know exactly what the website is, but you can just google if you just google CoinDesk Consensus 2024 that'll take you right to the website. and you can you can buy tickets there. There is a dev pass for 299 bucks. and I think you said Narb at the beginning with the commercial that the first 30 developers to register using DevDAO code will get 20% off. and I think that's the main thing.

Excellent. Well, unfortunately that brings us to time here, but thank you very much Brad. really appreciate you coming on taking time out of your day to give us the rundown of all the exciting things and speakers and your past experiences around the Consensus conference. Really looking forward to seeing seeing how this plays out and yeah, thank you again so much.

Thank you for the opportunity, Narb. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

My pleasure. And just before everybody jumps off the stream here, I want to share the QR code for you to scan for claiming your NFT for being an attendee here on DevNTell today. So what you want to do is scan this QR code, fill out the form, and you'll be airdropped a NFT, an attendee NFT, on the Base network just for watching DevNTell live today. So you'll have an hour and a half from now to be able to fill that out and you should expect the NFT to land in your wallet within a handful of days. But with that, just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend. hopefully this talk has inspired you to grab your tickets or for Consensus and you got that 20% discount with promo code DevDAO and we'll catch you back here next week for another episode of DevNTell. Alrighto. Have a good one.

Bye.