Last year at EthCC, Paris was sweating from some of the hottest temperatures it had ever seen, with a heat dome smothering the French capital and wildfires burning in the country’s Southwest region. The 2023 edition saw Paris reeling from a different kind of firestorm, this one ignited by the murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk. At a traffic stop in late June, the teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent was killed by police for driving without a license.

For the second year in a row, then, crypto’s import was overshadowed by more urgent, existential crises: climate emergency and the ever raging reality of institutional racism. But we've become very good at going about business as usual.

Five thousand people showed up to attend the Ethereum Community Conference, up from 2,000 last year – and the expansion was noticeable. The conference, headquartered in two adjacent buildings just south of the Seine, was just able to contain itself, as seas of people passed between venues and spilled onto the cobblestone streets that surrounded them. In the midst of still ongoing protests, the community’s whiteness and privilege was especially palpable.

The four-day conference featured 350+ speakers and 54 sponsors, as well as 300 side events. The first that caught my eye was a prelude to EthCC, a "web3 chess club" event on Sunday at the Blitz Society, a chess and card lounge near the Latin Quarter. 

Sponsored by Fluid Protocol, the native decentralized stablecoin for Fuel Network, and Raremind, a game where you can learn and play chess on any platform and earn rewards, the digital flier promised a unique combination of casual chess and crypto – and the presence of a grandmaster to boot.

Blitz is composed of exposed wooden beams and old stones from the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, an 11th century reconstruction of an even earlier monastery. A neon sign hung from a back rafter that read "Only a Pawn in their Game,” and it glowed down upon the 27 chess boards that dotted the space. I hadn’t played for the better part of a decade, and I’d forgotten the immense brainpower required to measure contingencies, imagine potentialities, spot gaps and peer into the future.

Peering into the future was a key theme of the conference, as web3 leaders channeled their expertise and fountains of optimism to paint a rosy future on-chain. The conference was largely oriented around infrastructure and DeFi, with myriad organizations highlighting protocol improvements and enhancements to security.

In the voluminous main stage, during one of EthCC’s most anticipated talks, Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin detailed a history of account abstraction, a densely technical chronology of the feature’s circuitous path toward being. He walked us through account abstraction’s past, from faraway hope to actual realization via EIP-4337, the Ethereum Improvement Proposal responsible for achieving it. It was a standing-room-only crowd, where many hung on Buterin’s every word.

Meanwhile I was sandwiched between two people on their phones – one sending emails and one playing solitaire – and doing my best to follow along. When Buterin finished we applauded, and he promptly vaulted from the stage, hurriedly put a mask on and hustled out of the room. Walking slowly behind him, just behind the guy still playing solitaire, I exited with the same question I’d entered with: what is account abstraction?

Later that night I found out, when the Eiffel Tower played host to a networking event with a number of startups, including Safe, Request Finance, Monerium, Gnosis Chain, Gateway.fm, Gelato Network and Disco.xyz.

Read more: Fluid Protocol and Raremind bring chess to Web3 for EthCC

Inside, surrounded by spectacular views of a still mostly unencumbered skyline, small groups chatted amongst themselves, drinks in hand, plotting about things like digital wallets and account abstraction.

I struck up a conversation with a tech founder of a DeFi startup, who politely stooped to my technical height and explained that it’s a method of authentication that doesn’t rely on public or private keys. It eradicates one of crypto’s fatal flaws – that losing your seed phrase means losing access to your wallet. Today, there are things like social recovery – where friends can help you rescue your digital wallet – and biometric authentication. 

The evening featured proclamations of "on-chain summer" and predictions that the entire world would be on-chain by 2030, just seven summers from now. But what I was missing was not the fact that people can go on-chain, but the reason people will want to be on-chain – the consumer layer talked about by folks like Patrick Rivera, who recently resurrected a piece from 2018 called “The Myth of the Infrastructure Phase,” written by Dani Grant and Nick Grossman. 

The piece traces a cyclical Internet history back to email and messaging in the early 70s. Every step of the way, the apps go first, subsequently informing the type of infrastructure needed to support those apps. “We need way more teams building at the consumer layer to help inform what infrastructure needs to be built and actually have people use it,” Rivera wrote.

Thankfully, there is a growing cadre of companies building that layer, focusing on both consumer apps and the ways in which we can leverage blockchain mechanics to foster public goods. And I was heartened to see EthCC make space for them.

Gitcoin – and now Supermodular.xyz – founder Kevin Owocki gave a prominent talk discussing the importance of decentralized social communities. And he was joined by AAVE founder and CEO, Stani Kuchelov, whose company is responsible for building Lens Protocol, an on-chain social graph that promises to transcend the walled gardens of traditional social platforms. The duo announced a collaboration called Quadratic Lenster, a quadratic funding-driven social network that forks Lens and is based on the notion that “likes are the ultimate shitcoin: inexhaustible supply, non transferable, worthless.” 

“Can we create a flywheel where we export more public goods to the community and reward creators for contributing to the public good?” Owocki wondered. “And create an information environment that supports the substrate upon which democracy relies and public goods substrates arise?

Jonas Seiferth, who leads Retroactive Public Goods Funding at Optimism Foundation, touched on similar topics. “If we look into the past and we reward what we all agree was useful, that’s much more effective than if we try to predict what’s useful in the future,” Seiferth said. “Optimism is not a rollup. Optimism is an update to capitalism."

Yitzy Hammer, who heads the crypto-focused law firm Hammer & Co., discussed how web3 tools can be used for charity and impact, specifically citing Optimism’s retroactive funding program and detailing some of the same blockchain-native mechanisms that make web3 valuable to creator-driven initiatives, like donation widgets that remove intermediaries.

Shannon Wells, Head of Ecosystems at Livepeer, likened this new disintermediated era of “permanent composability” to a renaissance – an evolution of the web2 “dark ages” defined by siloed Internet services and digital monopolies.

We are beholden to a handful of trillion-dollar corporations whose success relies on knowledge silos and black-box algorithms, she said, literally forcing us to operate in the dark. On these platforms, creators are at the mercy of an ad-driven monetization model that rewards that which appeals to the largest possible audience. Depthless content wins because platforms are incentivizing us to be shallow. 

The emerging renaissance is an opportunity to leave behind that reality – in the visions of these builders, to reimagine the creator economy, transform capitalism and even mitigate climate change.

Max Song, founder and chief executive officer of Carbonbase, shared ideas and structures for using the blockchain to drive sustainability through a voluntary carbon credits ecosystem. "The key desire for us is to create a stable economy that can successfully employ millions of people,” he said, “and drive billions of dollars into the carbon removal space."

Read more: Ecosapiens Battle Climate Change by Offering Carbon Credits as NFTs

The enthusiasm surrounding the myriad creative solutions was contagious, and the theory, intentions and architecture behind these initiatives – especially in succession, across a broad scope of industries and use cases – are exciting indeed. But in the words of Seiferth, “in socio-economic mechanisms, theory is always very sexy and beautiful, and then execution can be super messy … Somebody had a nice meme on a slide [where one side] was ‘thinking about DAOs’ (decentralized autonomous organizations) with a really beautiful rainbow. And the other [side] was ‘being in a DAO’ and it was really sad.”

That sentiment was mirrored by Camila Russo, founder of The Defiant, who explained how web3 is beginning to look like theater. “Another promise of web3 was that users would be owners of web3 and this would be done through governance tokens,” she said. “Instead, these are being traded like stocks. People think a governance token is a proxy for having stock in a protocol. That’s the reality. They don’t care about governance and they’re not participating.” 

Good product design seeks to bridge the gap between thinking and doing, but it’s a delicate, hard-earned balance, and few products actually generate sustainable traction and become parts of our everyday lives. How do people want to be involved? How do we inspire people to cross that crevasse from can to care?

Needing to touch grass, so to speak, I left the conference and wandered the city, eventually making my way to Montmartre in search of the “secret venue” that would host Refraction DAO’s rave. Eventually I felt the familiar untz untz resonating through the cement, and the glorious scent of sweat and smoke rising from the earth.

The rave was, unlike many that I attended last year, organized by music folk and thus a proper ordeal, complete with great basement techno from Peach and Vanille. Also appreciated was the obligation to cover phone cameras – lest we abstract ourselves from the music, the visual art curated by Agoria and the dancing bodies strewn across the dancefloor. It may have been a little sceney, and the water should have been provided for free (instead of five Euros a bottle), but it was a welcome corporeal reprieve from the heady intellect of the day. 

In the conference’s final day, there was more focus on “doing,” as Mirela Spasova, senior engineer manager for collectible avatars at Reddit, spoke about her journey onboarding millions of people to digital collectibles through an accessible, community-focused project. “Collectibles is not just a solo experience – it's not just about ownership,”she said. “It's also about community interacting together, investing back and building together.”

Even the venture capitalists were preaching community and deprioritizing financial mechanisms across consumer and marketplace applications. “My theory is that the things which wind up succeeding are things which really focus on community, interesting content and interesting experiences,” said Sriram Krishnan, general partner of a16z crypto, one of the most active firms in the web3 space. “The financial side of things is actually a minor to a non-existent mechanism.”

Feeling buoyed by these resonant narratives, I headed to the official EthCC afterparty, which was touted as a celebratory welcome mat for all – though first-come, first-serve – in attendance. Once capacity was hit, a one person in, one person out policy would be implemented, and there would be no admission after 10:30pm.

I hedged my bets and arrived around 10pm, waiting with a couple dozen people behind a cordon. Several security guards and event planners stood on the other side, seemingly waiting for something. As I waited, a few people skirted the line, approaching the gatekeepers to inform them they were on the whitelist. After quick confirmation, those people were allowed in. 

After about 20 minutes of standing as several “whitelisted” people passed through, the folks on the other side corralled us into a narrower line, planting a signpost that read “EthCC whitelist.”

One of the event planners approached me at the front of the suddenly transformed line.

"Are you on the whitelist?"

"What’s the whitelist?" I asked.

"If you don’t know you’re probably not on the whitelist."

"So how do I get in?"

"If you’re not on the whitelist, it’s full."

"Even if people leave, it’s still full?" I asked, referencing the one in, one out policy I’d read about.

"Yes."

"How is that possible?"

Shrugs.

"So there’s literally nothing I can do?”

"No."

Leaving aside my own personal chagrin, it was a disappointing end to Ethereum’s community conference. The term “whitelist” has been denounced by many organizations and replaced by more inclusive terms like “allowlist,” and even tech behemoths like Google and Microsoft have made the switch – way back in 2019. Only four years, yes, but in crypto years, that’s an eternity. And considering the moment of unrest that surrounded the conference, it felt especially tone deaf. 

The enigmatic whitelist both evidenced the exclusive mythos that has long burdened web3 and belied this EthCC’s overarching messaging: accessibility, community, public goods. As we seek to peer into the future and overhaul broken systems, it’s going to be essential that we don’t recodify into new programs.