With the Olympics happening down the road in Paris, the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) picked up shop and relocated to Brussels for its seventh edition. Thousands descended upon the city, enduring hours-long immigration lines for waffles, high ABV beer and the latest crypto communiqué.

Serving as headquarters was the Square, an events space whose foyers and stairwells are strewn with art. On a first-floor wall is an original fresco by Belgian surrealist, René Magritte. The piece, titled “The Mysterious Barricades” features leafy trees and chess pieces standing guard next to a warmly-lit home. Approaching the house on a white horse is a lone rider, returning home after some undisclosed journey. 

Crypto itself feels surreal sometimes. It defies conventional realities, depicted in abstract ideals and bizarre symbolism that can feel both mysterious and barricaded. And EthCC had it all: raves, ball pits, tech jargon and serious policy conversations, all held in rooms with names like Pacman and Space Invaders. It was a proverbial ‘choose your own adventure’ conference, and beneath it all lay a growing plexus of value systems that are increasingly difficult to paint into a single piece.

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The four-day conference featured hundreds of official talks and 400 side events, which took place all around Brussels. More than one EthCC regular told me they didn’t even get an official ticket this year, content with what was happening on the periphery – a potential financial problem for the conference down the line. 

Those numbers speak to the countless paths one can take at EthCC. Many paths, though, can also hide a more holistic picture of the here and now. "Even though it's hard to read the current state of the crypto ecosystem, we need to grow outside our community to grow adoption,” Stani Kulechov, CEO and founder of Avara, said in his opening-day keynote, “Power to the People.”

Insularity has long been crypto’s kryptonite. A tech-centric foundation and a stigma laden with scammy crypto bros have been chokeholds on the diversity of culture. Those effects are palpable.

“Despite the permissionless nature of blockchain, there’s a significant cultural, educational, and interest gap,” said Maggie Love, founder of SheFi. SheFi is an eight-week program aimed at accelerating women’s careers in web3, responding to a reality in which only 13 percent of founding teams include at least one woman.

Read more on EthCC 2023: ‘On-Chain Summer’ Gets Off to an Optimistic Start Atop the Eiffel Tower at EthCC

On Sunday, the organization held SheFi Summit, an excellent one-day “feminine-first experiential event” that preceded EthCC’s official kickoff. The day’s speakers focused on impact, attributing blockchain’s true utility to the folks serving the underserved – like the unbanked and artists who have long suffered extractive digital platforms.

“[On Twitter and Instagram], I’m giving away my data to these companies and they’re benefiting off of me,” the artist Latashá said in a fireside with Christina Beltramini, the head of growth at Lens (an Avara project). “Artists are creating the new Internet, so I believe artists should get paid for building that Internet.” 

Before leaving the stage, Latashá fielded audience questions on how to engage with web3. “Diversify your community,” she said, and ensure you’re not just interacting with “crypto bros.” Describing what she loved about working with decentralized social protocols like Lens, she added: “It’s really nice to have a new world and new soil where I can garden the way I want to garden.”

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More than once, the natural world was invoked. At a Lens-curated side event called “afk” (away from keyboard), web3 thought leader Simona Pop commented on how companies are transplanting web2 folks into on-chain projects without first immersing them in web3 culture. 

“Trees grow both ways,” she said. “It’s called ‘geotropism’” – e.g. roots grow down, branches grow up. “That root system – and I believe we are that,” Pop said gesturing to the room, "is very, very important.”

Expansive paths, tillable gardens and trees are all useful metaphors for describing web3, but in Pop’s analogy, how do we know who’s a root and who’s a branch? And either way, what does it say about our values – and the grander role we play in the ecosystem?

“What you choose to call the value on a blockchain is a lens by which you interpret the world,” said James Beck, a marketing director at Avara, during his EthCC talk. "Tokens spawn communities of supporters who define their politics in relation to each other and their shared cultural signifiers."

Perhaps the question of roots and branches, then, is best answered by our “cultural signifiers,” like whether we call tokens “memecoins” or “scenecoins” or “shitcoins.” Mathematically, they’re the same pieces of code, but culturally, the term we use invokes a value system – ‘a lens by which [we] interpret the world.’

The Square arcade room photo by MacEagon Voyce

Speaking with author and professor, Paul Dylan-Ennis, at ‘afk,’ Ethereum Inventor Vitalik Buterin described the value systems of the blockchain as self-selecting. “If Ethereum has 3.9 percent carnivores and Bitcoin has 4.1 percent carnivores, which are you going to choose?” he said. “You can say it's a piece of neutral code – it's math, but if you're a carnivore we all know which one you'll go to.”

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My EthCC experience was a manifestation of that self-selection process. As a culture journalist, I went to the events most likely to espouse and affect “real world” culture. Lens features prominently here because it’s a social project that inherently impacts culture. So do parties (the culture journo’s cross to bear) and conversations surrounding identity, public goods, open-sourcing and memes. 

“People tend to ‘YOLO’ into open-source,” said Rachel Epstein, Associate General Counsel at Matter Labs, during her talk, “They Meme Well (Legally Speaking): Open-Sourcing in Crypto.” “And [intellectual property] is always in the background,” she continued, “something to deal with.”

Epstein exemplified Matt Furie’s comic character Pepe the Frog, which has been the subject of multiple lawsuits after being co-opted by the alt-right, copied without permission as a non-fungible token (NFT) collection and turned into a memecoin.

Ultimately, by tapping the legal system, Furie sought to protect Pepe’s value system. But today, with its tangled history, what does owning a ‘Pepe coin’ say about your values? And for future creators, to ensure alignment of those value systems, what’s the least harmful way to protect your rights and encourage the spread of knowledge and creativity?

The concept of ownership, privacy and security should be extended” EthDublin co-founder Caolan Walsh said in his talk “Redefining Funding for Cultural and Creative Pursuits through Harm Reduction as a Public Good.” He went on, “which I think should be considered public goods, because they are all essential elements for harm reduction.”

Harm reduction is a sensible ‘lens by which to interpret the world.’ And it too is self-selecting, oriented around meeting people where they are and helping them get where they’d like to go. And only at a crypto conference do you get to talk about it in an area called “The Retro Gaming Block.”

Walsh gave a shout out to fellow Irishman Dylan-Ennis, who was in the audience. “To reference Paul, ‘the web3 event circuit is the best product the industry has to offer,’” Walsh said, looking to Dylan-Ennis, who nodded in confirmation. “I mean there’s a ball pit here – that’s gas.”

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I worked from a lounge across the ball pit one day. As errant balls rolled out from the pit, knocked loose by revelers, crypto bros took meetings, crypto punks took calls, and families (the ball pit was on the same floor as rooms called Zoombinis – a nursery – and The Sims – a daycare) gathered to eat lunch, served by numerous vendors in The Square’s expansive basement.

The ball pit photo by MacEagon Voyce

Downstairs, there was also a chocolatier, an old school arcade room, rows of working tables and dozens of booths for companies shilling things like “fully homomorphic encryption” and high yield decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. All day long, four coffee baristas caffeinated the heaving mass. Vigilant servers (no less than five asked if they could take my half-finished coffee) patrolled the space as folks came and went.

Down the road, on the conference’s penultimate day, I left the heaving mass to attend the “Blockchain for Good Unconference” – another EthCC side event. About 50 people – fittingly, organized in a circle – gathered to ask “Could Decentralized Identity break Surveillance capitalism and restore Privacy?” Panelists represented both government organizations and tech platforms.

“You learn all your life you need to have something to prove to other people what you can do,” said Perrine de Coëtlogon, President of the Board of Open Education and Digital Identity at the University of Lille, touting the benefit of on-chain accreditation.

Daniël Du Seuil, Convenor European Self Sovereign Identity Framework for European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI), talked about hybrid wallets that need to evolve to be “where the citizen is in control.”

“The political message in Europe is clear,” he continued. “We want to give citizens more privacy.” 

“I’ve heard a lot of ideas but not a lot of definitions,” said Evan McMullen, CEO and founder of the New York-based company disco.xyz, a web3 platform focused on decentralized identity. “Decentralization,” she began, one hand on the disco ball on her lap, “is when the subject has the most control.”

Despite a common mission toward user- and citizen-agency, there were tensions between the private sector and the government groups, and between the Europeans and Americans. “Tthe freedom to transact is one of our most fundamental rights,” McMullen said later, explaining why she thinks any piece of data should be monetizable if its owner so chooses.

“This is a difference between the U.S. and Europe,” responded Du Seuil.

As if on cue, an audience member jumped in to remind us that, “as digital citizens we’re still very young, childish and immature.” He worried that we’re opening Pandora’s Box. “Are we capable of handling this?” he asked.

“Pandora’s Box has already been opened,” McMullen responded. “If we weren’t here discussing this, we would proceed unfettered. There is no ‘Hippocratic Oath’” – an oath of ethics historically taken by physicians – “taken for those who build products.” 

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That night I went to the much hyped RAAVE, yet another Avara joint. (Avara’s first product was the DeFi protocol, AAVE, which means “ghost” in Finnish – founder Kukechov’s home country). 

When I arrived, dozens were outside the venue, Ancienne Belgique, chatting and smoking cigarettes. I was waved away from the VIGs (very important ghosts) line before pushing through the ‘regular guy’ turnstile. 

Inside, people packed a long dance hall and queued at the open bar, dancing to DJs JAMIIE, Henri Bergmann and the Spanish turntablist duo, MËSTIZA. The music was accessible, ranging from a mashup of Kelis’s 2003 smash hit “Milkshake” to Spanish-inflected house. The light show was top-tier.

Appropriately, RAAVE toed the line between bottle service megaclub and basement rave, accounting for an audience that spanned corporate-types and crypto anarchists. When your product suite includes both finance and social protocols, that’s the balance. It was befitting of Ancienne Belgique’s own history. A music hall since 1931, the site has existed since the 15th century, transitioning between marketplace and fortified bank vault, nursing home and banquet hall. 

RAAVE photo by Carolina Teixeira

More my speed was the party by the music-focused group, Refraction DAO. On the conference’s last night, the event competed with EthCC’s official afterparty, which I wholeheartedly skipped after a particularly shit experience trying to get in last year. 

After downing several Surrealiste Pale Ales – a new favorite and surprisingly thematic beer – at a local bar in the Saint-Gilles district, I arrived at the party towing, let’s say, an “unconventional” headspace that Magritte would have approved of. 

The party was housed in a sprawling industrial space. DJ booths were carved into cement block coves, forming two stages separated by the Gravity Lounge, a space designed by the artist Craig Barrow.

A no-frills bar served rail booze, and most exciting was the set by Move D, the legendary German musician and DJ. All night, ravers danced away their demons, cavorting in inspiring devil-may-care forms. And in the spacious smoking area, conversation floweth over. At the end of our EthCC journeys, everyone had a lot to say, but not once did I hear the word crypto. 

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EthCC 2024 felt more connective than in past years, but I am but one pair of eyes and ears, and from the infinite paths, I plucked the one I wanted. 

Much has been said about the worldbuilding capabilities of the blockchain, in which on-chain tokens and events can form the first bricks of a new world. EthCC 7 encouraged people to pursue those first blocks in an emerging garden of culture. The fact that you can ‘choose your own adventure’ means that web3 can appeal to a more diverse array of communities. 

Not everyone, though, yet feels like crypto has an adventure for them, or that there’s a home waiting at the end of it. And ‘self-selecting’ means builders can shirk ethics to build the products that have earned crypto its stigmas.

Pandora's Box is indeed open. While many will seek to profit, others will strive to use blockchain for good. The challenge lies in creating guardrails that reduce harm while empowering people to build new, fantastic and inclusive worlds.

But those guardrails are mysterious barricades indeed, and as new value systems enter the space, adding nuance to our understanding of well-worn words like decentralization, it will become ever more difficult to find common ground. The surreal will become real. Through our once rose-tinted lenses, we’ll squint to find the deeper meaning behind why we’re all here. "Everything we see hides another thing,” Magritte once said, rollicking in his own ball pit somewhere. “We always want to see what is hidden by what we see."