Devcon 1 in London marks Ethereum's first genuinely public gathering

NOV 09 2015 · 12:00

Video: DEVCON1: Understanding the Ethereum Blockchain Protocol - Vitalik Buterin Date: 2015-11-09 · Type: conference · Tags: devcon, london, ethereum, community, enterprise, 2015 Four hundred people in a former Victorian music hall; the whitepaper was two years old and the mainnet four months Devcon 1 was held at the Gibson Hall — the former National Provincial Bank of England banking hall on Bishopsgate in Westminster, November 9–13 2015, four months after Frontier launched. Where Devcon 0 in Berlin had been fifty developers in a hacker space, Devcon 1 was four hundred people in a building with simultaneous translation booths. The shift in register was unmistakable. Gavin Wood gave the technical keynote; Vitalik covered the protocol roadmap from Homestead to Serenity; Joseph Lubin's ConsenSys was already visible as an institutional presence. The programming reflected the peculiar transitional moment: Solidity had existed for less than a year, the first serious contract auditing practices were still being improvised, and the enterprise Ethereum experiments — JP Morgan, Microsoft Azure blockchain-as-a-service — were already being announced from the same stage as cypherpunk-inflected talks on censorship resistance. London, rather than Berlin or Zug, was where the protocol's dual audience — open-source community and institutional enterprise — first occupied the same room without obvious tension. The boldest thing about Devcon 1 wasn't any single talk; it was the implicit decision that Ethereum would address both constituencies simultaneously, and that the tension between them would be productive rather than fatal. That bet has been tested repeatedly since, and has not yet been definitively settled. Facts • Dates: November 9–13 2015, Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Westminster, London • ~400 attendees (vs. ~50 at Devcon 0) • Frontier had launched July 30 2015, roughly 100 days earlier • Gavin Wood gave the technical keynote; Vitalik Buterin covered the roadmap • Microsoft Azure Ethereum-as-a-Service announced at the conference • First Devcon with simultaneous translation into multiple languages Primary Documents • Devcon 1 archive (devcon.org) — https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/1/