Thousands of ethereum coders work and party in Denver

DENVER — A few blocks away from the Colorado state capitol in downtown Denver is a place called the Sports Castle. The six-floor building is a retrofitted Chrysler car showroom, originally constructed in 1927, where instead of stairs, sweeping ramps wrap the perimeter of every floor. The degenerate grunge aesthetic is deliberate and perfectly fits the ethos of ETHDenver, an annual two week-long event drawing some of the brightest and most innovative minds in the ethereum ecosystem.

“It’s like we broke into an abandoned warehouse,” said John Paller, who first launched ETHDenver in 2017. “It fits the vibe of that emergent, sort of permissionlessness, where it’s almost like, ‘Yeah, we’re kinda building a revolution, and you don’t even know about it.'”

Five years on, and the cat is most definitely out of the bag. Paller tells CNBC that more than 20,000 people registered to attend this year — and he estimates that more than 13,000 descended on Denver for the official gathering, plus the more than 350 ancillary events. ETHDenver organizers say it is now the largest and longest-running ethereum event in history.

Ethereum is the world’s second-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap after bitcoin, and it is known for its smart contracts, which are basically programmable pieces of code that could someday replace middlemen like banks and lawyers in certain types of business transactions.

Paller tells CNBC that hackers are known as BUIDLers — an intentional misspelling of the word ‘builders’ in a sort of homage to the bitcoin meme, HODL, or “hold on for dear life.”

“We prefer to BUIDL instead of HODL,” said Paller. “That ethos is very ingrained in the community.”

The meme-off may seem silly, but it gets at the core of what separates these two very different sets of people.

Bitcoiners tend to move more slowly on development, prioritizing security and decentralization above all else, while ethereum programmers tend to be more cavalier. While they aren’t necessarily breaking things as they go, they move fast and tinker aggressively.

Ethereum serves as the primary building block for all sorts of crypto projects, like non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi), and web3, a still somewhat amorphous buzzword for a third generation of the internet that is decentralized and built using blockchain tech. Most NFTs and 74% of DeFi apps, or dApps, run on ethereum, according to the website State of The dApps.

The network is also on the verge of a years-in-the-making upgrade from a proof-of-work mining model to a consensus mechanism known as proof-of-stake. The makeover will move ethereum to a less energy-intensive mining process and, according to network founder Vitalik Buterin, could boost speed by over 7,000-fold to 100,000 transactions per second.