“Didn’t someone say something about a bear market?” ETHDenver founder John Paller asked the crowd at the start of the event’s opening night. “We don’t believe in that crap!”
It’s not just the bear market that ETHDenver shrugged off this year. The event, which ran from February 24 to March 5, is probably the furthest thing you can imagine from a normal tech conference. In fact, one of the first things Paller told the crowd was that ETHDenver is not a “conference” but a “festival”: “We embrace the weird,” he said.
Which is a bit of an understatement. He welcomed attendees while standing on stage wearing a brightly colored and sparkly orange onesie that he explained was meant to look like the event’s mascot, the “bufficorn,” which, he said, combines the community focus and herd mentality of the Colorado buffalo with the magical and fantastical nature of the unicorn. A group of similarly dressed bufficorns standing off to the side of the stage cheered him on.
Following Paller’s opening speech, Jonathan Mann, a singer-songwriter who has written and published a song every day since 2008 (and had a minor viral hit with one about Baby Yoda back in 2019), performed a song meant to officially kick off the weekend’s festivities and, also, hopefully address the elephant in the room.
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