Author| kyle Wu Talks Blockchain

Side Events Halved

Let’s start with the most direct data: this year the number of side events has obviously halved. According to statistics from Luma, compared to the 668 side events in 2025, this year’s event period (2026/2/18–2026/2/21) will only see about 215 side events, a drop of 68%.

There are several reasons behind this. On one hand, it is the industry cycle itself; on the other hand, the timing of the conference close to the Lunar New Year is not friendly to Asian project parties and attendees; additionally, some external events are also diverting industry attention, such as the WLFI Forum at Mar-a-Lago, which has also drawn away some OGs and core practitioners.

Therefore, attendees can still feel that ETH Denver has many North American Web3 people gathering, but there are noticeably fewer participants coming from outside the United States, and the overall external influence of the conference has weakened.

From the perspective of specific ecosystem activity, it can also be felt that the industry has entered a phase that values efficiency and cost-saving.

Monad and X Layer have a strong presence; the former hosted three events, while the latter sponsored the main stage (but the team only participated on the first day of the exhibition); Aptos and Sui also had some exposure; Solana only hosted one main event, which was small in scale but good in quality. Overall, it appears that many public chain ecosystems are no longer pursuing the previous strategy of many events and full presence, but are retaining only a few side events, hosting one or two activities for formality, emphasizing cost-effectiveness.

AI Everywhere

One of the biggest changes this time is that AI is almost everywhere.

Aside from the main stage, this time ETH Denver has split the main venue into five stages — ETHERSpace (Applications and User Ownership), Devtopia (Infrastructure and Developer Tools), New France Village (Finance / Compliance / Institutionalization), Futurllama (AI / DePIN and other frontier trends), and Prosperia (Privacy, Public Goods, and Community). After three days of exploring the exhibition, Futurllama had the largest foot traffic.

The main venue also featured a summit called Claws Out Summit focused on the recent hot topic "Lobster" OpenClaw, as well as a small roadshow for founders of AI projects; outside the venue, there was the AI-themed Open AGI Summit hosted by Sentient, which even had a larger scale and density of attendees than some main venue areas. The atmosphere of this ETH Denver no longer resembles that of a traditional cryptocurrency industry conference, but rather feels more like a mixed exhibition of AI × Crypto.

Even the forms of exhibiting projects have changed. When seeing robots and mechanical arms during the exhibition, there is a sense of "Did I walk into CES?" PrismaX, Gensyn, and other projects focused on embodied intelligence have their own independent booths. Additionally, many projects, although still carrying a Web3 label, have core narratives that are no longer solely centered around public chains, DeFi, and wallet infrastructure, but are moving towards agent, chatbot, and other applications closer to AI product application layers.

A strategic manager from an exchange stated that his focus at this conference was not on mature projects, but on very early-stage directions, some of which were just taking shape. Regarding AI + Crypto, he was particularly interested not in whether projects could immediately generate revenue, but rather whether the combination of AI and Crypto would lead to new production relationships, new distribution methods, new workflows, and new on-chain collaboration mechanisms.

He also shared with me an internal strategic judgment from their company's senior management: everyone has already assumed that AI will bring significant productivity improvements, but in the Web3 field, what is really worthy of investment is not the so-called large models, but rather whether AI technology can be embedded within the exchange to enhance the current product experience. They are currently developing a large language model embedded in the exchange to provide trading recommendations based on real-time market news and to execute related product trades directly within the chatbox.

ETH Denver Still Builder-Oriented

Although AI has become the hottest topic, one thing that hasn't changed about ETH Denver is that it remains one of the strongest builder-oriented crypto conferences.

This can be seen from the agenda. On the last day, aside from the closing ceremony, the entire exhibition time was dedicated to hackathons and builder workshops, and the side events during the conference focused on developers.

It’s worth mentioning that Base also showcased a small product called Braindate during the conference. Base specifically set aside an area in its exhibition for socializing and chatting. However, unlike traditional chatting areas, you can join some interesting topics on Braindate or create your own session to attract like-minded partners to chat.

Inside the venue, this atmosphere can be felt more distinctly: compared to discussing market trends, more people attending ETH Denver are asking, “What are you currently building?” Especially among student builders, they care more about “Can this thing be built?” and “Is this product interesting?” rather than short-term market fluctuations. Because of this, although ETH Denver has contracted in size overall, it has not completely transformed into a conference that only discusses narratives without focusing on products. At least here, the real builders are still at the core.

The event that best embodies this atmosphere remains its hackathon BUIDLathon, and this BUIDLathon has a very noticeable change: the overall competition design has been advanced.

Based on feedback from participants, BUIDLathon has introduced an online hacking phase, where specific topics will be shared with everyone a week in advance, departing from the traditional model of “getting started only when people arrive on-site.”

This is actually quite an interesting innovation. It aligns better with the current working style of many builders and can improve project completion rates. However, it also means that the in-person exchange time has been shortened, halving from last year’s 8 days to 4 days, which necessitates that much preparatory work is completed in advance. The offline phase is no longer the starting point for building, but more like a concentrated wrap-up of the projects.

Changes in the competition structure may simply reflect a shift in the organizing preferences of the hosts, while the changes in the prize pool starkly expose the cycle the industry is currently in.

After interviewing multiple participants, they all complained that the number and strength of sponsors this year was significantly lower than in previous years. Last year’s total prize pool reached $1.03 million, while this year it has shrunk to $132,000. Sponsorship budgets have become more focused, also leaning towards their most concerning direction: AI.

Some participants mentioned that the highlight of a championship project in the hackathon was an "AI girlfriend." Users can tip the AI girlfriend with cryptocurrency, and through more frequent tipping interactions, establish some behavioral incentive mechanisms, thus bringing the two closer. This tipping mechanism sounds quite playful, but the project winning an award is indicative: the judges are no longer limited to assessing the combination of AI + Crypto from a perspective focused solely on wallets, settlement, and other strong Web3 scenarios; they hope to see projects outline user scenarios that are closer to ordinary, everyday users.

I also interviewed a participant named Justin, who took the third place in the Base sponsorship prize during the hackathon. His project is an open protocol aimed at ad monetization for AI agents.

The judgment behind this project is that many free AI products open to the public in the future may need to achieve sustainable monetization through advertising rather than subscriptions. Advertisers pay for promotion tasks, AI agents distribute recommendations based on user context, drive conversions, and earn income after the tasks are completed.

However, the biggest challenge lies in how to prove that the AI has truly completed the advertising task.

Justin’s solution involves introducing on-chain validators to verify advertising results. In this hackathon demo, he mainly validated verifiable behaviors such as on-chain purchases: only when the relevant delivery results are confirmed as genuinely occurred by the validators will the protocol trigger settlement, and the advertiser’s budget will be truly paid to the agent that completed the task. In this sense, this project is not just an “AI receiving ads” product, but is attempting to build the foundational infrastructure for a future AI-native advertising market.

This hackathon also has a noteworthy point: the participating crowd is very diverse.

On site, there are both university student groups and senior builders; there are deeply experienced individuals with mature industry understanding, as well as creators with very new and interesting approaches. Among the participating projects, aside from AI and DeFi-related directions, there are also some interesting GameFi projects.

The ETH Denver hackathon has not become an event solely for self-indulgent players within the crypto circle. There is a noticeable influx of newcomers, and they are not necessarily burdened by the expectation to work on traditional crypto use case projects, instead, they seem more willing to naturally integrate AI, gaming, advertising, social aspects, etc. with on-chain technology.

Somewhat Amateur Judging Process

Of course, this hackathon is far from perfect, and the judging process seems somewhat "amateur."

Participants reported that the judging process is divided into a main track and a sponsor track. The main track is relatively clear: contestants start queuing at 9 AM, usually facing 2 to 3 judges, and the entire pitch and presentation process isn’t particularly tense. However, the problem is that the presentation time is only five minutes, which means the judging tends to favor teams that can explain their projects clearly and demo effectively in a very short time. Under time constraints, strong points of humor and memorability often outweigh technical polish, and even having bugs doesn’t necessarily affect winning.

After finishing the main track, the team then needs to continue to the sponsor track to present their project again to sponsors like Base. This phase is relatively chaotic, with less clear order management, which tests the teams' on-the-spot judgment and execution.

Predictive Markets

In addition to AI, another theme that I found worthy of separate mention at this conference is predictive markets.

I heard several key discussion points shared by guests at the Frontier Markets hosted by Monad, which left a deep impression. First, they believe that the biggest barrier to predictive markets remains liquidity. Secondly, since each market has an end time, liquidity continuously migrates, making it hard to remain prolonged like perpetual contracts. Furthermore, how to attract liquidity providers in long-tail markets remains a persistent challenging problem.

Meanwhile, predictive markets have notable differences from traditional trading. Traditional trading tends to involve gradual fluctuations, but predictive markets can quickly drop to zero at a certain point, making leverage design, market making strategies, and risk management more complex, which keeps many traditional market makers hesitant about entering them.

However, predictive markets also have their peculiarities: many popular markets naturally give rise to liquidity providers primarily composed of retail investors. In other words, the key in this field may not simply be “creating another prediction platform,” but rather who can continually create sufficiently attractive circumstances for retail participation and reorganize liquidity around those circumstances, enhancing user experience.

Resilience in Crypto

If I were to summarize this ETH Denver, I would say: it reflects the state of the industry during a bear market, currently in a transitional phase. This is not a stage with clear hot spots where everyone quickly follows popular narratives. The excitement is lessened, enthusiasm in the crypto circle is greatly reduced, and the so-called “beauty during an economic upswing” is diminished. Yet at the same time, there are still builders earnestly exploring, some investors are still looking at early-stage projects with considerable potential, and while some projects are still imperfect and have bugs, they are already beginning to unveil feasible business models and outlines for the next phase of the crypto sphere.

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