This weekend marks the culmination of ETHDenver, probably the most important annual gathering for smart contract and DeFi [decentralized finance] developers right now, on Ethereum and beyond. I wish I could be there this year, but frankly I’m still recovering from a pretty intense four months of making cool things and exposing bad guys.

Fortunately, plenty of people are sharing clips from the event, so I can enjoy it vicariously. Unfortunately, many of these posts express something between innocent confusion and sneering takedowns of the supposedly lame ETHDenver goings-on.

But that attitude, to paraphrase the fugitive philosopher-thief Do Kwon, is a great formula for getting rekt. It may look like silliness and disorganization to you, but ETHDenver’s rough edges are actually strong signals that a real community has been drawn together by shared interests to build something together from the ground up. That’s the kind of community that has and will weather slow periods of crypto growth like what we’re going through right now.