Reef at ETHDenver Recap

ETHDenver has now come and gone. Now that the team has had some time to think about what we did, who we spoke to, and begin following up with new connections, we also wanted to lay out for the Reef community all that went on and what we learned.

Pre-Event

Before ETHDenver officially began, we had three fantastic artists collaborate on the Reef Metawall. The Metawall was used in a campaign to raise awareness of Reef on social media, but also to showcase how different artist styles and creatures can co-exist. and we feel this was highly successful. We also hosted two workshops — one focused on minting your first NFT, and another on deploying dApps to Reef.

Both workshops had good turnouts and were very well received. This set us up perfectly to focus on these types of discussions later in the week, as many people came up to the booth to tell us they attended one of the workshops and wanted to learn more about Reef as a result.

The Conference

During the main conference, from 17–20 February, Lukas, Derek, Philip and Matjaz spoke to everyone that came to Reef’s booth! Many people were drawn in by the branding, clothing, notebooks and snacks we had available. Others had already heard about Reef and wanted to learn more about why we were at ETHDenver whether they were a developer, product manager, marketer, artist, venture capitalist, or community builder. This was an incredibly invigorating experience, and gave us a chance to learn about what different people were focused on.

Artists, marketers and community builders were particularly keen about Reef’s energy usage. This gave us an opportunity to explain Nominated Proof of Stake at a basic level, how inexpensive it was to perform transactions like minting and buying NFTs, the various platforms we were using to build Reef’s community, and how little compute power was required to run a Reef Validator node.

Developers were interested in performance and what languages were supported. This gave the team an opportunity to talk about the real world testing completed in the fall yielding roughly 450–460 transactions per second, that minting an NFT should cost roughly $1 worth of REEF, to emphasize that we’re not talking about theoretical throughputs, and that we think the chain can run even faster. A developer we met also deployed two smart contracts on the weekend, giving us recent evidence that deploying smart contracts cost only a few hundred REEF each.

The venture capitalists and investors were interested in finding a better platform for the teams they’re investing in to deploy on. One with a vibrant community, good performance, and all the basic infrastructure needed to build and deploy. This gave us an opportunity to talk about the 260,000+ strong Reef community who were hungry for dApps, the Gitcoin Hackathon projects that would be deploying live dApps in the near future, the Reef Developer Grant Fund, network performance, and the other connections we had already formed at ETHDenver.

For four days we talked non-stop, and spent time after hours strengthening those connections whenever we ran into people we had spoken with earlier in the day. Overall it was an amazing experience and the team is now following up with everyone we encountered to move those initial discussions forward, and turn them into tangible deployments people can see and use.

After Party

All of ETHDenver’s presenting sponsors got together to host the official after party at two venues, ensuring everyone had a chance to enter at least one venue throughout the evening. Reef focused on The Church and had an aquatic themed evening with great music from DJ Mahf, DJ Lowkey, DJ Tennis, Option 4, H-Foundation, DJ Mental 69, Ne.Hau and BIGREDMACHINE spread across four rooms in this large venue, with a headline DJ set from Phantogram.

All of the performers put on a terrific show, and everyone we met had a great time and thanked us for hosting the event. We expect everyone at The Temple had similar feelings from their experience at that venue!

What We Learned

We learned a lot! We learned that there are developers that are still unsatisfied with the current slate of blockchains they had available before learning about Reef, that there is a high percentage of people concerned about the environmental impacts of Proof of Work blockchains, that high profile projects are looking for new networks to deploy on, and also the processes for how some go about evaluating which networks to integrate.

We also re-learned the value of in-person events. While many people are now more comfortable with online/remote meetings, there is still nothing that beats getting to meet and interact with people in real life. You encounter those you may never have met otherwise, and you get to have a more meaningful discussion because they are more open and there to actively learn.

All in all, ETHDenver almost felt like a “coming of age” event where we had our first big opportunity to get face-to-face with the community, existing and new, due to the lockdowns that have been in place over the past two years. It was Reef’s first in-person event for 2022, but it won’t be our last.

About Reef

Reef Chain is a layer 1, Substrate based blockchain that is the most advanced Ethereum VM-compatible blockchain available. It’s self-upgradable and has on-chain governance. Its infrastructure also allows for EVM extensions which allows for native token bridge, scheduled calls (ie. recurring payments), and smart contract in-place code upgrades. In the near future, it will support an additional VM which will allow developers to write code in multiple programming languages. The network runs on a Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS) consensus mechanism, which offers scalability and low fees.

• 🌎 Website: https://reef.io
• 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReefDeFi
• 🗣 Discord: https://discord.gg/reefchain
• 💬 Telegram: https://t.me/reefchain
• 📚 Medium: https://medium.com/reef-finance