Notes From Devconnect Buenos Aires

A casual recap of what actually mattered (+ what didn’t)

Nov 30, 2025

Hey everyone — it feels like a while since I sent out a Sunday newsletter. I’ve been traveling for the past 2/3 weeks and I’m now in Istanbul. As much as I love traveling, this time my body said “enough,” and I’ve been a bit under the weather. I’m feeling a lot better, but long trips do take a toll.

This week’s post is a roundup of my takeaways from Devconnect Buenos Aires, the biggest Ethereum developer conference of the year. If you read my previous post, you might remember I had a presentation on Prediction Markets — you can find the content from that talk here.

My Devconnect Takeaways

The most discussed topics seemed to be: prediction markets, stablecoins, x402, AI agents and Privacy. Interop and infra improvements too are again a big topic. (Someone told me they make x2 their salary in prediction markets, I trust my source.)
No one was talking about memecoins or SocialFi.
Like the rest of tech, crypto has a hiring mis-match: many companies are hiring for seniors, while most job seekers are juniors.
Buenos Aires made a great conference city — venues were close, prices were reasonable, the weather was great. Passed the vibe check.
I heard from a few marketing people that marketing is shifting away from CT (crypto twitter) toward other platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok.
Panels are out; presentations and small group discussions are in. It finally feels like everyone agrees that panels are a genuine waste of time.
Exclusive/invite-only events are now much more popular — and honestly, that’s where you actually meet the people you’d probably end up doing business with.
People say ‘sentiment is low’, but I didn’t actually hear anyone say that. I guess there were fewer side events, which could be a sign — though it might just be that people realized there’s no real ROI on most of these events and stopped doing them.
Crypto twitter seemed to be very interested in who is flying business.
My most notable events were: Padelcon + a Steak team dinner. One of my friends went to a guinea-pig betting event, which I guess makes the list of most interesting things that happened during Devconnect. I also heard about Uniswap cup. It’s not easy to make such a memorable event when there are +100 events.
Someone asked me: as an early-stage startup, should I hire marketing? I’ve been thinking about this ever since. At first I immediately said yes, but the more I think about it, the more I come to realize the answer is no. Especially in a tech company, you need good storytellers and campaigns to bring the stories to your specific audience — but before you have a real product you can take to market, the focus should be on the product itself.
The reason is simple: you’re still figuring out product–market fit, still learning who your users really are, and still shaping the core value of what you’re building. Most marketing work — paid acquisition, content engines, brand strategy, event strategy, social/content pipeline — becomes effective only once you know what you’re selling, who you’re selling to, and why they care. Before that, what looks like “marketing” is mostly founders and product people talking to users, refining the story, doing direct outreach, and making quick changes based on feedback.
old but gold tweet