# Berlin Ethereum Meetup Opening and Ecosystem Updates | Martin & Eniko (November 2025)

- Channel: [Berlin Ethereum Meetup](https://streameth.org/berlin-ethereum-meetup)
- Date: 2026-04-09
- Duration: 15:09
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-_xBoduRLPoM
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xBoduRLPoM

## Description

Join us on Meetup to get up to date on our Berlin events: 
https://www.meetup.com/berlin-ethereu...
See you at the next one!

Apply to speak at our future meetups: https://forms.gle/txTvFB4E8E8KbEqX8

X (Twitter): @BerlinMeetup
https://x.com/BerlinMeetup

## Transcript

Okay, welcome everyone. Thanks for thanks for coming down. We're back with another meetup for November having started the series last month or restarted. We got an agenda here. We are obviously not keeping to the time as usual. Um, but we'll just do a quick intro. Myself and Ino, we're both from from the EF. And uh, then we have Riley over here who's going to give a great great talk about Ethereum adoption in Latin America. Uh so it serves a little bit as a little warm-up for some of those that are going to bonus for Dev Connect happening in two weeks, less than two weeks from now. Um I just wanted to quickly again mention why why Berlin meetups are special and why why we here and why it's awesome that you guys are coming here. Um we've had Ethereum Berlin meetups for more than 11 years now, which is pretty crazy. And uh I just looked back in some old meetups. I found this uh one from 2018, an Ethereum Berlin meetup at uh at Cabbase. And here we have Eco Barinov um who's presenting. He's talking about X DIY chain. And X DIY chain later became Nosis Chain, which is kind of funny because we're here at at full node, a bit of a home of Nosis. And funnily enough, Ego has also recently joined the EF to oversee privacy efforts. Um, so it was a nice throwback I thought. Um, we have Dev Connect coming up real real soon. I believe that's the 11th. No, I mean I guess it's we've had seven DevCons and this is the third Dev Connect if I remember correctly or maybe eight DevCons. Anyway, Devcon started here in Berlin. We had the very first one in 2014, DevCon Zero, which was kind of like a closed event. It was kind of like an invite only small event. And now it's going really big and I think last year we had 10,000 people in Bangkok and I think we are expecting the same or maybe even more in Buonosirus. It's going to be really really uh crazy and Anique was going to talk a bit about that later. Um we I talked about this last time as well but like Berlin blockchain has really grown uh crazy big and we've had some really really big events over the years. Um some of them I've been part of so I'm just going to shill some of those uh protocol bag and East Berlin and so on. But we also of course have Dabcon organized by by the guys here from from Noses. And we have some soft dates already for uh Berlin Blockchain 2026. It's not something I'm organ like announcing. I'm just saying like mark your calendars because we already have DevCon announced for for June 16th and 17th. Um so it's around the same time as as it was this year and I'm very excited. Hope to see many of you there. Um, we want to uh bring the Berlin community a bit uh closer together and do more stuff together. We think there's there's so many people that are in crypto that are in Ethereum here in Berlin. Um, but sometimes feels a bit fragmented. We only see each other every once in a while. So, one part of it is getting this meetup series back and checking in more often and and seeing each other. But uh aside from that, we also started a new initiative at EF where we do um co-working uh Wednesdays. So this is every Wednesday where we have a section of the EF office here in Berlin where we invite people to come and co-work from uh co-work with us. So you can co-work there from from 10 to 6:00 and then from 6:00 to 8:00 we have some social hours. We have some beer, some pizza and just hang out, get to know each other. You can apply here. scan the QR code um and um and then um if we like your application, we'll we'll send you an a confirmation and then you're more than welcome to uh to show up. Um I think that's pretty much it from from my side here. Some nice photos. Um back when Berlin looked a little bit nicer than it does right now. Um like good kind of like late summer vibes. We did a barbecue for the first one and here's a nice uh time for lunch here at Amrit. Um, so yeah, very much encourage you to to apply, come and co-work with us and um, yeah, make sure you attend all the all the different meetups and just be a good part of the community. If you have ideas of things we can do to bring the community closer together, we are all ears. Um, and yeah, I think that's pretty much it from me. Now, I'm going to hand it over to Eniko. >> All right. Thank you, Martin. And yeah, thanks for being here. Um, you know, there's a lot going on in Berlin as always. So, we appreciate you showing up. And as Martin said, this is more about like continuity, regularity. We kind of want to make sure that we bring this community um activities and vibes back to Berlin. Um, and we also initiate a little more um as part of the Foundation. So just want to be a bit more approachable and more active in the in the local scene and and have uh more community gatherings, regular events and also if you're organizing something or involved with anything then let us know. Um I'm also part of a team who is supporting events. So um feel free to approach me after the talk if you're planning to do something here in Berlin. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the new grants program at the Ethium Foundation um ecosystem support program. I talked a little bit about the restructuring of the ecosystem support and ecosystem development teams at the foundation. I mentioned that now there are more uh focused teams focused on founders focused on developers academia events. So the grants program if uh some of you know I don't know if any of you have any experience or applied for any grants from the foundation in the past but it was a very generic grants program anybody can basically apply for any kind of grants um research grants even grants uh so it was a little bit of a more broader generic thing and now this has been a little bit restructured um and this new program allows uh it foundation teams to uh list wish list items items and RFPs. So the wish list items are a little bit more generic. These are like high level goas. Um so this is a little bit similar to what has been like what the the open grants application was in the past but they are still a little bit more concrete for for certain um areas. This could be technical. So the difference is that um each team and the foundation can um write like more specific like wish list item that they would like to see grant applications uh submitted for. Uh and then the next one is the request for proposals. These are a bit more concrete things. So if you have like if some of the teams have like a very like uh concrete like they need um researchers to work on a specific solution or issue or it's also timesensitive um they're um like they submitting these requests for proposals and the ESP team puts that on the website and then people can apply for these. So I encourage you to check it out. There are already some RFPs and wish list items listed on the ESP website. Uh you can just scan the QR if you want and there will be way more in the future. So don't worry there are not that many listed for now but they will be um more in the future and yeah I wanted to talk a little bit about Defcon. Um just raise your hand if you're going to be at Defcon from here. Okay quite a few of you. Perfect. So I also don't want to make you sad if you're not going. So I just kind of want to give you a little bit of a context of of what this is and why why uh we are all excited about it. So so Defcon and Defcon is are are the only two events that are organized by the Ethereum Foundation. Uh every other event uh around the world which there so many events now uh are organized by local grassroots communities which is I think is very impressive. Of course the foundation supports some of them financially and non-financial uh ways but um yeah they are all organized by the locals. So Devcon connect is the only conference in the year and defcon that is organized by the foundation and they are usually one of the biggest uh gatherings and um ecosystem um events that are happening. Um so yeah I just kind of wanted to talk about the difference. So Devcon was originally like Martin said like the developer conference, right? Like like the the the first like from the start very small gatherings of of more like core developers or people who were working on Ethereum. Um and then it grew into this like way bigger like conference for the whole ecosystem uh with a lot of attendees. Um and then of course there was a little bit of uh a break uh because of COVID and because there was nothing really happening during COVID the foundation was like let's let's do something before Defcon because Defcon is usually happening in fall. So they decided to organize DEFC connect in Amsterdam in 2022. Um and the idea behind it is that it has like more focused events around specific topics. So it can be more deeper um only um one topic is covered at usually at these events and they have these deep dive sessions, workshops, roundts um and they try to have attendees who are really like particularly interested in that specific topic and this is also a good way to empower the ecosystem to organize events. So literally none of the the content or the talks are organized by the foundation uh at Defcon. Um and in Amsterdam I also How many of you were in in Amsterdam at Defconnect? Okay, cool. So I really like that it was like very like decentralized in terms of locations too. So you could get to see the city like I biked everywhere. I remember like the locations were all spreaded out in the city. So, there was this main co-working space um that's here in the corner, but that was literally just like for the community co-working music, but all the events and the content and the the presentations were at different locations in the city. So, that was a really really cool concept. I really liked it. And in that year, there was also Defcon in fall in Bota, I think. And then there was Defcon again in the next year. There's the picture down here. Same concept. big co-working space but all the other events were scattered around the city um and the ecosystem and the communities were organizing those events not the foundation. So the concept right now is that um they are happening in alternating years. So one year there is DEFCON the next year is DEC connect. So this is a good balance between like ecosystem organized events and the big conference which is DevCon where the content is curated by the Ethereum foundation of course showcasing and and having a lot of speakers from the ecosystem as well but u again more curated by the EF um yeah so the next one is coming up in Buenosirus in Argentina. Um as I mentioned again it's the the point of def connect is empowering the ecosystem to organize own and lead and uh um lead the content of these events. Um and then uh yeah the next one. Yeah. So what's new at this dev connect? Uh obviously a lot of people are already there because it's happening soon um in this month. Um but there are so many side events always. There are pop-up cities, there are hecatons, there are builder um villages and so many other uh events organized around defcon and and also defcon but for sure devcon connect this time um not just in Argentina actually but in other LATAM countries um hackathons conferences um the other cities so a lot of things going on so this time um most of the things are going to be at Lura from what I heard so it's a little bit different from for example from uh Amsterdam So it's going to be more focused on this big venue because it's also this new concept that's it's going to be like a vert fair. So it's going to be a very big cool uh venue with a lot of showcases of real world use cases um discussion corners um community hubs co-working of course as always meeting rooms uh the food trucks everything will be here and also some of the events. So there will be like neat like uh stages and event rooms where um some of the events will be hosted. So it's be going to be more um centered at Laruro. But of course there are so many other side events will be also organized at other locations. Um a lot of the food trucks and the the vendors at the venue will accept crypto which is is really great. Um there's going to be a lot of things organized by the community, by the ecosystem like startup world cup, founders lab. I think Riley can maybe uh mention that. I think you have a little bit of involvement with this one. Um yeah, and it's also going to showcase the very strong adoption of of Ethereum and crypto in LATAM. And again, Riley will have a really really good presentation uh on this after me. So I don't want to waste too much time. Um, if you're interested, that's the uh calendar of the events on the left. And um, the Defcon team also published an article recently about everything you need to know about Devcon connect. So if you're going, then you can uh, scan this QR. And if you're not going then again, I just wanted to highlight that we have a community here. So don't be sad. you know, maybe next time you can join, but we really want to encourage you to to meet us to to to come to the meetups to join us for the co-working session. So, we will have a more active community here in the future as well. So, plenty of time to to network and connect and and meet new people um as well. Yeah. and make sure you you talk to someone tonight who you haven't met before uh to exchange some some thoughts and uh have some good conversations. Um and yeah, we also have a popup. So if you're a collector, then you can uh scan this QR code um and mint your popup for this meetup. Yeah, I think that's it from my part. So, uh, I can just pass it on to Riley in the meantime while you're collecting your popup. Does anyone still need the cure? No. Okay. Thank you.