Devconnect Argentina 2025 in Buenos Aires: Vitalik, the Ethereum World’s Fair and Key Announcements

When I put this wristband on the first day, I had no idea how much information, how many useful contacts and how many great projects the week would bring. Devconnect ran from 17 to 22 November 2025 at La Rural in Buenos Aires. I don't regret for a second that I went.

Devconnect Argentina 2025 in numbers

This was the first Ethereum World’s Fair, and according to the Ethereum Foundation recap the largest EF event so far: more than 14,000 attendees from over 130 countries, 45% of them from Argentina, 80+ teams showing working applications and 500+ side events across the city.

La Rural was split into eight themed districts: DeFi, Privacy, L2s, Decentralized Social, Hardware & Wallets, AI, Gaming and Art. Food trucks took crypto payments, and with about 20% of Argentines owning crypto, paying in stablecoins felt completely normal here. The ETHGlobal Buenos Aires hackathon ran in the same week.

The Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik

I met some very interesting people from the Ethereum Foundation. We talked about where AI is heading and how it will affect blockchain infrastructure.

I listened to a great panel, "Future of Smart Contract Security: Neither Smart Nor Secure?", and a talk by Vitalik Buterin himself, Ethereum in 30 Minutes, about where the protocol is heading. I even got to shake his hand.

1inch and Aqua

I chatted with the team from 1inch. It is a great project with ambitious plans. One example is Aqua, a shared liquidity protocol that brings liquidity from many pools and many chains into a single flow. 1inch launched it right at Devconnect.

I was pleasantly surprised that almost everyone from the team at the booth was Russian. It was good to see all of them.

Nym: a VPN built by cypherpunks

I stopped by the Nym booth and listened to their talk about the VPN they are building. Without going into the technical details, it takes the best of Tor's onion routing, of classic VPNs and of the latest cryptographic standards, so that users stay fully protected and anonymous.

The project is made by real cypherpunks, with huge attention to detail, to anonymity and to user privacy. These days that matters a lot.

Meeting Tina from Flashbots

I met Tina from Flashbots in person. While I was building my MEV project, I often relied on materials written by the community she curates. Flashbots in general carries a lot of memories for me, so it was a real pleasure to see her in person.

Names and logins on Ethereum

I also visited the booth of the team building a DNS for the blockchain and an advanced login system: ENS for names, Sign in with Ethereum for authentication, the Ethereum Follow Protocol for an onchain social graph, and the Ethereum Identity Kit that ties them together.

It is an interesting approach, although I prefer the blockchain to stay anonymous, the way it was originally designed. We'll see how social features and ideas borrowed from social networks shape its development. Will the community accept it?

Geth T-shirts

The Go Ethereum team gave us these awesome T-shirts. When I was building smart contracts for Ethereum, I often used their client to partially sync the real chain and run my own node. It is a very reliable product, if a bit fiddly to configure. I wrote about one of those setups in Truffle with Geth.

They had their own booth at Devconnect too. Geth is a key tool for the whole infrastructure and ecosystem that keeps the blockchain running.

The main Devconnect 2025 announcements

Many teams saved their news for this week. The ones people still search for most:

• Kohaku, a privacy- and security-focused wallet stack from Vitalik and Ethereum Foundation teams.
• The Ethereum Interop Layer (EIL) from EF Account Abstraction, meant to make Ethereum feel like one chain again.
• 1inch Aqua, the shared liquidity protocol I mentioned above.
• The new Aave App and Gnosis App.
• wARS, an Argentine peso stablecoin on Ethereum, Base and World Chain.
• Devcon 8 will take place in Mumbai, India, in Q4 2026.

Privacy came up everywhere, from Kohaku to the Nym booth. And there were plenty of real-world asset projects: teams were tokenizing everything from yerba mate to real estate. I wrote a separate post on RWA tokenization.

Startup pitches

I also went to the pitches of new projects at the ETH/ACC Crypto & AI demo day. The overall trend was prediction markets and using AI for prediction, comparison and matching.

I'm glad I didn't miss this Devconnect, and I hope to make it to the next one too. Next up is Devcon 8 in Mumbai.