Original Title: “Side Events May Shrink Over 80%, Why Has ETHDenver Peaked and Declined?”
Original Author: Zen, PANews
With less than a month until ETHDenver opens, this developer conference held at the beginning of each year and highly watched by the cryptocurrency industry has grown increasingly popular over the past three years. In 2025, even as Ethereum remained sluggish during that period, ETHDenver still attracted nearly 20,000 attendees to Denver.
However, this large-scale Ethereum-themed developer event has notably cooled off this year, reversing its previous upward trend. Data provided by the cryptocurrency event information platform CryptoNomads reveals this trend:
During the 2023 conference, there were about 176 registered side events, which rose to 325 in 2024 and surged to 668 in 2025. However, entering 2026, with less than a month before the official opening, only 56 ETHDenver side events have been confirmed, a drop of approximately 85%.
When the side event craze experiences a “burst bubble,” and the once widespread side events shrink significantly, this contrast sends a clear signal and serves as a vivid footnote to ETHDenver’s decline and the current industry downturn.
Why has ETHDenver gone from unprecedented prosperity to a sharp downturn?
The Myth of Over-Commercialization
Originating from a local Ethereum community gathering in Denver, ETHDenver has always carried a strong “festival, carnival” vibe. As a conference specifically for developers, its free tickets, community-driven approach, and mechanism centered around a buildathon significantly differ from the heavy commercial atmosphere of traditional conferences.
Moreover, Denver’s more central location in the United States and the lower costs of hosting events in such non-major cities allow attendees and participants to reduce overall expenses. Therefore, for a long time, ETHDenver has resembled more of a compromise community meeting point rather than a high-cost showcase in a coastal metropolis.
However, over the past few years, increasing criticism has pointed to changes in the conference’s positioning and atmosphere. Many question whether ETHDenver is shifting from a technical event originally celebrating open-source hacker culture into an overly public relations-oriented brand exhibition.
During the grand ETHDenver 2025, some attendees joked that their experience felt like accidentally walking into a corporate expo. Expecting to enter a “sanctuary of decentralized innovation,” they were immediately surrounded by a dazzling array of corporate booths, with major sponsors everywhere. Even Polkadot’s booth was handing out free socks to attract attention.
The original open, inclusive, and non-ticket-revenue-dependent approach also fueled ETHDenver’s eagerness to accept extensive commercial sponsorship infiltration. The conference’s atmosphere gradually shifted accordingly. This turn towards commercialized events led some Ethereum community developers to lament that the conference is losing its early grassroots hacker spirit, diluted by heavy commercial promotion.
Dilution of the Ethereum Narrative
Meanwhile, ETHDenver’s focus on Ethereum themes has also been questioned.
Many attendees have noticed that in recent years, the conference has invited and accommodated numerous non-Ethereum ecosystem projects and sponsors, with themes becoming increasingly generalized, blurring the conference’s Ethereum identity.
This criticism became particularly heated in 2025, forcing conference co-founder John Paller to publicly respond. Using data, he clarified that over 95% of sponsors and 90% of content remain related to Ethereum and EVM-compatible ecosystems.
Even so, many remain dissatisfied with the exposure given to other public chains and unrelated topics at the conference. Some commentators pointed out that after all, ETHDenver is not an official event organized by the Ethereum Foundation but merely borrows the “ETH” name, making it easy to mix in various unrelated projects, diluting the original Ethereum-focused positioning.
When even the main stage featured guests advocating that “Ethereum has declined” and switching to other chains, while exhibition halls displayed booths from other ecosystem projects, the sense of thematic deviation and loss of direction intensified unease among community veterans.
More worryingly, the industry’s former diversity in narratives and categories is now a thing of the past, with many tracks nearly disappearing. Affected by the broader environment, ETHDenver has also lost its former creative spark.
The term “creative exhaustion” has become feedback from many attendees.
Rising and Cooling Expectations for Crypto Policy
Behind the peak and decline is also the significant impact of the Trump administration on industry sentiment. The “Crypto President’s” inauguration last year initially greatly raised expectations for his crypto policies. A large number of attendees flocked to ETHDenver, an industry event held early in the year, with hopes for the arrival of a “crypto spring.”
However, after a symbolic round of regulatory easing, the industry’s situation did not effectively improve. While global risk assets, stock markets, and various metals soared, only cryptocurrencies remained at rock bottom. The “Anything but crypto” rhetoric stung the crypto community.
At the policy level, although the stablecoin bill was enacted last July, broader regulatory frameworks are still in progress. Currently, the advancement of the cryptocurrency market structure bill is not optimistic. The Senate Banking Committee has repeatedly delayed the crypto market structure bill, pushing it to late February or even March, with its focus shifting to more urgent, livelihood-related housing legislation. This contrast between verbal policy expectations and disappointing reality has also affected people’s enthusiasm for attending.
Clashing with Lunar New Year
In addition to the above reasons, ETHDenver 2026’s opening date is set for February 17, coinciding with the 2026 Lunar New Year.
While European and American participants might treat ETHDenver as a work week, for many Chinese and broader Confucian cultural regions and countries, this week is inherently the least suitable for business travel all year.
After all, the Spring Festival is the culturally most important holiday. Compared to small meetups, demo nights, and ecosystem closed-door meetings highly reliant on “cross-timezone flights” and “team collective travel,” most people choose to set aside a year’s busyness and troubles, reunite with family, and celebrate the New Year together.
However, from the official narrative, ETHDenver 2026 still places “builders” at the center and attempts to create a more integrated field in terms of event space, content, and experience. For teams truly focused on delivery, this centralization may improve efficiency: they no longer need to expend energy navigating city routes and information noise.
From the controversy itself, criticism does not mean death. The debates surrounding it also indicate that it is still expected and regarded as a symbol of industry culture.
The real issue in 2026 may not be “how many side events are missing,” but rather, when the crypto bubble fades and hot money flows away, whether we can still rely on technology and the community itself to retain those willing to endure cycles.
