How the Fellowship of the Ethereum Musicians was born at DevconVI, Bogotà

matlemad
5 min readOct 26, 2022

A pilot’s story

I recently found myself contributing to a very interesting on-chain protocol called GUILDS: a Dapp based on a simple Token Curated List (TCL), where the listed items are the people applying to be part of that list. Together with a few interesting tricks in terms of tokenomics and community governance (read the WhitePaper I wrote for them here), Guilds aims at offering a valuable solution for many specific-field professionals and creatives struggling with non-portable reputation across centralized platforms.

In the meantime, a long-awaited Devcon VI Bogotà was almost ready to be served to a global audience of attendees from more than 150 countries: for this special event, and on the wave of the spontaneous music sessions put together at DevConnect Amsterdam, ETHPrague, SpaghettETH and EthCC, me and a few musician-devs and ethereans had decided to launch a Devcon Improvement Proposal (DIP) in order to set up a break-out jamming space within the conference. The proposal, supported by the coordination and passion of some Devcon team members, was soon accepted and funded and we were granted an amazing in-venue outdoor space with our own crew and backline, the Chiva Lounge.

the Remix IDE team jazzamatazzing at the Chiva Lounge, Devcon VI Bogotà.

From Stage to Chain

In order to connect the live stage to some sort of web3 experience, I reached out to GUILDS’ core team and proposed a pilot called “The Fellowship of Ethereum Musicians”, or simply ETHMusicians: a TCL with the aim to list all those people in the ETH ecosystem (devs, project managers, community managers etc.) and simple attendees who always end up gathering and play some music at every ETH-conference in the world.

Building a pilot Dapp for battle-testing a new protocol during the ‘liveness’ of a conference filled with excitement, overlapping talks and a reasonable amount of FOMO revealed to be an interesting process of trading constraints and opportunities. Here some of the factors we kept into account when tailoring GUILDS for this vertical:

  • Some people would join the stage only to play a couple…
matlemad

Musician rolling down the crypt, educator and project manager. https://linktr.ee/matlemad