I don’t often venture out of my home office cave, but didn’t miss another chance to meet the whole Arweave ecosystem. Especially since I’ve been involved since 2017, building full-time since 2020, and never even seen some of my closest ecosystem friends in person.
By a strange twist of fate, this transaction in block 0 has my name in it.
The stated aim of attending Arweave Berlin was to give a talk on HyperBEAM alien compute at Arweave Day, held in a lakeside hotel just outside the Berlin outskirts.
But the real value was having longform conversations with teams that I might have only previously exchanged a few messages with in a group chat, or a couple of 30m video calls.
I had a 1am kebab with the Odyssee team, talked for hours with ar.io about the state of Arweave gateways, talked about the history of interactive art with OLTA founder Terence, and got introduced to the intricate metagame of Clash Royale courtesy of Pierre.
With a tired Pierre at the airport, ~3am
Compared to last year at ETHcc (where I met my co-founder Rani for the first after working together for 5 years online), I’ve realized that coming in cold to a conference is orders of magnitude less useful than meeting people you already know.
It sounds counterintuitive that you should not optimize for expanding your circle, but the chaos and time constraints of a conference full of strangers is not the place for initial trustbuilding; it’s better as a way to deepen connections and stumble on collaboration ideas.
The talk: alien compute on HyperBEAM
On the 2nd to last day, over a dozen teams from the ecosystem presented their projects. Given the looming HyperBEAM M3 release and Sam’s M3-focused talk, the theme was HyperBEAM. How are teams migrating from legacynet, or building previously-impossible exotic devices? My talk was on the latter, demoing an EVM execution machine and kernel functions device, with ultraviolet.load.network and the kem glitch art project as examples.
We debuted the hb/acc manifesto – a dedication to Build meta-VMs within the Hyperbeam device stack, achieve interoperability with ao-core compute, and to kick off research into new general purpose utility devices that can result in extra revenue streams for HyperBEAM node operators.
Miscellaenia
Some nice juxtaposed architecture near the center
Berlin isn’t what I expected. Driving in from the airport was a 45 minute journey down a pretty desolate and dreary cross-section of the city with no real discernable landmarks. But the next day, wandering aimlessly through side streets, underpasses, embankments, made me realize that the layout was walkable, open and sparse. Even in the center, the city’s breadth meant it never felt crammed.
About as close to the center as you can get – just wide open spaces.
Acquiring swag at the Forward Research offices
This squishy Dumdum is not allowed to come out of its bag lest it get rekt
At Berlin 2024, Rani and Pierre found what has been now called by Rani the best kebab in Europe, and we were hyped to find the place again. It was alright but no doner-chips-and-cheese from an English place on a night out.
Bonus lore: here’s Sam pushing the last commit for HyperBEAM M3, on a sofa in the lobby of the Rome Hotel.