The Devconnect Tango of Crypto Idealism Vs. Reality

Olivia Capozzalo & Camila Russo
November 25, 2025

gm, Defiers!

Today’s big story:

At Ethereum’s Devconnect conference in Argentina, three themes dominated — privacy, zero-knowledge technology, and interoperability.

In other news:

RAIN surges on DAT news
Monad launches mainnet
Core blocks Maple’s syrupBTC

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📈 Markets in the Past 24 Hours

TICKER	VALUE	24H
Bitcoin	$86,997	-2.02 %
Ethereum	$2,910.72	-2.09 %
XRP	$2.18	-1.95 %
BNB	$853.04	-1.79 %
Solana	$135.99	-1.00 %

Today’s Big Story

The Devconnect Tango of Crypto Idealism Vs. Reality

In Buenos Aires for Devconnect, the jacarandás were in bloom, weaving a sort of purple lace of flowers in front of the French-style buildings. The nights were warm, the steak was juicy, and the dulce de leche, heavenly. Many attendees fell in love with the city. And I get it: Argentina has a way of seducing you. It definitely seduced me when I covered markets there with Bloomberg News between 2011-2015, and I will forever be grateful to Argentina, as I learned about crypto for the first time in those years.

And now, finally, one of the biggest Ethereum events came to the country with some of the highest crypto adoption rates, and also the home of major projects, from OpenZeppelin, to Decentraland and POAP, while most major DeFi protocols have at least one high-ranking Argentine –or several (MakerDAO/Sky). It was a long-standing request from the local crypto ecosystem for the EF to organize Devcon/Devconnect in Argentina, and they were proven right – the country and community lived up to expectations and more.

Of course, there’s a reason why crypto found growth there. Argentina has one of the world’s highest inflation rates and, at one time, suffocating currency controls (though both issues have improved, thanks to Javier Milei’s administration).

People aren’t drawn to crypto here because it’s fun or futuristic; they’re drawn to it because they have to be.

But here, I would caution from over-romanticizing crypto adoption in Argentina. In the developed world, crypto advocates often like to present countries like Argentina and Venezuela as the prime examples of why crypto works. But keep in mind crypto ownership, while among the highest globally, is still only around 20% of the population. It skews toward those who already have some means, some education, some digital access.

It’s also tempting – especially after one week of “private dinners” and fancy events – to romanticize Argentina as a magical playground full of asados and Malbec sunsets. But the reality is more layered. Most Argentines don’t get to enjoy the city the way Devconnect visitors did. Nearly ~30% of the country lives in poverty, scraping by paycheck to paycheck while prices climb weekly (still, a sharp decline from ~50% a year ago).

And maybe that’s why this Devconnect felt emotionally charged for me: it sat at the intersection of crypto’s idealism and Latin America’s hard constraints. (I was also incredibly nostalgic for my past life there!)

Privacy, ZK, and Interoperability

About the actual conference, three themes dominated the week:

Privacy was the headliner. Between Vitalik’s renewed push for privacy-preserving infrastructure and the wave of announcements across research teams, it’s clear the ecosystem is finally treating privacy not as a “nice-to-have,” but as a necessary primitive.

ZK Everything was the second big current running through the week. We’re long past the phase where ZK was mostly a theoretical playground. The air in BA felt more pragmatic: proof systems are stabilizing, developer tooling is improving, and the trade-offs between SNARKs, STARKs, and zkVMs are finally digestible enough for mainstream builders.

Interoperability rounded out the trifecta. Teams talked less about “bridges” and more about coordination layers, shared sequencing, and trust-minimized message passing. The focus is no longer on scaling with L2s we have, but on how seamlessly they can all connect.

What Didn’t Show Up: Institutions

One surprising absence this year? Institutions and tokenization talk.

All anyone could talk about all year has been BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Apollo, etc., tokenizing real-world assets flooding into Ethereum. But in Buenos Aires, institutional narratives faded into the background. I guess that’s because Devconnect is fundamentally a builders’ gathering. And builders were focused elsewhere: privacy, proofs, coordination, UX.

In a city where crypto is about savings and remittances, that refocus felt appropriate.

Buenos Aires reminded me why I fell in love with crypto: it’s messy, idealistic, imperfect, and yet profoundly capable of improving people’s lives, even if only a fraction feel that impact today. Devconnect hopefully helped remind its thousands of attendees why this work matters beyond charts and token prices.

With love,

Cami, founder of The Defiant

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🎬WATCH

Tokenize Everything: Robert Leshner’s Vision for On-Chain Finance

In the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, Cami sits down with Robert Leshner — the mind behind Compound, and now the founder of Superstate — to discuss why DeFi itself shouldn’t change, but assets will, how tokenized T-bills, basis strategies, and even equities are finally getting institutional traction, and what happens when DeFi becomes the infrastructure powering TradFi.

Pluis. what he’d do differently after Compound’s messy transition to decentralized governance.

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