Equilibrium Infra Bulletin #45: ETHDenver, Hacker Houses, Protocol Berg, and more...
Writing this while pondering the classic post-conference flu.
Equilibrium designs, builds, and invests in core infrastructure for the decentralized web. We are a global team of ~30 people who tackle challenges around security, privacy, and scaling.
🔍 ETH Denver 2025 Recap
ETH Denver 2025 Recap by @Jommi (EQ Labs)
Story, Polkadot, ICP, Hedera, Flow - these were the top-line sponsors for ETH Denver this year. Even Ethereum’s public enemy no.1 Max Resnick was put on stage to flame Ethereum for a full speech. It makes you think - maybe the event should just be called “Crypto Denver”?
Noircon - Once you realized everyone was hanging out at the rooftop of the coworking space, it was one of the best places in the whole week in terms of signal. Topics ranged from stuff like zkWormhole and Witness Encryption to Scraping and data portability with authentication (zkTLS) and unstructured parsing (LLMs).
Bitcoin events. There were many BTC L2 gatherings, though they seemed mostly light or repetitive on content. Robin Linus continues his BitVM push; Lil Jon even performed at a BTC L2 after-party.
Decentralized AI companies finally started releasing more information about what they were working on in the past year with all their funding:
Gensyn: Four different releases: 1) RL Swarm - collaborative RL over internet, 2) Trustless ML verification, 3) SkipPipe comms-efficient pipeline training, 4) Diverse Expert Ensembles - new MoE Arch.
Sentient: Working on defensive fingerprinting of models so that their usage can be tracked and traced.
Prime Intellect: Open Source Genome Foundation Model, SYNTHETIC-1 a collaborative synthetic dataset created from DeepSeek-R1
Intimate Events and Hacker Houses kept winning:
Internet Commune - A hacker house built by some friends, super high signal - the moment when Fabric Cryptography’s CEO came in and whiteboarded their whole set of efficiency improvements was legendary.
Sozu Hauz - Now 3 years strong, not just a hacker house but a large developer community with the most diverse set of topics covered by its builders.
[ ] Safe House - iykyk, a private community centered around an experiment of referential vouching and trust grew bigger than ever this time around.
💡 Research, Articles & Other Things of Interest
🤓 DelegaTEE: Brokered Delegation Using Trusted Execution Environments (2018): Brokered delegation (as in DelegaTEE) lets users grant controlled access to their online services without revealing their passwords. A TEE enforces conditions set by the owner—such as time limits or device restrictions—so that services see valid credentials but cannot detect delegation. With the advances in TEEs, their capabilities and performance, this paper might do well for a re-read :)
📚 Ethereumadoption - A resource tracking real-world Ethereum and EVM adoption.
📚 Hierarchy of Trust - Friend of EQ Andrew Lu outlines a 5 level spectrum of application designs ranging from those that actively sell user data (least trustworthy) to those that operate entirely offline (most trustworthy). Each level imposes different constraints on developers but confers progressively stronger privacy guarantees.
🎧 Ethereum is Game Changing Technology: Apriori from Anoma and Drew, founder of Commit_Boost delve into a deeply rooted discussion on the real fabric of Ethereum, and what it means to be building towards a “North Star” for Ethereum. Big recommendation on this one.
🔥 News From Our Friends
Protocol Berg (June 12 - 13, 2025): This week is the final week to apply to speak or host a workshop. It is a non-profit technical conference on protocol research, decentralized infrastructure, and core dev experience. It only occurs once every two years, alternating with ETH Berlin.
🤌 Personal Recommendations From Our Team
📚 Reading: Elon Musk - Walter Isaacson. It might be a good bet to read or listen to the biography of the richest man in the world as he goes increasingly off the rails.
🎧 Listening: Metaverse Filipino Worker: Earning Online Without Leaving Home - A short film exploring how Filipinos are embracing Web3 as a new frontier for work. Is working by a computer more humane than working at farming or factories?
💡 Other: AI Information Diet Ranked List by Eito Miyamura