A Revolution Per Minute: Photos From the Ethereal Summit

This piece by Cryptograffiti was estimated to go for $2,000-$3,000 at auction. Robert Indiana, eat your heart out. Image: Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard

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A Revolution Per Minute: Photos From the Ethereal Summit

The Ethereal Summit is a two-day, $1,200 per person event that featured everything from guided meditation with Deepak Chopra to sushi on the blockchain.

by Daniel Oberhaus

May 16, 2018, 6:13pm

The revolution may not be televised, but it will, evidently, be on the blockchain.

At last weekend’s Ethereal Summit, a two-day conference organized by blockchain software development company Consensys, every blockchain project pitch I heard described their work as being revolutionary. There is a blockchain revolution coming in the way visual artists collaborate on and sell their work; the blockchain is revolutionizing Saudi Arabia’s oil economy; distributed ledgers are revolutionizing the way musicians form bands; the way we consume sushi is being… revolutionized.

That “revolution” seemed to be the Ethereal Summit’s buzzword du jour was interesting. On the one hand, revolution connotes a major upheaval, a disruption of the natural order of things. Given our history, Americans tend to equate revolution with progress and an escape from oppression, even though many other revolutions ended in brutal dictatorships. A revolution is also a technical term to describe rotation around a fixed axis. In this latter case, every revolution brings you right back to where you started. It was often hard to tell which usage was being employed by the self-described revolutionaries at the summit, a $1,200 per person affair hosted at an art space in Brooklyn.

Consensys is a multinational company founded by Joseph Lubin, a co-creator of Ethereum whose early investment in the native Ethereum token, ether, made him a billionaire. Consensys now has over 800 employees and nearly every company at the summit was affiliated with Consensys in some form, either as one of the company’s “spokes” (startups it incubates) or in some advisory role. In this respect, Consensys is something like a Ycombinator of the cryptocurrency world—the company throws its support behind the blockchain-based ideas it thinks has the best chance of succeeding, which has led it to collaborate and invest in everything from music distribution to asteroid mining.

The Ethereal Summit is first and foremost an industry event, but it also fosters creative ambitions related to the blockchain and included a number of art installations as well as an auction that saw a C ryptokitty sell for $140,000 USD worth of ether. New Age huckster Deepak Chopra was also there to offer guided meditations in the courtyard. No one—including Lubin himself—could explain Chopra’s presence. “I think he reached out to us about coming,” Lubin told me when I asked him.

Nevertheless, Chopra’s attendance was fitting. Chopra has made a name for himself by combining spiritual guidance with buzzwords like “quantum,” much to the ire of actual scientists who have made a point of calling out Chopra on his misuse of scientific concepts. Yet this mishmash of hype and science is undoubtedly familiar to anyone working on distributed databases, a field where the term “blockchain” has been diluted to the point of near meaninglessness. The only thing that was missing from the conference, as far as I was concerned, was a bar serving Long Island Iced Tea. Here’s a visual tour of the second New York Ethereal Summit. If its attendees are right, it’s also a glimpse of the future.