--- robots: index, follow image: https://i.imgur.com/qIXHqty.jpg --- <!-- description: A report from ETHLisbon 2021 --> # ETHLisbon, an Ephemeral Centro The ETH\[City\] conferences are Gatherings. They’re where the urban Guilds and rural Tribes of Ethereum assemble to exchange knowledge. In the after hours they’re festivals, giddy celebrations of the success of the ecosystem. Coincidentally I was on a team that just completed the [ETHOnline](https://showcase.ethglobal.com/ethonline2021/) hackathon (with [@tgrykias](https://twitter.com/tgrykias) [@eurvin](https://twitter.com/eurvin) and [@bidah](https://twitter.com/bidah)). Our project, [Streaming Collateral](https://showcase.ethglobal.com/ethonline2021/streaming-collateral), won the “Most Futuristic Hack” prize from sponsor [Superfluid](https://superfluid.finance/). That garnered a lot of attention so the timing of [ETHLisbon](https://www.ethlisbon.org) was auspicious. Most of the action happens in the side events. The main event is a hackathon but&nbsp;–&nbsp;as I discovered – if you’re not hacking you’re understandably not welcome. There are thousands of people milling about so the organizers need a filter. On Thursday morning I went for a run along the Lisbon waterfront. Splendid views. There’s UNESCO world heritage architecture everywhere. ![UNESCO world heritage architecture](https://i.imgur.com/mAKy8px.jpg) There was also a [LISCON](https://liscon.org) before the main conf which required a ticket and was sold out. But on Thursday I took an Uber to the [PieDAO](https://piedao.org) loft and one of the guys gave me his badge so I could get in. Francesco Renzi, the CEO of [Superfluid](https://superfluid.finance), was at LISCON (with a t-shirt for me) and I wanted to meet him and see the event. It was swarming with devgens. There were booths with known names like 1inch exchange and various protocols. Superfluid didn’t have a booth and Fran wasn’t feeling well. He headed back to his hotel and I missed him. We were messaging via Telegram. Ubers are THE way to get around Lisbon. The city is big with a maze of small streets going up and down killer hills. The conf was in the center but most of the side events were out in an industrial area that seems to be the new cool neighborhood. LISCON was in a converted factory with dilapidated warehouses next door. ![Sculpture in the LxFactory neighborhood](https://i.imgur.com/iqOaBMP.jpg) In the evening I went to a [PieDAO](https://piedao.org) party at their loft. It had a lanai with a view over the harbor, a bar, and catered food being passed around. Met a bunch of people I only know via Discord so that was fun. The DJ was Luis, the [Aragon](https://aragon.org) founder. I didn’t stay late. As I was waiting for my ride a continuous stream of people were Ubering up. Lotsa celebrities there. ![Party shot with Ray Dalio cutout](https://i.imgur.com/BrVMpT5.jpg) The conf started at 3pm and after hanging around I found out that you need to be registered as a hacker to attend. But Fran was feeling better and he pinged me an invite to a Happy Hour at 5. He forwarded a message with the location and I noticed it was from “Ian Emerson - Fabric Ventures”. Fran told me they’re [Superfluid](https://superfluid.finance) investors and they were sponsoring the Happy Hour. Off I went. That event, which was on the roof terrace of a pricey hotel, turned out to be ‘the place to be’. It was full of crypto movers & shakers. I mentioned “Most Futuristic Hack”, like, a lot. ![Panoramic view of Lisbon from the rooftop](https://i.imgur.com/hoYWfuC.jpg) First off I met an Asian American guy who said he’s from Element Finance. He was full of VC information and a super networker. Turns out he’s “Windra Thio, Growth and Strategy” so that fits. He filled me in about Kartik Talwar, who actually has a track record at SV Angel and others, but left to found [ETHGlobal](https://ethglobal.co/). Now I’ve researched [element.fi](https://element.fi): > October 20, 2021: “Element Finance has raised a $32 million Series A round at a $320 million valuation.” (So Windra was flush with fresh funding.) There was a guy sitting on a couch with a familiar logo on his t-shirt. We started talking. Turns out he’s Polish and the logo was [ramp.network](https:/ramp.network/). His name is Przemek Kowalczyk. Today I looked at the Ramp site. Guess who’s an investor? [Fabric Ventures](https://www.fabric.vc). Then Fran showed up. So finally we met! He gave me my [Superfluid](https://superfluid.finance) t-shirt :) ![Photo of Superfluid t-shirt](https://i.imgur.com/DjMBrzM.jpg) We babbled and quickly hit it off. Fran is bold and charismatic. He introduced me to a couple guys on his team and we talked about streaming money and dev issues. It was a good convo. One of the guys is the UX lead and the other is developing their “liquidation functions”. I’m not sure what those are but he’s writing it in Python, not Solidity. I circulated and noticed a tall guy with long hair and a familiar friendly face. Then I recognized him, it was Andrej from [Deep Work](https://deepwork.studio), who’s a brilliant formation coach. I said hi, told him I was in the [Apollo Hackathon](https://gitcoin.co/blog/apollo/) and was really impressed by his online session. If your embryonic entity needs definition you should look at his stuff. Then I noticed a couple guys with Fabric Ventures t-shirts. I checked the message from Fran, tapped on Ian Emerson’s name, saw a profile photo, and knew who I had to connect with. Said hi, told him about participating in [HackFS](https://hackfs.com) and [ETHOnline](https://showcase.ethglobal.com/ethonline2021/). We had an elevator talk. At that point it was getting dark, the wind was coming up, and Ian’s elegant gf/wife looked uncomfortable. I asked her, “Are you cold?” to which she said yes. I told them that the hotel has little blankets available, maybe you should get one. That rounded off the conversation. A bit later I noticed Ian’s wife, with blanket, standing next to a heater. I recognized another person from a video meeting, a woman who was a judge for my [HackMoney](https://showcase.ethglobal.co/hackmoney2021/) team. Her name is Min Teo, from [Consensys Mesh](https://mesh.xyz/), and I said hi to her too. The other judge was Fran. That hack initialized my stream of streaming thinking. The conf continued into the weekend but my cal had a conflict, a quarter Marathon on Sunday, so I exited to the airport on Saturday afternoon. The Lisbon conference was a time to sync after the long corona hibernation. It became a Festa, a celebratory communion where the ecosystem cycled into its next season. ![Full moon above a Lisbon square](https://i.imgur.com/qIXHqty.jpg) There was a full moon too 🌝
Last changed by  
 
kitblake
Entrepreneur, technologist, cofounder at Infrae/@infrae, Gauss/@getGauss, and Chaîne Research/@chaineresearch. Writer. Runner.
160

Read more

Data Streams Like Rain

Volodymyr was tired of getting soaked. In his home country, if you checked the weather you knew what the next hours would bring. If it was gonna rain you took rain gear. If it was sunny you could enjoy it. Nice and consistent. Reliable. In his new country it was chaos. You could walk out the door into blazing sun and five minutes later you’d get drenched. The locals, the cool locals, managed to look cool getting drenched. He’d never get that. There are RainRadar apps which give an approximation. But they aren’t granular enough. Sometimes there’d be no precipitation in the scan and he’d still come into work dripping. After showing up at a few meetings looking bedraggled, eliciting comments from comedian colleagues, Volodymyr decided that he had an itch to scratch. He knew that the weather service provided realtime data and he figured he only needed two parameters: nearby precipitation and wind direction. When he accessed the weather site he found a list of data feeds. They were all realtime and geofenced with minute frequencies. Volodymyr’s spine tingled. This was high quality data.

7/25/2022
Streaming Money Reservoirs

As a civil servant Fritz prided himself on being up to speed. In his research department he was responsible for the finances. They had a lot of obligations and subscriptions. The researchers accessed data every day, often in real-time, and most of the sources cost money. This was particularly true of the streaming data. The entities that offered the data never did it gratis because of the freerider problem. Students, data dilettants and the public would overwhelm the servers, many just letting the data flow. So all the data providers charged something for the data streams, even if it was a minor amount, just to act as a filter. Fritz would setup steaming payments to pay for the streaming data. He coupled each payment to the data flow. If for some reason the data stopped the payment would stop too. Likewise, when researchers went home for the day and stopped using an app, they would turn off the stream so as not to waste bandwidth. The payment would stop too. His department used Superfluid for payments. In order to start a stream it was necessary to post a buffer bond, equal to four hours of stream time. Each subscription also had to have a reserve of currency available for the stream. As a result the reserves added up to a sizable amount. All that cash was sitting in a wallet, doing nothing, when it could be deposited in a DeFi protocol and earn double digit compounding interest.

5/26/2022
Data Flows In, Money Streams Out

Kazumi liked to be efficient. At the software company where s/he worked they were known for their efficient code. But they were most concerned about efficiency with time. They had important things to do. There was this Virtual YouTuber... Everyday they took a tram to the office, and twice a day they didn’t want to wait. The tram company provided an app where you could see what time a tram was supposed to arrive. But that didn’t mean it would. Kazumi liked it when they walked out the door and the tram was pulling up when they arrived at the stop. When an update to the tram app arrived they noticed that the tram company, which viewed itself as a public good, announced real-time tram telemetrics from each tram’s GPS. The data was available via an API. Nice. It was time to scratch that itch. Kazumi decided to make a little app so they could always catch the tram with no waiting. The first thing they discovered was that the real-time data wasn’t free. It cost half a cent per hour, which wasn’t much, but they hated subscriptions. They were an endless cash drain. Every time they looked in their crypto wallet they noted the money trickling out. For some of the streams, like their insurance and electricity, they didn’t mind because they were necessities. But the subscriptions for niceties, like music, were really irking.

5/23/2022
Streaming Collateral

ETHOnline-2021 Project User Story This story has three roles: The Employer is an established company which pays salaries in streaming cryptocurrency. The Employee, Emmy, received an NFT from her company which acts as the anchor for her incoming salary. She stores it in her hardware wallet. The DeFi Site is a Dapp that offers various services, including bridge loans. Suddenly Emmy needed some liquidity. It wasn’t a surprise, she’d been waiting for a specific opportunity. Of course, it arrived right at the moment that most of her savings were locked up in high-yield lending protocols. If she prematurely withdrew she’d pay a penalty.

10/15/2021
Read more from kitblake
Published on HackMD