The Ethereum Foundation held its sixth developer conference at the Agora Bogotá Convention Center in Colombia from October 11 to 14, 2022. The event was the first in-person Devcon since Osaka in 2019, ending a three-year hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the first in the conference's history to be hosted anywhere in South America. More than 6,000 attendees arrived from 113 countries, while 60,000 additional viewers joined remotely across the four days, including 21,780 livestream viewers on the first day alone. The opening ceremony served as a formal celebration of The Merge, Ethereum's transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, which had completed just 26 days earlier on September 15, 2022.

The Merge Set the Technical Tone

The conference unfolded with a transformed network underneath it. Post-Merge data released in October 2022 showed that Ethereum's annual issuance rate had fallen from approximately 4.5 percent to 0.45 percent, an 88 percent reduction, while daily ETH issuance dropped separately from roughly 13,000 ETH to approximately 1,700 ETH per day. With fee-burning mechanisms already active, net issuance fell to roughly 0.17 percent annualized, and brief deflationary periods were recorded. The energy consumption reduction was more dramatic: Ethereum's power draw fell by 99.95 percent. Approximately 14 million ETH was staked at the time, with self-run validators earning around 5.8 percent annually plus roughly 0.9 percent from MEV (maximal extractable value, which refers to additional income validators can earn by ordering transactions within a block). The miner selling pressure that had weighed on ETH prices for years, estimated at 709,000 ETH per quarter, was eliminated entirely.

At the time of the conference, ETH was trading at approximately $1,200 to $1,650, a price range that makes the scale of eliminated miner selling pressure concrete and sets the context for the market disruption that followed weeks later.

Against this backdrop, the 444 speakers and 200 hours of programming across 10 tracks focused heavily on what comes next. Danny Ryan of the Ethereum Foundation presented on Merge milestones and the validator roadmap, while Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation spoke on cryptocurrency and human rights. Zero-knowledge proofs (cryptographic tools that verify information without revealing it) received significant attention from projects including Aztec and Sismo, who framed ZK-rollups as core to Ethereum's scaling and privacy roadmap. Layer 2 networks, which process transactions off the main chain to reduce costs and increase throughput, were moving from testnet to mainnet deployment. Account abstraction, a technical shift that replaces seed-phrase wallets with programmable authorization, was presented as a route toward wallets that don't require users to hold ETH to pay transaction fees or manage raw private keys.

Bogotá Was Not a Neutral Choice

Selecting Bogotá carried deliberate intent. The city ranked 15th in Chainalysis's 2022 Global Crypto Adoption Index, hosted more than 32 Bitcoin ATMs (more than any other Latin American city), and counted 87 active crypto businesses within its limits. Colombia's peso had fallen below 5,000 per dollar for the first time in 2022, and remittance flows had become a larger source of dollar income than coal exports, according to reporting by CoinTelegraph. Bogotá's municipal government ran a parallel program called Hub Blockchain Bogotá, which allocated 2.3 million USD to support up to 200 local blockchain companies during the same period.

The Ethereum Foundation reinforced the regional focus through its Scholars Program, which provided 50 developers with full financial support including tickets, travel, accommodation, and a daily allowance. Half of those scholars came from Latin America, and 70 percent of them went on to attend the ETHBogota hackathon, a figure that illustrates concrete downstream engagement beyond the conference itself. Fourteen preparatory community events, organized under the formal name Road to Devcon, were held across the region before the conference opened, and satellite events ran in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Malaysia, Portugal, and Turkey.

More than 20 percent of in-person attendees identified as female, transgender, non-binary, or other genders, according to the Ethereum Foundation's own post-conference wrap-up post.

Ethereum Foundation Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi opened the conference with a talk titled "Executing with Subtraction in the Infinite Garden," in which she described her deliberate choice to reduce rather than expand the Foundation's centralized power. Her argument was that the Foundation serves the ecosystem better as a support structure than as a controlling entity. A session on Web3 usability drew separate attention when Sasha Tanase, Head of UX/UXR at Threshold Network, made the case that poor design decisions become permanent in blockchain systems. "Designers and UX teams come too late to the table and have their hands tied at that point," Tanase said, arguing for earlier integration of user experience work in protocol development.

Broader Signals for the Global South

A session titled "Borderless Africa: A New Narrative" appeared in the official programme, marking a formal platform for African blockchain use cases at Devcon's scale. Community proposals to host future Devcon events in Lagos, Nigeria and Nairobi, Kenya have since been posted to the Devcon forum, reflecting a shift in how the Ethereum community itself views Africa's role in the ecosystem.

The technologies debated at Devcon VI carry particular relevance for developers across Africa and the broader Global South. Account abstraction, by removing seed-phrase barriers and enabling wallets that do not require users to hold ETH for transaction fees, directly addresses the needs of first-time mobile users in markets where smartphone adoption is outpacing traditional banking infrastructure. ZK proofs offer privacy and identity tools suited to populations without reliable state documentation, enabling participation in systems that would otherwise require credentials unavailable to them. The post-Merge energy efficiency gains also remove a significant regulatory obstacle in energy-scarce regions, where proof-of-work's power demands had made blockchain adoption politically difficult to defend. These are not peripheral use cases. They are the design problems that the Bogotá agenda was built to solve.

The timing of the conference carries a sharp historical footnote. Devcon VI concluded while the broader market remained stable. The FTX exchange collapsed between November 8 and 11, 2022, just days after the Ethereum Foundation published its wrap-up post. ETH fell to approximately 1,081 USD, and roughly 152 billion USD in total crypto market capitalization was wiped out within three days. Analysts noted at the time that Ethereum's technical credibility, built through years of protocol work and validated at Bogotá, had helped it retain developer trust through the crisis in ways that many of its peers did not.

The video archive from all 200 hours of programming was distributed through Swarm, a decentralized storage network, and Etherna, a Web3 video platform, providing persistent and censorship-resistant access. For developers in regions with inconsistent connectivity or restrictive information environments, that archive remains a direct technical resource. Account abstraction and ZK-rollup systems discussed in Bogotá in 2022 are now running in production in 2026, with projects including zkSync, StarkNet, and Polygon zkEVM among the deployed examples. The pipeline of developers who will build on them is increasingly global. Electric Capital's 2024 developer report found that India now accounts for 17 percent of all new blockchain developers worldwide, and Asia as a whole surpassed both Europe and North America in developer share, a trend that Devcon VI was helping to catalyse. The agenda set in Bogotá belongs to them too.