The Ethereum Foundation announced on December 13, 2021 that its flagship developer conference would return to in-person format in Bogotá, Colombia, while simultaneously introducing a new independently organized gathering called Devconnect, scheduled for Amsterdam in April 2022.

The dual announcement ended roughly three years of uncertainty around live Ethereum events. Devcon V, held in Osaka in October 2019, drew an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 attendees and was, at the time, the largest installment in the event's history. The Foundation had originally targeted August 2021 for Devcon 6 but pushed the date back twice, citing pandemic-related travel restrictions and the need to ensure broad international participation. "While nothing is guaranteed given the ongoing pandemic, we're hopeful that a new date announcement is possible soon with the availability of COVID-19 vaccines ramping up now," the Foundation wrote at the time. With vaccine availability improving, the Foundation confirmed Bogotá for Q4 2022 and used the same announcement to debut a structurally different companion format.

A Different Kind of Conference

Devconnect is not a traditional conference. Rather than gathering thousands of participants under a single program, it functions as a coordinated week of parallel, independently organized events. The Foundation issued an open call for event host proposals, allowing any domain experts to submit applications to run sessions within the framework. Each session is run by specialists and targeted at specific technical audiences: developers focused on MEV (maximal extractable value, which refers to the maximum value that can be extracted from transaction reordering, inclusion, or exclusion by block producers), Layer 2 scaling solutions, staking infrastructure, smart contract security, and DAO governance, among others. The Ethereum Foundation handles logistics but does not control programming. The format is also sponsor-free at the umbrella level, though individual event organizers can seek their own funding.

"We aim to have audiences that are relevant experts or those very interested in the specific domain," the Ethereum Foundation team wrote in the original announcement. The format ran April 18 to 25, 2022 in Amsterdam, featuring more than 20 independently organized events and a shared co-working space open to all attendees. Post-event, the Foundation published a candid summary. "We're thrilled to say that, thanks to all of you, we exceeded our expectations," the team wrote in a May 2022 wrap-up post. "Your dedication helped to make this event as decentralized as possible, and we're excited about the future of this new format."

The Market Context in December 2021

The announcement landed during a period of peak activity across the Ethereum ecosystem. ETH was trading above $3,800 in late December 2021, near its then-all-time high. The Merge, Ethereum's planned transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, was in active preparation. Layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum and Optimism were gaining real users, and the NFT market had seen explosive growth throughout the year. Developer interest reflected this momentum: Electric Capital's 2021 Developer Report counted more than 34,000 new developers committing code to open-source crypto projects that year, the largest annual cohort in Web3 history. Ethereum retained its position as the dominant ecosystem, posting 42% year-over-year developer growth and attracting roughly one in five new Web3 developers globally, with active monthly contributors numbering above 4,000.

Why Bogotá Matters Beyond Latin America

Devcon has cycled through Berlin, London, Shanghai, Cancún, Prague, and Osaka since its first edition in 2014. Bogotá would be the first Latin American host, and the choice carried symbolic weight for developer communities in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and other regions that had long watched Ethereum's most important technical conversations happen elsewhere.

The deeper significance, though, lay in Devconnect's structure. Because any qualified expert group can apply to run a session within the framework, the open-application model theoretically lowers the barrier for communities in Lagos, Nairobi, Mumbai, or Colombo to host technically meaningful Ethereum events without waiting for a foundation-organized conference to come to them. For readers and builders in South Asia and Africa, this structural opening is the announcement's sharpest implication. The question is not whether Amsterdam or Bogotá succeed; it is whether the model eventually makes a Lagos or Nairobi edition as straightforward to organize as one in Europe.

Electric Capital's data showed that blockchain developer growth was accelerating fastest outside traditional Western hubs, including in Western Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Nigeria was already establishing itself as one of Africa's most active blockchain hubs, with its local Ethereum community connected to ETHGlobal's network of more than 65,000 members across 153 countries. India's developer community was on a trajectory that would eventually make it the top source of new Web3 contributors globally by 2024.

The gap between structural openness and practical accessibility remains significant, however. Amsterdam and Bogotá both present high visa costs and travel expenses for developers in lower-income markets. The sponsor-free ethos of Devconnect, while preserving editorial independence, also limits the scholarship infrastructure that has historically enabled Global South participation at major crypto events. Regional Devconnect editions had not been formally established at the time of this announcement.

Looking Ahead

Viewed from March 2026, the geographic trajectory signaled in December 2021 is now legible in the event record. Bangkok hosted Devcon 7 in 2024, and Mumbai is confirmed for Devcon 2026, a validation of the direction the Foundation outlined four years earlier. Developer Nader Dabit, a prominent figure in the Web3 builder community, captured the conference's cultural standing in a November 2024 post on X: "DevCon is such a legendary event... it attracts the best and most passionate developers and founders from around the world, and has the smallest number of VCs and other non-builders."

For communities that have long consumed Ethereum's development from the outside, the more consequential question raised by Devconnect is not whether Amsterdam succeeded. It is whether the format's open-application model will eventually make a Lagos or Nairobi edition as straightforward to organize as one in Europe. Mumbai's confirmation as a Devcon host in 2026 shows that the geographic center of gravity is already shifting. Whether the Devconnect open-application model extends that shift to cities and communities beyond the flagship conference schedule is a question still being answered.