This weekend marked The Network Society Conference, Ipê Village’s kick-off event.
I presented on Saturday and the talk went well, sparking good interest from the audience afterward.
@Kaf_Anode, as a full-time Ipê Village resident, has been putting in exceptional work on the ground, reaching out 1:1 with builders and speaking about Rootstock.
Our presentation slides: Sovereign Infrastructure: Programmable Bitcoin for Network States
The event had 165 registered attendees, plus additional walk-ins who were received at the front desk and attended without registration.
A few photos from the event:
At such a gorgeous venue, a Rootling could not resist sneaking in and was sighted at the event.
The conference was hosted at Il Campanario Villaggio Resort, Jurerê’s most iconic venue:
Takeaways
My main takeaway is that Rootstock’s brand awareness in this region is still very low. Many attendees either didn’t know Rootstock at all or had a vague notion of it being “another Bitcoin L2” without any differentiation from others.
Based on feedback I received after the presentation, what impressed people the most was learning that Rootstock is an EVM chain secured by Bitcoin’s own Proof of Work through merged mining, a concept originally proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto. Rootstock currently has ~88% of Bitcoin’s hashrate securing it, and its BTC peg-in/peg-out mechanism is permissionless, auditable, audited, and has had zero incidents since inception 8 years ago.
Many builders I spoke with simply didn’t know a Web3/DeFi-enabled blockchain with these characteristics exists. Many have defaulted to proof-of-stake or non-Bitcoin-based chains not out of preference, but out of not knowing the alternative is available. From what I spoke with @Kaf_Anode he is having the same read on his 1:1s.
I know we’ve all had bad experiences sponsoring retail-focused crypto events, and obtaining a clear ROI on them is always a challenge, but my point here is different. I’m not arguing the solution is to just sponsor more events. The conversations after the talk weren’t surface-level hype, they were builders genuinely surprised that a battle-tested, PoW-secured smart contract platform exists on Bitcoin. Rootstock has a unique position in the industry that so many builders out there haven’t heard of yet, and we need to think seriously about strategies for improving that awareness.
As an exercise, I invite all to take a look at this page: rootstock.io/powpeg. The content there is excellent. The question for all of us is how do we get this information in front of more crypto communities and developers?