Edcon

EDCON, the Community Ethereum Development Conference, is an annual global conference for the Ethereum ecosystem, held once a year in a different country. Its stated purpose is to boost communication and interaction between Ethereum communities worldwide and to support development of the Ethereum ecosystem, inviting speakers, mentors and projects to present each year. Its terms of use describe EDCON as a non-profit.

Programming has historically combined a main conference with hackathons, workshops, sub-conferences, panel discussions and community side events. Past agendas have featured Ethereum core researchers and developers alongside ecosystem project founders, covering topics such as proof of stake and Casper, sharding, Plasma, state channels, zero-knowledge proofs, scalability, privacy and cryptography, security, on-chain governance, decentralized finance, and blockchain policy and business use cases. The organization is also associated with De University of Ethereum (UETH), described as a decentralized global educational platform initiated by the Ethereum community to provide a structured learning path for Ethereum students at all levels.

For EDCON 2026 in Kuala Lumpur, the organizers have opened sponsorship applications and applications from parties wanting to host side events such as networking sessions, talks, workshops, exhibitions and meals, with speaker and volunteer applications announced as opening later.

Business model

EDCON is described as a non-profit annual global Ethereum conference. Website terms reference a registration portal and product offerings, and describe donations contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem. For the 2026 edition, the organization solicits brand sponsorship and offers third parties the ability to host their own affiliated side events; the 2019 edition sold main-conference tickets with discounts for early birds, developers and students while offering the hackathon free of charge, and invited sponsors, media partners, community partners and volunteers.

Traction

EDCON has run annually since 2017 across eight prior editions on five continents plus two online editions. The 2019 Sydney program included a three-day hackathon with six workshops and a main conference whose speakers included Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Foundation researchers Danny Ryan, Hsiao-Wei Wang, Justin Drake, Aditya Asgaonkar, Karl Floersch and Virgil Griffith, ENS lead developer Nick Johnson, and Uniswap founder Hayden Adams, alongside multiple community-run side events. The 2024 Tokyo edition was staged at United Nations University and Yoyogi National Gymnasium.