By Luke Kanashev, Partnerships @ dRPC
Attending Devconnect Argentina for the first time was a completely different experience from Token2049 Singapore. Token2049 felt like a spectacle with polished booths, announcements, product launches. Devconnect, meanwhile, felt like walking into Ethereum’s R&D lab.
Buenos Aires turned into a maze of engineering workshops, cryptography deep dives, client development groups, multi-chain roundtables, and infrastructure discussions. Instead of glossy presentations, we had raw, unfiltered conversations with the people building the foundations of Ethereum.
Across the Privacy & Scaling Explorations sessions, the Infrastructure Summit Buenos Aires, the Multi-Chain Developer Roundtable, the Censorship Resistance & Ethereum Symposium, and the Builders Hub, a few themes kept reappearing. These weren’t pre-packaged narratives. They were the real challenges and priorities shaping the next era of Web3.
Here are the biggest lessons I took home from Devconnect Argentina.
Key Themes Emerging at Devconnect Argentina
Privacy Has Moved From “Feature” to “Foundation”
One of the most striking experiences for me came during the Ethereum Privacy Stack sessions at Devconnect Argentina. What stood out wasn’t just the technical depth around ZK systems. It was how matter-of-factly teams talked about privacy as infrastructure.
At Token2049 Singapore, privacy came up occasionally in the context of ZK ecosystems. But in Buenos Aires, the tone was different. Builders repeatedly emphasized that privacy must exist at every layer of the stack, including the RPC layer, where metadata leakage is still an unresolved threat.
During conversations in the Privacy hub, several researchers pointed out how centralized RPC gateways can inadvertently expose patterns like transaction timing or wallet intent. It was a reminder that privacy isn’t purely a protocol concern.
If privacy is foundational, then decentralized RPC access becomes a core requirement, not a bonus feature.
Infrastructure Is the Real Bottleneck in Scaling Ethereum
During the Infrastructure Summit Buenos Aires, several teams working on execution clients and node tooling stressed something I see echoed daily: execution may be scaling, but access has become the new bottleneck.
In multiple sessions, engineers described scenarios where dApps appeared “slow” or “down” even though the chain itself was operating fine. The cause? Not the protocol but RPC providers overwhelmed during burst traffic, regional outages, or stale node clusters.
At the RPC-focused working groups, we repeatedly heard variations of the same insight: users experience RPC congestion, not protocol congestion.
This lined up perfectly with what we observe in production environments. As networks accelerate block production and increase throughput, RPC must evolve in parallel, as distributed, load-balanced, and failover-ready. Devconnect Argentina made it clear: scaling efforts aren’t complete until the access layer scales too.
Multi-Chain Deployment Is Now the Default for EVM Builders
In the Multi-Chain Developer Roundtable and throughout the cross-chain UX sessions, the phrase “EVM chains” came up constantly. Builders weren’t treating multi-chain deployment as an expansion strategy — they were treating it as the baseline for launching any new dApp.
EVM compatibility gives teams shared tooling, shared execution environments, and shared mental models. But as several speakers pointed out, it doesn’t give them shared infrastructure. Each network still exposes slightly different RPC behaviors, latencies, and reliability characteristics.
During one interoperability meetup, a developer summarized the challenge well:
“EVM makes contracts portable. It doesn’t make infrastructure portable.”
That resonated deeply. The more teams adopt multi-chain architecture, the more they need RPC infrastructure that feels unified, global, and predictable. Devconnect Argentina reinforced that multi-chain RPC is no longer optional. It’s now a key enabler for user experience consistency.
Censorship Resistance Extends Beyond Consensus. It Reaches the RPC Layer
At the Censorship Resistance & Ethereum Symposium, presenters explored how centralization risks are shifting upward in the stack. Instead of focusing only on sequencers and validators, many discussions zoomed in on infrastructure choke points: relayers, mempools, bridges, and RPC providers.
This was the first time I heard so many researchers connect censorship resistance directly to RPC access. Several developers described situations where centralized endpoints introduced subtle but meaningful risks: region-based filtering, traffic shaping, metadata analysis, or inconsistent availability during politically sensitive events.
Later in the Security & Threat Modeling sessions, the message sharpened: a decentralized consensus layer doesn’t guarantee censorship resistance if access to the chain is centralized.
This hit home for me. It directly validates the architecture we’ve been building at dRPC, a distributed network of independent providers offering censorship-resistant access routes to chains.
Builders Are Now Thinking “Infrastructure First”
Across the Builders Hub Buenos Aires and the tooling sessions, I noticed a shift in mindset I hadn’t seen at Token2049 Singapore. Conversations weren’t about the next trend, the next token, or the next market narrative. They were grounded in the realities of what it takes to run production-grade systems:
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reliable RPC
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robust observability
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better node clients
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multi-chain abstractions
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privacy-by-default tooling
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decentralized access points
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secure mempool paths
Teams talked about infra not as a support layer, but as the product itself, as the thing that makes any application possible.
One takeaway stood out: The next stage of Web3 growth won’t come from hype cycles. It will come from infrastructure that doesn’t break.
For me, Devconnect Argentina reaffirmed that the direction we’re taking with decentralized RPC and global routing isn’t just technically correct but it’s also aligned with where the entire ecosystem is heading.
Final Thoughts from DevConnect Argentina
My first Devconnect experience made one thing absolutely clear. Ethereum’s future hinges on infrastructure that is resilient, censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving, and multi-chain ready.
The biggest lessons from Devconnect Argentina:
- Privacy is infrastructure.
- RPC scalability is essential for real-world scaling.
- EVM chains require unified RPC behavior.
- Censorship resistance must reach the access layer.
- Builders are prioritizing infra over narratives.
What’s my main take-away? As someone working daily at the intersection of nodes, decentralization, and developer experience, Devconnect felt like watching the ecosystem converge directly onto the problems we’ve been solving with dRPC.
