Over 15,000 people gathered across Buenos Aires this past week for DevConnect 2025. Hundreds of side events sprawled across the city — from cryptography salons to protocol launch parties — fracturing attention, but deepening focus within curated spaces.
The Nexus team joined the fray with a mission to drive one core idea forward: trust must be built in, not layered on.
Find more about the specific events we hosted in last week's Community Report:
The rise of invite-only gatherings was the defining shift. Private salons, curated dinners, and closed-door roundtables consistently pulled top builders, KOLs, and researchers away from the main venue. The center did not hold — and perhaps that’s the point. Ethereum’s growth now spills beyond a single hub.
For projects like Nexus, this distribution of attention demanded clarity and focus. Our team navigated a packed schedule, from protocol deep-dives to strategic BD conversations, advancing our work across DeFi infrastructure, validator coordination, zk interoperability, and white-label solutions.
Verifiable is the new default
One throughline tied the week together: verifiability is no longer niche. Whether the topic was zkML, cross-chain privacy, or agent-based execution in DeFi, participants repeatedly returned to the need for provable, transparent, and traceable infrastructure.
For Nexus, this shift played directly into our hands. Across dozens of conversations, our focus on verifiable compute for finance resonated — not as a futuristic abstraction, but as a present-day requirement.
As Aisling Connolly, CSO of TACEO, warned at our Verifiable Finance Brunch:
“I lie awake at night thinking about a half-baked agent with no semblance of privacy built in taking over crypto trading. This is where data verifiability in finance must play a role.”
“DeFi security needs attention. Specifically key procedures, like smart contracts. We must focus on governance and keys — not just security codes — in order to safely handle trillions of dollars on chain.”
The themes from our brunch and other events throughout the week touched on the real fault lines in today’s DeFi infrastructure: from governance lapses to traceability gaps. These are exactly the areas where Nexus’s verifiable compute stack offers differentiated power as a foundational approach.
Hot topics
While verifiability anchored much of the week’s signal, a few additional themes stood out across the ecosystem’s most thoughtful sessions:
Public token launches are back. Projects like Aztec and Monad signaled a return to the playbooks of 2017, albeit with more polish, more strategy, and more market alignment
Real-world adoption was no longer an aspiration. From stablecoin pilots in Latin America to institutional-grade DeFi integrations, the conversation shifted from ‘what if’ to ‘what’s live.
Privacy and security are table stakes for meaningful adoption. At DevConnect, it was clear that systems must protect user agency while proving integrity. From private execution to key management, the call was for infrastructure that’s performant and verifiable.
Looking ahead
DevConnect 2025 showed us a few things clearly. The future is moving faster, but the fundamentals still matter. And as AI and agents enter the financial stack, the demand for integrity, transparency, and verifiability is accelerating.
For Nexus, that’s not a challenge. It’s the opportunity we’ve been building for.
Bria Han
