Solana Devs gather for a month-long Utah retreat after FTX

Across from a seedy 7-Eleven and around the corner from a Victorian-style municipal hall in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, Solana developers flock to a month-long coding retreat: mtnDAO.

“GM,” the builders yelled to every tired face shuffling into The Shop—this hackhouse’s exclusive coworking space—on a recent Monday morning. “Are you going skiing later today?” an arrival asked Barrett, the manager who demolishes Snowbird ski resorts when he’s not building software to trade tokens that centralized exchanges don’t touch. (Barrett asked not to be referred to by his full name.)

“No,” Barrett replied. His team at Cypher had just launched version three of its on-chain trading software, and the behind-the-scenes needed some risk adjustment. “We have some degenerates on the platform already,” he said a little later to a passerby.

Besides, he said, the midweek snow forecast for Little Cottonwood Canyon looked absolutely glorious: 60 inches! Better to frontload the backend work to make room for the powder sky. “I’ve been known to get up there and get converted from time to time,” he explained.

Getting inverted is what this code-hard-shred-harder crypto club is all about. A record 250 people applied to participate in February’s self-proclaimed “infamous action-packed hacker house,” now in its third iteration. For some Solana developers, the community-driven mtnDAO has become a seasonal tradition that began during the chain’s fierce bull run. It continues today through the depths of the bear.

MtnDAO version 3 (v3) is testing whether Solana’s developer ecosystem can regain momentum after a terrible 2022 bookended by chain halts and the collapse of FTX. Cracks appear: MtnDAO, once a pure Solana event, is now sponsored by rival platform Aptos.

But mtnDAO founders Barrett and Edgar Pavlovsky, from another decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol called MarginFi, are as committed to Solana as ever. They’ve turned a sponsor-backed budget close to $100,000 into a one-month coworking bonanza where code is regularly shipped.

Barrett’s army of 24 computer screens command the entire second floor of The Shop, and on any given day most of his rented seats are filled. These hoodie-wearing twenty-somethings come from as far away as South Korea and as close as down the street. They chug energy drinks long past the last call, only breaking for lunch and also late night poker games. Many tear cigarettes, crush nicotine gum, crush vapes.

Clickety-clack went to the keyboard at 11:59 this Monday as big-haired Barrett, double-wielding Red Bulls, walked past three rows of hungry developers. Ambient alt-rock poured down from The Shop’s third floor, where this coworking space’s non-crypto clientele largely roamed, pulling out pre-lunch jitters. But after dinner delivery of food – today’s menu: chicken katsu and rice – the hacker house’s horde had begun to gather and break into the conversation.

Calling mtnDAO a “hacker house” is a bit of a misnomer. Sure, some of the contestants are hackers (though most are actually coders and such), but Edgar and Barrett haven’t hosted them in a house since the event’s precursor in 2021. That’s when the former college roommates crammed 25″ children” into a six-bedroom house owned by a producer of the high-octane dirt bike TV show “Nitro Circus.” It was called mtnCompound and it was a lot.

One year later, Barrett wanted to throw his concept into “turbo mode” with paying sponsors who might thumb their noses at, say, the mansion of a guy best known for working with Johnny Knoxville from “Jackass.” So he asked The Shop, a boutique coworking space in downtown Salt Lake City where about 200 members pay for clean desks, natural lighting, fast Internet and subtle Union Pacific railroad motifs, to host his band of digital nomads in one month.

Anne Owens, community manager at The Shop and a member of mtnDAO’s Telegram group, said the company had never worked on a month-long coworking event before, but it jumped out at the opportunity to bring people together.

“It’s one of the first times a hacker house was brought to a place designed for productivity,” Owens said.

The atmosphere of mtnDAO is different from Solana’s roving armada of official hacker houses. Seemingly every month, Solana Labs and marketing giant Jump Capital host week-long coding extravaganzas in a different global city. Their guerilla marketing campaign attempts to spread the gospel of Solana’s super-fast blockchain by appealing directly to potential converts.

But these cooperative trials trend more club-like than colleagues, according to the partisans of mtnDAO. They’re not fans of the Solana hacker house’s blasting technology, or its apparent insistence on drenching desks in enough purple light to make Barney the Dinosaur color blind. If you can hear your desk mate amid the din, it must only be because the organizers are between the panels.

“Here I feel that people are not pressured to sit and listen to lectures. They can work on their stuff, says Angelo Boskovic, head of business development for token management startup Streamflow. He had flown from Belgrade for two weeks with mtnDAO.

Although some tech companies are slowly scaling back their workforces for part-time work weeks, in crypto — especially DeFi, with its emphasis on decentralization — bricks and mortar don’t exist. Many of the teams at mtnDAO are spread across time zones and Telegram chats, some employees have never before met their own colleagues in person. Work in an office? Monday to Friday? Fuggetaboutit.

At mtnDAO, they also work on Saturday and Sunday.

“Every night I’ve been here late,” said Lee Tirrell, a full-time computer scientist who flew in from Oregon to work on his crypto site, a Solana-based analytics product called Spire. Never before a crypto conference attendee, he recognizes other developers by their “internet monkey JPEGs,” not their faces. He decided to come after hearing about mtnDAO on Twitter.

Most people at this winter’s mtnDAO heard about it on Twitter or through word of mouth. Barrett and Edgar spend next to nothing on marketing (beyond paying a trio of interns to organize events, take photos and push out promotional tweets).

“My strategy here is memes and s**tposts,” said Harry Swales, mtnDAO’s chief tweeter, who said his job is “to get people to show up and engage and build.” It’s not hard to sell for the hired marketing gun: “I’m selling the experience, but the experience is free.”

There is no cost to participate in mtnDAO. That’s one month of free lunches, unlimited coffee, ski lift tickets, jobs, tables at clubs, piles of branded swag and enough Red Bull to kill Cocaine Bear. There are several sponsors, including Solana.

It’s the kind of place where dinner conversations spiral between the quixotic futility of crypto-idealism and breathless speculation about when the next bull run will hit.

“Everyone is trying to implement democracy [decentralized autonomous organizations] and democracy is [damned] backward—you have to have a chain of command,” said one mtnDAO developer at a recent Taco Thursday. He later described the project’s somewhat dubious tokenomics: It grew in value by accumulating value generated by newcomers for the benefit of first-in token holders.

Over meals and between meetings, builders shared their tips for getting work done faster. A common refrain was the limitless potential of ChatGPT, the generative artificial intelligence (AI) program that can be called upon to produce bespoke poetry, essays, film treatments, restaurant reviews – and also much of the front-end code for one’s web app.

The meme-laden internet chatter these builders tout online leaked into their time IRL. For example, if something goes wrong, “you got roughed up.” It was as if their text-based conversations had never stopped.

However, not all participants were taken by the energy of mtnDAO. One visitor told CoinDesk that the whole affair felt rather subdued, a feeling they chalked up to the slightly depressed state of Solana in general.

The current crypto bear market hit the chain harder than most, manifesting in declining network usage statistics and the battered price of SOL, one of the worst major token performers in 2022 (assets are down about 38% since the FTX crypto exchange collapse in November ). Even so, Solana’s developer scene remains the largest and most vibrant of any outside of the Ethereum community.

MtnDAO began as a Solana-only event, and the vast majority of that iteration’s members built in Rust, the chain’s base coding language. But a handful are focused on Aptos. The upcoming network notably co-sponsored mtnDAO v3; it sent representatives to hold workshops with participants and switch to them during “Aptos Week,” which included a free trip to Snowbird.

“The only thing we changed is we opened up that it’s multichain,” Barrett said.

Its success has encouraged Barrett and co-founder Edgar to take mtnDAO corporate – literally. On Feb. 6, mtnDAO LLC was incorporated in Delaware, state records show. Barrett hinted that mtnDAO “could go to more places” in future iterations, and v3 certainly won’t be the last. He doesn’t stop at The Shop.

But The Shop is as eager as ever to host his odd and scrambled band of globe-trotting hackers, said Anne Owens, community manager. She assumes that mtnDAO will continue to happen with the seasons – winter, summer and again winter. It’s not like she or the store gets early warning of the coming swarm.

She found out that v3 happened via Twitter.

Barrett says he remains committed to building Cypher at Solana, even though his event money comes from a chain that some see as its rival. He framed the decision as one that makes mtnDAO more inclusive of crypto builders; after all, some Solana builders have traveled to Aptos in recent months.

MtnDAO’s model has spilled over to the wider Solana ecosystem. In Greece, Solana developer Dean Pappas is organizing his second annual “AthensDAO” Hackerhouse inspired by mtnDAO. Pappas said AthensDAO follows a set of Solana Foundation “environment” guidelines — “being open, lighting, seating and desks” — in exchange for funding, merchandise and the foundation’s seal of approval.

When asked if mtnDAO was interested in seeking Solana management’s “hacker house X” designation, Barrett scoffed. The brand is too “valuable,” he said, clearly proud of mtnDAO’s independence.

A handful of teams formed here or built here have won hackathon prizes, or received funding from venture firms.

“It’s cool to see what we’ve done inspire other people to take the initiative and not wait for Solana to host a hackerhouse in their town and just do it themselves,” Barrett said.