Last week, Devconnect turned Buenos Aires into the world’s Ethereum capital. The week-long gathering brought together builders, researchers, institutions, and local communities to showcase and celebrate all things Ethereum. 

For us at Optalysys, DevConnect ARG was a chance to see, up close, how fast the ecosystem is maturing, and how closely that maturation is tied to privacy, scalability of infrastructure, and the real-world needs of places like Argentina. 

Here’s what stood out to us: 

Privacy has landed and it’s here to stay 

Our biggest takeaway from the week is this: privacy is no longer a fringe cypherpunk topic. It’s become baseline infrastructure.

That shift was crystallised by Vitalik Buterin’s announcement about Kohaku, a new open-source privacy framework for Ethereum wallets. Kohaku aims to give wallet builders a modular toolkit for features like opt-in shielding, stealth-like addressing and selective disclosure, using zero-knowledge techniques to keep users’ activity private while still allowing controlled transparency when needed. 

The message from the main stage and side events alike was clear: 

• Privacy isn’t a philosophy or even a feature – it’s the critical enabler in making blockchains the global financial settlement system 
• The tooling is now catching up, packaging years of research into frameworks developers can actually ship with 
• The default is flipping to private by default, transparent when necessary 

In short: privacy is graduating from experimental add-on to a default part of the Ethereum user experience. 

Privacy & scalability are the bridge to enterprise adoption 

The second major theme followed naturally: institutions are no longer asking whether to come onchain, but how they can do so. The answer lies in privacy and scalability. 

In sessions on stablecoins, tokenised real-world assets and institutional DeFi, enterprises and builders converged on a similar set of requirements: 

• Selective disclosure – businesses need to protect commercial confidentiality and customer data while still proving solvency, risk limits and regulatory compliance 
• Compliance-aware design – privacy can’t be adversarial to regulators; it has to support audits, viewing keys and proofs of regulatory properties, not just shield information 
• Production-grade scale – it’s not enough for a singular private transaction to work in a demo. Enterprises and their users expect predictable latency, throughput and fees across thousands or millions of transactions. 

Privacy is a necessary condition for bringing serious businesses onchain, but it isn’t sufficient without scalability. Private transactions must clear quickly enough for trading, payroll and supply chains. Proof systems must be efficient enough that adding privacy doesn’t slow everything to a crawl. 

This is exactly the intersection we focus on at Optalysys: privacy-preserving computation that can actually scale to institutional usage.

Crypto 🤝 AI: x402 and machine-native payments 

Another strong thread was the convergence of AI agents and onchain payments.  

Coinbase ’s x402 protocol was a recurring reference point. It revives the long-reserved HTTP status code 402 – Payment Required and turns it into a native crypto payment rail. When a client (or AI agent) calls an API, the server can respond with a 402 that includes how much the request costs and where to pay. Once payment is settled onchain (often in a stablecoin) the client retries and receives the response. No accounts, cards or bespoke billing. 

For AI systems, that makes usage-based, per-request billing feel natural. Agents can chain together models, data feeds and tools, paying exactly for what they use. 

But this raises familiar questions: 

• Privacy – payment flows and metadata can reveal behaviour, business strategy and model usage patterns if they’re trivially linkable onchain 
• Policy-aware confidentiality – enterprises will want agents to prove they’ve paid and are compliant, without exposing full transaction graphs 
• Scale – agent economies imply vast numbers of small, frequent transactions and the underlying infrastructure must keep up 

Again, privacy and scalability are inseparable. High-performance, privacy-preserving compute is what turns ideas like x402 into viable infrastructure for AI-driven commerce. 

That Buenos Aires was the perfect backdrop 

Argentina, and Latin America more broadly, is living through exactly the kinds of economic conditions that make decentralisation and programmable money go from interesting to essential: 

• Inflation and volatility in the local currency have pushed many Argentines toward alternatives like dollar-pegged stablecoins for daily transactions and savings 
• Argentina and more specifically Buenos Aires are already leading the way in adoption of Ethereum, driven by individuals and government alike – local taxes, vehicle registrations and even fines can be paid via cryptocurrency in the city 
• A deeply crypto-aware population – Buenos Aires already has an active crypto job market, developer community and startup scene, making it an ideal real-world testbed for Ethereum-based financial infrastructure 

Latin America is not an experimental or fringe crypto market. It is a region where crypto, stablecoins, and smart contract platforms already underpin daily financial life, with a steep growth trajectory still ahead. 

Our presence at Devconnect

We didn’t just soak up some learnings – we delivered plenty too. We joined Zama at their CoFHE shop for an analysis of FHE enabled use cases in DeFi, the photonic future of confidential computing and a practical workshop centred around an encrypted dApp game running on our very own testnet.

We also sponsored Fhenix ‘s Encryption Day and took to the stage for a panel session on the institutional adoption of privacy and delivered a dev-focused session FHE, but make it practical.

Keep your eyes peeled and subscribe for the full recordings of these sessions when they become available 👀

If you met us in Buenos Aires – or want to explore what it takes to make privacy-preserving, institution-ready and AI-native Ethereum applications a reality – get in touch! We’d love to continue the conversation.