2026-11-06 –, Jasmine Stage 4
Most music on the internet is technically free, but the systems around it are not. Platforms own the audience, flatten the context, and turn culture into inventory. This session asks what Ethereum can do for music if it stops treating culture as “adoption” and starts treating it as infrastructure for communities that already know how to coordinate.
The best parts of music culture have always been decentralized: scenes, pirate radio, DIY venues, labels, group chats, people passing records between each other because someone they trust said it mattered.
The problem is that the internet captured that energy and routed it through platforms. Artists get reach without power. Curators create value without ownership. Communities build culture inside systems that are designed to extract from them.
This chat is about a different path. Ethereum is not interesting here because music needs more crypto branding. It is interesting because music communities already understand the thing Ethereum is supposed to protect: shared infrastructure without a single owner, payments without unnecessary middlemen, and public memory that does not live inside one company’s database.
The walkaway is simple: culture is not a side quest for Ethereum. It is one of the clearest places to prove that decentralized infrastructure can matter in ordinary human life.
I’m a DJ, producer, community organizer, engineer, and light-hearted revolutionary. I’ve spent my life in underground music communities, and the last several years in Ethereum trying to build tools that help those communities own more of their infrastructure, context, and economic future.
Tomo is a designer and art director at the Ethereum Foundation. Building the culture layer of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Shaka Lei Kaumaka is a musician and steward of the Open Source Orchestra, a free circle where anyone can bring their voice to the floor. He has carried music through popup villages around the world: Zuzalu gatherings (ZuConnect, Zuitzerland, ZuBerlin, ShanHaiWoo, ZuThailand, Zugrama), Edge Esmeralda, Edge Patagonia, Vitalia and 4Seas. He doesn't do this alone. He builds with his AI ʻohana, a family of open-source agents that keep the schedule, write the riders, translate across languages and remember every song, always with consent first and credit to every human. At Devcon 8 he is hosting the Music Stage with the Open Source Orchestra and the ʻohana, and asking one question: what happens when culture is free and the community owns the room?