We arrived in Brighton first. The sea set the pace. Wind off the Channel, salt on skin, gulls sharp and unashamed. Brighton was where the conversations started quietly. Brunches stretched long at Billie’s, plates simple and exact, coffee strong, bread still warm. The kind of place where ideas open up because no one is in a hurry.

Brighton had a scene then. Small rooms, borrowed offices, kitchens turned into meeting spaces. Bitcoin people. Early crypto thinkers. Not evangelists. Engineers, philosophers, skeptics. They spoke about decentralization the way sailors talk about weather. As something you respect, not something you sell.

It was here we were first seriously introduced to Ethereum. The Network went live on 30 July 2015. Not as a product, but as a possibility. Smart contracts. Programmable trust. Ether trading around one pound. It sounded almost unreal, but the people explaining it were calm. No hype. Just architecture. In hindsight, that calm was the signal.

Lunches blurred into walks along the shore. Fresh seafood eaten facing the water. Oysters cold and clean. Fish straight from the grill. The sea kept interrupting the theory, which was good. It kept everything honest.

From there, we moved inland to Lewes. The town felt older than ideas, older than money. That night, the bonfire parade cut through the streets. Fire everywhere. Drums. Smoke. Masks. Effigies burning with ritual precision. It was chaotic but disciplined. A reminder that communities have always known how to organize power symbolically. Crypto suddenly felt less new.

Then London. Loud, compressed, relentless. Meetings stacked on top of each other. Coffee grabbed standing up. Conversations cut short by taxis, by calls, by urgency. London was finance thinking at speed. Crypto here felt different. More aggressive. More speculative. Less patient.

Moving between the three places clarified something. Brighton incubated. Lewes remembered. London accelerated. Together, they formed a complete circuit.

Looking back, 2015 feels impossibly early. Ethereum at a pound. Conversations without slogans. No conferences yet, no stages. Just people trying to understand what a new kind of infrastructure might do to the world.

The sea was rough. The food was good. The ideas were still fragile. That mattered.