“Leave no trace.”
So said the intimate gathering of roughly 100 Ethereum developers who descended upon the Catacombs of Paris for an illegal techno rave.
Amid a tumultuous macroeconomic backdrop and $2 trillion crash for the cryptocurrency industry at large, attendees entered the 65-foot deep caverns, which are said to be lined with the skeletal remains of millions of plague victims, effectively making it the world’s largest grave.
Crypto developers recently congregated in Paris for the annual Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), the largest European-based Ethereum summit, where 2,000 gathered for three days. A subset of developers visited the grim, centuries-old attraction, which was not associated with the conference.
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“It’s very illegal but also very crypto,” said one attendee who spoke anonymously to CNBC.
An attendee of an illicit rave in the Catacombs of Paris walks through water in a hallway of the mass grave.
Working in secret, the crypto developers answered questions on a survey before being connected with a centralized planner, who broke out the small squads of developers into groups. Each group was then purportedly assigned a channel on Telegram and coordinated multiple entry points so as not to alert officials.
Some directions were as nondescript as merely identifying a gap in the rocks. But all entryways eventually converged on the candle-lit rave, which featured a DJ and bar, per CNBC.
The Catacombs of Paris site is expected to hold the remains of a collective six million Parisians and has been open to the public since 1809.