So how is it like to attend a big blockchain event? Is it full of people talking about elliptic curve mathematics and Merkle tree parsing algorithms? Not quite. A few years ago I went to Microsoft TechEd in Orlando -now called Microsoft Ignite- which is a Mecca for software developers.
Consensus draws a very different crowd than Microsoft conferences. Attendees include company founders, CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, evangelists, crypto investors, fund managers, financial analysts, students, journalists, lawyers, compliance people, tax people, consultants... Some wear suits and ties, others coloured hair and tattoos. If they have long hair they’re cryptographers.
Consensus is an event organised every year by Coindesk. This year 8500 people registered, more than twice the number Coindesk was anticipating a few months ago.
The Hilton Midtown near Broadway was packed: often it was hard to cut through the crowd in-between sessions. Next year Coindesk might have to pick a bigger place -Microsoft is known for booking Ignite in conference centers large enough to comfortably park a few A380s.
Consensus has many tracks going on in parallel so you have to keep your FOMO under control. Refrain from doing sessions back to back or it can be draining. The main presentations were happening in the Grand Ballroom: big stage, two giant screens and a sketching artist illustrating the talks live.
I met a few people who didn’t go to any of the sessions and just walked around the floors, talking to anyone and networking. Breakfast was served in the ballrooms, another opportunity for networking around bagels and muffins. In the evening the ballrooms turned into bars with free flow alcohol.
Some highlights and takeaways:
Day1
- Don Tapscott (Blockchain Research Institute) described a taxonomy of blockchain tokens. He classifies them in seven types, which is an interesting way of making sense of the 1800+ tokens that have been created to date.
1. cryptocurrencies (BTC, Dash, )
2. platforms (ETH, EOS, …)
3. utility tokens (can be redeemed for a service, such as cloud storage for instance)
4. security tokens (used to raise money)
5. natural asset tokens (carbon credit, …)
6. crypto collectibles (crypto kitties)
7. crypto-fiat currencies, stable coins.
Don Tapscott co-wrote a book titled The Blockchain Revolution.
 |
| Live sketches by Heather Klar |
- John Bullard, a researcher from the Federal Reserve argued that cryptocurrencies would make economies more complicated. He suggested we might come back to a situation similar to the 1830’s when most of the notes in the US were privately printed notes (notes valid only for a particular bank).
- Some engaging presentations on Layer 2 and scalability: Amy Yin from Coinbase (@yin_ami) explained the benefits of extended keys, which allows a business to generate as many public keys as needed when getting paid by customers while maintaining a single seed. Muneeb Ali (@muneeb) highlighted the risk of forgetting about scalability issues when coding.
- What programming languages are used when writing production blockchain code? During a conversation involving Charlie Lee (founder of Litecoin) and David Schwartz (chief cryptographer at Ripple), Jutta Steiner (Parity, ex Ethereum) said “For robust implementation we went for Rust and web assembly”.
Hyperledger Projects
-
Bridget Van Kralingen described how IBM is actively working on micro-finance with Stellar. IBM has its hands in a bunch of Hyperledger projects: food safety, traceability of diamonds, tracking of donations and carbon trading. After her talk I went to the Hyperledger booth to check out some demos: I saw one about tracing the origin of a bag of coffee you buy from the shelf all the way back to the harvest. With your iPhone you scan a QR code stuck on the package and that brings up the full history Fedex-style:
Security for institutional investors
- Ledger -the French guys behind the Nano S- were sponsoring a roundtable on the theme of crypto funds. Nicolas Bacca and Eric Larcheveque talked about a new service called Ledger Vault. The idea is to outsource the complexity of managing private keys: instead of using a bunch of Nanos you store private keys on a SHM (Secure Hardware Module) locked in bunkers in various locations. It’s easy to see how this can be useful to people who manage portfolios of cryptos. For instance the Japanese bank Nomura will use Ledger Vault to offer crypto custody services to its customers. This is a big thing. Soon more and more banks will do this.
- You now have people specialised in selling or advising on crypto funds. So who is selling crypto funds? One example is Grayscale Investments who offers 8 products. Another example is Fundstrat Global Advisors whose chief analyst Thomas Lee (@funstrat) described a model developed by his company to value cryptocurrencies. He mentioned his model was currently valuating BTC at USD36000.
Tips to Research Tokens
- Alex Tapscott brought up the example of the 1800’s red flag act to illustrate the risk of over-regulation. To describe the position of the crypto market today: “we have reached the second half of the chess board”.
- Alex Sunnarborg from Tretras Capital gave some tips on how to research a cryptocurrency. Here is what to look at:
- transaction amount and size
- fees
- distribution of mining effort
- supply: what is circulating, what is locked in? Percentage of money held by top 100 holders?
- GitHub commits
- regulatory risks
- He added: "Short term price movements are driven by noise, not fundamentals" Yep.
This day was more calm, everyone coming in late because of the parties from the night before.
I had conversations with people from Ripple, Dash, Ledger, Shapeshift, Interbit, Volt... then crashed into bed by 4pm.
In the end...
In the end Consensus 2018 was an exciting event that stood out by the number and diversity of its attendees.
This weird idea thrown into the public by some anonymous dude almost 10 years ago with a 9-page whitepaper and open-source code has now infected the minds of hundreds of thousands of people from all sectors (tech, law, investment, charity, environment, tax...). They are building development platforms, interoperability protocols, secure storage systems, investment vehicles, education material... building blocks and bits and pieces that will be used as infrastructure over the next 20 years or more.
