Day 2 of the conference started with Christoph Jentzsch from Slock.it talking about “How companies can exist with only computer code and the story of ‘The DAO’.” It was amazing to be able to meet the person who “authored” the DAO.
Margaux Avedisian was next talking about a “Beginners Guide to raising money via ICO’s (Initial Coin Offerings)” and “How to plan and execute a successful crowdsale”. It was very insightful and very interesting. The main takeaway I got was that you have to know your stuff if you’re asking for money. If you don’t, you will be found out.
Jake Vartanian then talked about “Crowdsale Design, Marketing, and Community.” He had the most powerful and emotional start to his presentation when he talked about his experience meeting a kid who wanted $125 to start up an ice cream stand on his travels in South East Asia. He ended up giving the kid the money and kept in touch ever since.
There was a panel discussion after that taking questions from the audience.
After morning tea Graham Anderson & Mital Kayaiya from Webjet Australia shared their experience with what they are doing with blockchains.
Maksim Izmaylov from Travel Tech Con shared his experience with “Inequality and Innovation in the Blockchain Era”. It was fascinating to see how a hand full of big players (by handful I mean 2) control the travel market in the US.
After lunch Emma Weston from Agridigital talked on “Is there a business in the provenance of food?” Lots of “food for thought” :).
Being an ex-programmer I loved one of her puns so much that I’m going to use it in one of my talks.
Kaidi Ruusalepp from Funderbeam talked about “The funderbeam story: a new stock exchange.” They have incorporated blockchain technologies into their stock exchange.
Kaidi showed an interesting slide on the process of trading on the stock exchange that involved no less than 8 steps. I could relate to this because I was at a talk last year where Mandy Simpson, former COO of the NZSX said the same thing. Funderbeam chopped this to less than half.
There was another panel discussion providing an opportunity for audience interaction which was great.
Max Kaye from Flux spoke about “How the blockchain will spur a 2nd renaissance in democracy.” It was a fascinating topic but also quite advanced and new thinking.
Peter Borah from Ownage had the tough job of being the penultimate speaker. Peter is an Ethereum developer working on tokens in video games and spoke about “A Tourist’s Guide to the Future.”
Everyone stayed riveted in their seats waiting for the final keynote speaker. Vitalik talked about “What is cryptoeconomics?” and blew the audience away. The information was next level and very new that I can’t even summarize what he said. I’ll have to re-watch the recording.
In summary, it was a superb conference and a rare opportunity to see some amazing speakers in action. Kudos to Mark and the 3Month team for all the hard work behind the scenes. Looking forward to continuing the momentum and seeing the progress in this space in New Zealand.
