Blockchain Connect June 26th, 2018 Conference Recap

The June 26th Blockchain Connect was in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center and had a distinct theme: Catch the Next Crypto Unicorn.

This seems appropriate, as the event was hosted by SV Insight, and co-hosted by Draper Dragon, HBUS, DHVC, Dodhi, Noris, Node Capital, 8Decimal Capital, and ConsenSys.

The crowd included the general mix of cryptocurrency influencers, investors, and blockchain project founders.

Of the notable talks, Draper Dragon’s fund manager Andy Tang commented when you see a unicorn, it’s already too late to catch it, so you need to discover it at the early stage and help to nurture it.” Tang also went into a few of Draper Dragon’s investment strategies, and how various blockchain projects have the potential to revolutionize traditional industries.

Other topics included:

Blockchain VS Government Regulations – Daeje Chin, former CEO of Samsung Semiconductor Business and current Chairman of the Korean Blockchain Association (KBCA), an association counting 24 exchanges and 42 companies in their membership. Chin noted, “as Korean government conducted a series of regulation and control, it also accelerated blockchain industry development through policies including raising blockchain talents, supporting blockchain startups, clarifying policy uncertainty and obstacles and promoting communication within blockchain industry.”

How can technology solve the challenges within blockchain? –  Zhong Shao, Yale University CS Department Chair and blockchain startup CertiK co-founder, gave a speech on “Building Fully Trustworthy Smart Contracts and Blockchain Ecosystems”.

Traditional Business VS Blockchain: The first panel of the conference featured DHVC managing director Judy Yan, Hub CEO and former Linkedin co-founder Eric Ly, and other panelists.

The panelists agreed that blockchain can revolutionize traditional business models in ways that haven’t been explored. Tokenization and blockchain services provided several angles from which to create solutions for businesses that traditional models aren’t able to provide.

How to Catch the Next Crypto Unicorn?: Leo Wang, co-founder of PreAngel spoke about the essence of “value” and how capital functions similarly from gold, branding, and bitcoin. It’s the consensus of a group of people. A token’s value comes from liquidity and agreement of its worth. The token economy is essentially an economy for building consensus.

The conference also featured a variety of projects such as BlockVC, Theta, Trade Terminal, Taxa, Aelf, Quarkchain, Altonomy, UST, and Iris Network.