Devcon Recap — #DappAwards and More

The following is a transcript of our Devcon Recap video (above). Find more about the Dapp Awards in our write-up from Mainframe founder Mick Hagen here, and see our Dawn of the Dapps video here.

Hey everybody. The Mainframe crew just got back from Prague in the Czech Republic, or Czechia as many call it. It’s an incredible city with amazing cuisine and architecture and culture that we could talk about for hours, but we did not go to Europe just for sight-seeing. This year Prague was home to Devcon 4 from the Ethereum Foundation.

We had a few goals for our week at Devcon, but there was really just one event that we were most excited for: Mainframe hosted the first Annual Dapp Awards. We work in a funny industry with world-changing potential, but very few existing customers or use-cases. There’s a long way to go still, but we wanted to take one night to celebrate the foundational work that’s already been done. The Dapp Awards was our way of recognizing the builders in the space.

Quick rundown of the night: At the Czech Museum of Music, we hosted some of the most influential and brightest minds in the blockchain space. Our founder Mick Hagen gave the keynote, sharing the Mainframe vision for how this technology can make, not just an industry or the financial sector, but the WORLD — a more free and prosperous place. To illustrate where we stand today, we shared our Dawn of the Dapps video, a satirical look at the sparce and clunky experience of dapp users in 2018. This was the first public showing of the finished video, but the full video has since been released, and we think you’re really going to like it.

The emcee for the evening was none other than yours truly, keeping the audience entertained. Offering some insight and educations was our panel of builders — Taylor Monahan, Founder/CEO, of MyCrypto, Erik Voorhees, Founder/CEO of ShapeShift, and Connie Yang, Director of Design for Coinbase. This panel was moderated by Cahlan Sharp, Mainframe’s VP of Product.

We also held a discussion with some of the top investors — Kyle Samani of Multicoin Capital, Alex Shin of Hashed, and Ari Paul of BlockTower Capital. Moderated by Matt Larson, VP of Strategy/Operations at Mainframe.

And of course, the awards. Presenters included Shawn Wilkinson, CEO/Founder at Storj.io, Katherine Wu, Director of Business Development at Messari, Karyl Fowler, CEO/Founder of Transmute, Alex Wearn, CEO/Founder of IDEX, Amber Baldet, CEO/Cofounder of Clovyr, and Vinay Gupta, CEO/Founder of Mattereum. Presenters Taylor Monahan, Founder/CEO, of MyCrypto, and John Fiorelli, Global Head of Advisory at Kinetic Capital.

And of course, the winners! Best Utility Token went to Spankchain and Ameen Soleimani, CEO/Founder. Investor of the Year went to Multicoin Capital and Kyle Samani. Best Mainstream Media Coverage went to Bloomberg and Camila Russo (Markets Reporter). Testnet Launch of the Year went to ThunderCore and Elaine Shi (Cofounder / Chief Scientist). Most Essential went to Etherscan and Matthew Tan (CEO/Founder). Game of the Year was, surprise surprise, CryptoKitties with founding engineer Nick Salloum. Exchange of the Year was Coinbase with Connie Yang (Director of Design) accepting. And finally, the Developer Tools & Infrastructure Winner was Truffle with Tim Coulter (Founder/CEO) accepting.

It was a huge hit. We got to rub elbows with many of the best, and genuinely had a really fun night. See the full recap written by our founder Mick Hagen on our blog, and expect to see more dapp-focused events in the future.

Now, this was Devcon, so we wanted to learn from the other brilliant minds in attendance. Our engineers soaked up the experience and insights from other people there, and shared many of their own.

Doug Leonard, Software Architect — We had the opportunity to represent ourselves at the SWARM mini conference. The presentation was on a demo application using SWARM feeds for chat. Throughout the week there were a couple of highlights that were exciting to me as an engineer. They have these physical Ether cards that you can load up with any sort of token and hand them to a friend. There is a new concept called reversible ICOs, which is interesting in the space. There is a new app called Argent.XYZ, which uses social proofs to recover your account keys, and… yeah, that was from a high level the highlights of the week for my leanrings.

Sarah Wiley, VP of Engineering — On the last day, I heard a talk by Eduardo Gomez who has recently fled from Venezuela, and he told his story about how he lived on bitcoin, and he used crypto as a means of survival. He made the case that cryptocurrency and crypto-based solutions are things that they need now, and today, and they don’t need them to be perfect, they don’t need every problem solved. It can save lives.

But attending Devcon sessions was really only half our reason for being there. We also wanted to learn one-on-one with some of the brightest minds in the space, about broad issues and higher level insights, and share those insights with you. So we did a few interviews (more like discussions) along the roadways of Prague. You can look forward to meeting and hearing from the founders of IDEX, Perlin, Bloom, and more. Those will be released in the coming weeks.

It is not hard to see the industry maturing. Last year at Devcon there were only a couple different tracks for the conference, and most of the discussion was around overcoming basic technological hurdles. This year there were multiple tracks, and a lot more focus on user experience. We’re excited to take the knowledge and relationships fostered at Devcon this year, and to turn those into incredible technology, ready to go into your hands.

Thanks, team.