Blockchain Buffalo goes to Token Summit
Last Thursday 10 of us from our Blockchain Buffalo group attend Token Summit. Over 700 people were in attendance with another 600 folks waitlisted to get in at NYU.
I’ve attended about a half dozen conferences since 2014 and my first one was with Joe Peters in 2014 down in Disney World (Coins in the Kingdom). To the say the feeling from then to now is different would be a understatement. Bitcoin was crashing at Disney and every coin was up and to the right during Token Summit.
Joe and I flew down on the same flight but weren’t sitting next to each other which left just a man and his thoughts for an hour. You don’t really bother telling strangers why you’re on the flight when your going to a event called “Token Summit”. It made me think how few people know anything about this. Did anyone on this plane besides Joe know what blockchain was? Doubtful. Joe’s first words to me after we got off that flight? “No one on that plane knows what any of this is, it’s still so early.”
So that’s how we started the trip. Hyping up crypto in our own minds before we even landed. I’m sure we weren’t the only ones who did that.
Fast forward a day and we were surrounded by 700 other dreamers, enthusiasts, and innovators listening to pioneers of this industry on stage. Price wasn’t really talked about and either was Bitcoin. Only one project was actually building on the Bitcoin platform and that was Civik Key.
Just about every entrepreneur presenting was building out their business on the Ethereum platform as an ERC20 token.
The crypto market is extremely hot right now and look no further than Buffalo, NY where I was receiving emails, texts, LinkedIn messages etc. asking to learn more about this technology while at the conference. These messages were from some of the more successful business people around town. Our slack channel is a little over a month old and we have close to 70 members on the platform. We met up with Taylor Greene a VC in NY who grew up in Buffalo and gave him one of our shirts.
We kept being asked what is Blockchain Buffalo? Today it is just a group that gets together every Tuesday but I see it evolving. We have a strong diverse group that is trying to figure out use cases for blockchain technology.
Joe and I flew Delta home and if you have flown Delta recently you know what that means. We rented a car and drove home to Buffalo. 6 hours in a car together talking about the conference and the technology turned into a brainstorming session for use cases. We landed on an idea that both of us became really excited about and before you knew it we were back in Buffalo. Stay tuned. I have a feeling this will be the first of many ideas that the Blockchain Buffalo builds.
Jon
