This summer was awesome. Endless. Hot and sunny. Unfortunately, 2018 turned out to be a cryptowinter.
While crypto volatility stabilized downwards during summer, in light of the large institutional push into the crypto markets, with OTC market at its all-time-high, it turned gradually into a cryptowinter. Lately, we have seen a dramatic slide in market cap, and expect it to continue until we finally see “capitulation.”
Crypto has met overexpectations during 2018. On many fronts: Public Chains are not scalable as desired, some projects abandoned, ICO scams, many ICO projects are not viable, decentralization is not soo decentralized, cryptocurrencies are no “safe haven” and so on.
2018 was a horrible year for crypto. We fall, as Gardner describes it so well in their Hype Cycle Model, from the “peak of inflated expectations” into the “trough of disillusionment.”
This was a huge correction, and the mantra “HODL”, reflecting the focus on the speculative aspect of crypto has been replaced by “BUIDL”, means building and developing applications and applications.
Having been in various emerging technology cycles in the past, we know these hype cycles from other technologies. Therefore, it is time to look at 2019, but that will be another post “What’s Next for Blockchain 2019”.
Firstly, we want to give you below an update on our activities, upcoming plans and engagements.
Over the last months, we were quite busy, participated and spoke at conferences and panels, attended meetups, conducted workshops in Switzerland, Germany and France and further progressed with our project TRACY around sustainability in textile.
August 2018
“10. Innovation Congress OWIKon”
The chamber of commerce Ost-Westfalen invited us to their 10th innovation congress “OWIKon” in Bielefeld for Aug, 27. We joined speaker like Torsten Zube, VP Head of Blockchain at SAP, Prof. Andreas Ittner from the Blockchain Competence Center of University of Applied Sciences Mittweida and Didier Goepfert from Streamr Network to present applications and use cases of the blockchain.
Sven presented new business models, enabled by blockchain technology at the 10th OWIKon “Internet of Values: Anwendungen und Potenziale der Blockchain-Technologie”. Ostwestfalen is home to large industrial groups like Miele, Bertelsmann and Arvato. He showcased various live use-cases ranging from decentralized exchanges, validator and staking business models, decentralized insurance products, saving, credit, identity, decentralized commerce, tokenized online advertising and more.
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“Transparent - Sustainable Fashion” by Zalando
Zalando, Europe’s largest online fashion retailer organized for the second time an event about supply chain transparency.
Over the last 20 years, clothing production doubled globally, creating a boom for the fashion industry. At the same time, many of the industry’s existing challenges — from ecological footprint to working conditions — worsened.
This came as no surprise that blockchain took the main stage of the event and was discussed as the technology underpinning the data integrity and data-sharing in Supply Chains.
This is a reason, why we work since 2017 on TRACY — a blockchain powered platform, aimed at providing transparency and sustainability for the textile and garment ecosystem. Our vision is to incentivize data sharing by applying cryptoeconomics. This has in our opinion the potential to turn a cost centre into profit centre. A separate announcement about TRACY with more details will be published later.
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“Curation Markets and Non-Fungible Tokens”
Berlin is one of the most important cities in blockchain space. There’s constantly a multitude of meetups, where newest developments within crypto are discussed.
Curation markets and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is getting lately quite some attention. Billy Rennekamp, Cosmos developer and artist, presented his own project Clovers.network. Clovers is a place, where one can discover, collect and trade mathematically generated artwork, represented by NFTs and their price defined by a curation market.
Elad Erbin, a theoretical computer science researcher and VC at Berlin Innovation Ventures talked about the markets and whether these can be at all efficient. He argued that markets usually are not that “smart”, price discovery is rather problematic, especially for the financial products with a long-term maturity. Markets are not a fit-them-all solution but can nevertheless be efficient for certain use-cases.
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Madana, a decentralized market for data analysis.
Further, we also met with Madana in Berlin to discuss their product proposition. Madana has the vision to create a decentralized data marketplace and will be running on the Lisk blockchain. Multiple parties will be able to supply their data in a secure manner and others to analyze this data via APIs and templates without the data owner been disclosing or compromised. Monetization occurs through a token. Madana will be the first major ICO on Lisk. Christian Junger, CEO and founder of Madana, followed our invite and joined us for our “Executive Blockchain Dine and Talks” in Berlin.
September 2018
OECD Blockchain Policy Forum: Distributed Ledgers
Back in Paris. This time for the three-day OECD blockchain and DLT conference. The first two days were the OECD Blockchain Policy Forum, where we met many high-profile policy makers and other stakeholders from the blockchain space. It was great to meet again Greg Medcraft, Director of the OECD Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs, who appreciated the progress of our project TRACY.
After the Blockchain Policy Forum, we were at the OECD textile workgroup, together with HUGO BOSS at the follow up workshop, dedicated specifically to the usage of blockchain in garment and textiles supply chain.
The mission of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. The OECD was established in 1961 in Paris and has 35 member countries.
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OECD “Blockchain for Responsible Business Conduct in Garment & Textiles Supply Chain” workshop
There, we discussed, how blockchain can help the textile industry with its sustainability goals and presented TRACY to representatives of large fashion groups, industry associations and NGO’s. The form of the concept presentation was very practical and hands-on, with us being able to showcase several use-cases and expected functionalities with a frontend interface. We had collected a lot of input from various stakeholders and this has been taken into consideration for further TRACY iterations and our continued work on it.
Blockchain, smart contracts and tokens can support sustainability goals in the garment and footwear sector, while fighting bad actors in the sector. It was fantastic to see such an interest from important stakeholders and a separate day dedicated to it within the forum!
Having sustainability in the focus, blockchain technology is not only able to decrease frictions along the supply chain, but also to ensure the provenance and authenticity of goods. It can also provide a new way of financing, potentially turning a cost center into a profit center. Stay tuned for more information on TRACY!
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“Sustainable Everything” by Blueyard Capital
Blockchain and sustainability has been one of the major topics for us this year, which we support and develop with our project TRACY. Thus it is always great to see activity happening in this space and investments being made. This further reinforces the notion that such solutions are needed and there is indeed a problem with supply chains, which blockchains can help to solve.
Blue Yard Capital invited to the meet-up “When blockchain, supply chain, and inclusive financing come together” and hosted organizations like the GIZ Blockchain Lab and startups like Provenance and Centrifuge.
Provenance is a digital platform that empowers brands to take steps toward greater transparency.
Centrifuge is an open, decentralized operating system to connect the global financial supply chain.
Blue Yard Capital invests in founders with transforming ideas that decentralize markets, empower users and liberate data. BlueYard is a thesis driven firm and this is what they are thinking.
Supply chains are extremely complex and not easy to digitize and automate certain processes. A lot of specific industry know-how is necessary and best practices need to be developed. Many companies, however, are currently developing the building blocks for it, ranging from supply chain finance and remittance to sensors and IoT.
With TRACY, we come from the view of the ecosystem, closing the loop of value creation between the end consumers of fashion and other textile products and suppliers such as cotton farmers or kettle farmers.
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ASTRATUM “Executive Blockchain Dine and Talk”, Berlin
We invited again to one of our private “Executive Blockchain Dine & Talk.” We organize since 2016 this format together with the ADG, the education unit of one of Germany’s leading financial groups. The concept aims to close the gap between the blockchain space and executives from banking, insurance, real estate, investment and more. This is achieved by creating a framework, which enables an open dialogue between incumbents and the blockchain start-up ecosystem.
This time, Alice Kohn (Blockchain journalist, Smith & Crown, Deutsche Welle), Lutz Thelen (Elea Labs) from Cryptovalley, Switzerland and Gleb Dudka (ASTRATUM, TRACY) joined our discussion with executives from the financial industry. Thanks again for the excellent and open discussions about the state of our industry. We all enjoyed this informative and pleasant evening.
Feel free to contact us, if you’re interested to discuss with us, how this format could be adopted to the needs of your organization.
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TeamBank AG Keynote, Nuremberg
The TeamBank invited us to hold a keynote about blockchain at their headquarters in Nuremberg. Their best know product is @easycredit. TeamBank is embracing innovation, having R&D and innovation big on their roadmap. It is thus no wonder that they are open for DLT technology and potential use-cases. Sven presented and discussed with them blockchain, its components and ecosystem and how it may impact the financial industry, demonstrating a selection of relevant use-cases and examples.
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Innovation and Blockchain Workshop, Schloss Montabaur
Back for a blockchain innovation workshop at the beautiful Castle Montabaur. In July, we conducted there with the Akademie der Genossenschaften (ADG) the Blockchain Summer School 2018. ADG invited top executives of the largest cooperative banks in Germany to a week-long executive education class. The focus of the class was on strategy, organizational development, technology and innovation in the financial industry.
Many innovative use-cases for blockchain in the finance industry were presented by Sven and Gleb. These use cases ranged from savings, creditworthiness, KYC and IDs, decentralized lending, decentralized commerce, IoT, insurance products, asset management, syndicated loans, remittance, cryptoexchanges and trading.
An important aspect for us was to provide an insight into the cultural phaenomenon of “blockchain” and “crypto”, and to show, how some market segments have already embraced this new paradigm. Many participants were astonished about the sheer number of relevant blockchain projects and metrics, while all enjoyed performing real token transactions.
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Blockchain Camp III, Stuttgart
Back in Stuttgart for the third edition of the Blockchain Bootcamp, organized by the chamber of commerce IHK Stuttgart. This time the event took place within the whole-week event series “Themenwoche 100 Stunden Morgen”. Apart from meeting many friends of the south-German blockchain ecosystem, Sven presented latest business models, enabled by blockchain technology . These were projects with potential to disrupt current business models, and completely new “crypto-native” business models such as validation and staking pools for major PoS protocols. These can be catered to by the current institutions like banks, insurers and VCs to participate in their value creation.
In the evening, Sven was invited to join the panel “From Token to Tokenomics,” moderated by Andrei Martchouk from KI Decentralized. The panel was about cryptoeconomics and how it is used to incentivize desired behaviour within distributed systems and decentralized applications (dapps).
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“Disruptive Thinking in Blockchain” by Coinfund and ChorusOne
New-York based Coinfund and Chorus.one from Berlin invited to the “Disruptive Thinking” meetup in Berlin.
Jake Brukhman, co-founder of Coinfund, put it very well:
“It now seems more and more clear that our role at Coinfund is to transcend the investor and to engage the networks themselves, maybe even integrate with them. We might/should become miners, stakers, validators, bonders, curators, dispute resolvers, nodes, hubs, watchers, routers for networks.”
Validation business has been gaining a lot of interest in the space as it combines in itself various business models at the same time, a crypto-exchange, a VC, a bank and a mining pool. One of the central topics was staking and validation with Chorus.one presenting their Cosmos validator business model, which is mostly focused on security. Security, not only on the IT infrastructure side, but also process side is extremely important for a validator, as a breach and potential double-signing will cause slashing — losing up to 20% of staked tokens permanently.
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RCON3 — The RChain Developer Conference
The idea of a cooperative blockchain is close to some of the more traditional organizations. This is why we attended the RCon3 developer conference in Berlin. Continuing with the topic of validation and staking, RChain (RHOC) is another interesting project, which many validation companies are looking forward to release their mainnet. RChain is a blockchain platform and a set of tools to enable social coordination in robust, secure, and scalable ways. It was great talking to Chorus.one and Staking Facilities about their plans to run RChain validators among other protocols like Cosmos, Tezos, Polkadot, Dfinity.
October 2018
Technical University TU Berlin x ASTRATUM — TRACY
Being an industry partner of the Technical University TU Berlin, we continued our collaboration, this time adding another topic to the mix. Last semester, we collaborated with the TU Berlin on autonomous drones and new business models, presenting our project Vaagnar. Now, we started with collaboration on the topic of sustainability with Prof. Dr. Sören Salomo, Entrepreneurship and Innovationmanagement, presenting and discussing our project TRACY in form of a master class in mid December. Prof. Dr. Salomo Sören is well-known for being co-author of the standard handbook “Innovationsmanagement.”
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Further, we are proud to welcome Marco Schletz as an advisor to TRACY, who is a Ph.D. Student at the TU Berlin. Marco is working at the UN as expert in the field of sustainability and climate change and a blockchain enthusiast.
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The Web3 Summit, Berlin
Towards the end of October, Berlin hosted one of the most high-profile blockchain events of 2018 aside from probably only Devcon4. Web3 combined workshops, hackathons, panels and speeches about all aspects and building blocks of the Web3. The three-day summit deserves a separate post of its own due to the sheer amount of information and project updates. The conference was packed and with many high-profile talks. People had to sit on the floor or even stand through. The community is by no means discouraged by the current bear market. General sentiment shifted from “lambo” talks (“Lamborghinis being the symbol for get-quick-rich schemes of 2017) to projects delivering (“BUIDL”) and being held accountable for the money raised and roadmap delays.
Gavin Wood, co-founder of Parity and Polkadot and widely respected for his role as former CTO of Ethereum (and author of the “yellow paper” of Ethereum), gave one of the most impressive talks by coding with Substrate, a new product from Parity, a new blockchain, launching it, writing a coin toss game and updating the blockchain with it on a new out-of-the-box Macbook in 15 minutes. Take the time and watch the demo above.
While Gavin sees smart contracts not as the only, or even the best abstraction method for describing the things one want to do under the roof of a consensus system, “they work well, when the code is small, and not so good in any other circumstance”, he believes that “smart contracts will stick around as a means of quickly prototyping and deploying ideas..you innovate quickly within the smart contract environment…but when you have to increase throughput, ..you roll out a parachain, which contains this smart contract or a set of smart contracts, partly because you don’t have to worry about gas metering.” Gavin also believes that parachains will be ready in 2–4 years, and then it should be not more difficult to compose them than smart contracts.
Asked about the disruptive impact of substrate, he answers that substrate encompasses all lessons learned from Ethereum and Polkadot, and, if he and his team is able to execute as desired, this will enable developers to set up an own blockchain in a much faster way as today and benefit for free from all their experiences made.
Substrate is a promising framework to create application-specific blockchains in modular way, catering to the interoperability future. It already had a simple user interface, being able to send transactions, update chain, create wallets and interact with smart contracts. Substrate powers Polkadot (its relay chain to be precise). Due to Polkadot, all Substrate-built blockchains can thus be easily interoperable to one another and to other non-Substrate blockchains. Substrate is potentially a game-changer. Learn more about Substrate here.
On the investment and trading front, some representatives of CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange) and CME Group (Chicago Mercantile Exchange & Chicago Board of Trade) were present, telling that there is still a long way to go for crypto-related financial products. Interesting notion was raised was KYT (as opposed to KYC we all know), standing for Know-Your-Transaction, which is basically a KYC-lite, ensuring only that the tokens being traded are not coming from blacklisted addresses associated with hacks, or bitcoin mixers. This would introduce the “healthiness index” to your funds. If lets say >30% of your exchange deposit in crypto are somehow related or traced back to a mixer, deposit can be frozen until further investigation is conducted. Upcoming security token exchange platforms like Harbor and Polymath take a similar approach, introducing KYT on protocol level.
Brave is still a relatively unknown browser, which has gained visibility in the decentralization / blockchain community through their quite successful ICO in 2017. The browser comes with a lot of interesting features. The most revolutionary: It changes the traditional (and broken) online advertising model by introducing tokens as reward mechanism. In that context, Brave browser showed great progress, aiming to become the front-end to dapps. One year after their ICO, they showed healthy user growth, a lot of integrations with Metamask, Ledger, Trezor etc. Brave is a good example of ICO money well spent. Be like Brave.
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Annual meeting of the German Blockchain Association (Bundesblock)
The first annual meeting of the German Blockchain Association Bundesblock took place as a part of the Web3 Summit in Berlin at Berlin’s blockchain co-working space Full Node. ASTRATUM, as a founding member, was looking forward to this meeting.
Florian Glatz, president of Bundesblock, provided updates on activities and showed the progress of the past year. Joachim Lohkamp, member of the board, presented the new paper on identity that the Bundesblock just released. We discussed several topics, ranging from the creation of regional chapters, how to deal with the addition of large enterprises and the latest news from the interaction with the policy makers. Besides, it was great to catch up with the other members and afterwards have a chat over a drink at a nearby restaurant.
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Blockchain Roundtable at Textilbündnis, Berlin
Together with the German textile alliance Textilbündnis, Heinz Zeller from HUGO BOSS and ASTRATUM invited to the “Textilbuendnis Blockchain Roundtable” on Oct, 29.
Textilbündnis is a multi-stakeholder initiative with about 130 representatives from five different actor groups (German Federal Government, business, non-governmental organizations, unions, standards organizations). The goal is to achieve social, ecological and economic improvements alongside the entire textile supply chain.
Viktor Peter from the GIZ Blockchain Lab introduced GIZ’s approach to blockchain, while we introduced blockchain technology and its benefits for the supply chain in textile industry, before presenting and discussing with representatives from the ecosystem our project TRACY. Large retailers, but also manufacturer, cotton exchanges, independent service providers and data set and certificate providers were all taking the opportunity to discuss the new technology and possible use cases.
This is another step in the direction of bringing various stakeholders along the supply chain to, in first instance to realize the benefits of DLT technology for their business model and secondly, engage these to take an active part in the transformation to be the ones driving the change.
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ASTRATUM “Executive Blockchain Dine and Talk”, Berlin
On Oct, 30, we invited the “Zukunftsforum großer Banken” to our “Executive Dine & Talk.” We welcomed fifteen board members of the largest cooperative German banks to discuss “blockchain” with us and our guests Christian Junger from Madana and Heinz Zeller from HUGO BOSS. It is important in our opinion to bring a differentiated set of experiences and backgrounds to the table, because crypto and blockchain is a new paradigm, which will deeply affect the financial industry. ADG’s aim with the “Zukunftsforum Großer Banken” (“Future Forum of Big Banks”) is to educate executives and board members from the largest cooperative banks with the latest innovation in financial industry and fintech. Blockchain as “fintech 2.0" is a must in such a context.
November 2018
Berlin Science Week, Understanding Blockchain
During one week, Berlin invited many international and local speakers to contribute to their fabulous interdisciplinary “Berlin Science Week” (BSW). The well-known Swiss university ETH Zurich contributed to the BSW and invited us to give on November, 7 a presentation about Blockchain and Sustainability and Science at the Berlin Science Week and join the panel “Understanding Blockchain”, which covered opportunities, limitations and real use-cases of blockchains.
The location was very much “Berlin Style” a destroyed building, which hosted an underground club, where the event took place. Blockchain and tokens were discussed as one of the tools to measure sustainability and make the SDGs actionable.
The panel was moderated by
Mariette DiChristina, Editor in Chief of the well-known science magazine Scientific American and featured:
Dr. Marcus M. Dapp (Computational Social Science, ETH Zurich)
Mark Ballandies (Computational Social Science, ETH Zurich)
Dr. Sönke Bartling (Founder of Blockchain For Science, Berlin) and
Sven Laepple (Founder ASTRATUM).
Watch the panel video here.
Marcus and Mark presented their noteworthy work on cryptoeconomics and tokens (See ETH December workshop below for more details).
Sven presented some blockchain use-cases as well our project TRACY. TRACY is a new approach to provide traceability and transparency in the textile supply chain. Our aim is to provide with TRACY efficiency gains for enterprises, traceability and transparency for customers and business and achieve sustainable goals by using distributed ledger technologies and applying new socio-economic models.
TRACY is closing the loop by connecting people in developing countries to brands/retailers and hence the final costumers.
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ASTRATUM “Executive Blockchain Dine and Talk”, Berlin
Once again, we invited to our “Executive Blockchain Dine and Talk” in Berlin.
This time, we invited Regine Haschka, CEO of Seedlab and advisor of the IOTA foundation and Didier Goepfert from Streamr to our blockchain diner with board members of a large financial group.
Seedlab is a specialist for digital innovation and an expert in community platforms.
IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger that is being built to power the future of the Internet of Things (IoT) with feeless microtransactions and data integrity for machines.
Streamr is creating an open source platform for a free and fair exchange of the world’s realtime data via a blockchain-backed data Marketplace
We also welcomed Jens Brandes, digital transformation and innovation expert from the ADG.
During these “dine and talks”, executives and representatives of the blockchain eco system get an opportunity to exchange ideas and learn from each other — while enjoying great food and wines.
SAP’s “Outside the Block”
It was great to be invited to the enterprise blockchain diner after SAP’s “Outside the Block” conference in Berlin. There is really a need for closer collaboration and exchange between public and corporate blockchain spaces. Great discussions and insights into enterprise blockchain projects and frameworks by Manuela Godeck, Vodafone Global Finance Innovation.
Blockchain interoperability will play an important role in bridging the gap and connecting the private and permissioned enterprise chains to the public networks acting as a trust machine.
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Revision Summit 2018, Berlin
The Revision Summit brought together a pretty wide audience, not just around blockchain, but around the topics of AI, IoT, Art and many others. We were invited by Ela Kagel, Supermarkt, and Peter Harris, Resonate.is to be part of their roundtable about alternative governance and cooperatives.
Great and lively discussions around challenges of governance and its necessity, when things break. Staking as a means of governance via incentives was discussed in context to our project TRACY.
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The European Blockchain Startups Summit, Frankfurt
The “European Blockchain Startups Summit” was organized by the Frankfurt School of Management Blockchain Center and EU-Startups.com. The aim was to bring together around 300 entrepreneurs, investors, and blockchain technology service providers from across Europe and to foster relationships.
Sven Laepple was one of the high-profile entrepreneurs and investors to be on a panel about the blockchain ecosystem.
The event showcased a pitch battle for a selection of the hottest European blockchain-based startups with a prize package. The one-day event was a fantastic opportunity to network, and an ideal meeting point for aspiring entrepreneurs and investors, who want to build blockchain companies. It also count on the participation of high-profile entrepreneurs and investors among the speakers:
- Vanessa Grellet, Executive Director of ConsenSys
- Marjan Delatinne, Global Head of Banking at Ripple
- Thomas Hessler, Blockchain Investor
- Nikola Stojanov, Chief Business Development Officer of æternity
- Prof. Dr. Philipp Sandner, Head of Frankfurt School Blockchain Center
- Marc Taverner, Blockchain Global Ambassador at Bitfury
- Sven Laepple, Founder of ASTRATUM
- Patrick Lowry, CEO and a Managing Partner of Iconiq Holding
- Sergio Pereira, co-founder and CTO of Tech HQ
- Klaudius Heda, international counsel at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP
- Timo Dreger, strategy and investor relations at MyBucks
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Chain2Sustain Conference, Berlin by BMZ and GIZ
Gleb Dudka presented our venture TRACY at the Chain2Sustain conference in Berlin, organized by the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the GIZ Blockchain Lab.
Heinz Zeller, Head of Sustainability and Logistics at HUGO BOSS dialed in and outlined the pilot project in Egypt with 6,600 farmers, potentially scaling up to 336,0000, where TRACY will hopefully pilot.
The pilot is supported by UNIDO, the Italian Agency for Development, the Egypt Ministry of Trade and Industry, the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), Helvetas and COTTONFORLIFE.
Blockchain is the technology, underpinning the data integrity and data sharing in supply chains. Our vision is the incentivation of data sharing by applying cryptoeconomics. Having value staked in the system, stakeholders are prevented from acting dishonestly. Interesting discussions about tokens addressing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In addition, some productive workshop sessions afterwards!
December 2018
Cryptoeconomics for Smart Human Coordination, Expert Workshop
Out of the dynamics within the distributed ledger and blockchain ecosystem is emerging cryptoeconomics as a new discipline. Some think of it as new scientific field, others as an engineering method. In any case, it is a complex and interdisciplinary domain that combines elements of economics, cryptography, complexity science and others and therefore is rather complex.
According to Vlad Zamfir, Ethereum, cryptoeconomics are “A formal discipline that studies protocols that govern the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in a decentralized digital economy. Cryptoeconomics is a practical science that focuses on the design and characterization of these protocols.”
The ETH Zurich invited to this private expert workshop. Some of the participants were
Markus Dapp and Mark Ballandies, both computational science researchers from the ETH Zurich, Max Rösner from the TU Munich, Kris Paruch from the Institute of Cryptoeconomics at the WU Vienna, Markus Zimmermann from the Research Institute for Art & Technology (RIAT) Vienna, Elad Verbin from Berlin Innovation Ventures, Nina Siedler from the law practice DWF (Thanks to DWF, who were so kind to host the workshop) and Sven Laepple from ASTRATUM. Sven runs since 2017 a large cryptoeconomics meetup with 700 members in Berlin. Though 2018 was more about “BUIDL”, we envisage a program in 2019.
We discussed methodological approaches, cryptoeconomic primitives, critique of the concepts of Cryptoeconomics and Token Engineering, best practices, show cases, the role of modeling, simulation, and experiments.
Marcus Dapp and Mark Ballandies presented their very helpful work, proposing a taxonomy and classification. Read their paper “Decrypting Distributed Ledger Design — Taxonomy, Classification and Blockchain Community Evaluation” here. Find plenty of useful information about “Building Blocks : Cryptoeconomic Primitives and Higher-Level Patterns” here. Also make sure to read Outlier Ventures’ excellent report “Token Economy Creation.”
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True Global Ventures “Disrupt Finance”
We had been invited by Dušan Stojanovic, founder of True Global Ventures (TGV), to attend their conference “Disrupt Finance” in Zurich. This time, their event took place at the Trust Square, the blockchain co-working space in Zurich.
Dušan, founder of TGV, gave an update on their activities around the globe and TGV’s progress to have serial entrepreneurs as local point of contacts to identify truly promising projects on any continent.
True Global Ventures 4 is a Global Blockchain Equity fund is that invests in Serial Entrepreneurs in over 30 cities.
TGV just announce its 4th
Global Blockchain Competition. Application Opening Date is January 2019 (At the earliest). Semifinals / Preselection is January 2019, whileFinals are in February 2019. Cash prizes up to USD 5000-15000.
The blockchain categories are:
a) Infrastructure
b) Financial Services
c) Artificial Intelligence / Data Analytics
d) Entertainment (Gaming, Media)
Details can be found here.
It was interesting to listen to the panels and discuss with investors about crypto and blockchain. Oliver Bussmann, president of the cryptovalley association and former UBS and SAP top executive gave his outlook for next year. Cleary, the so called STO’s were a major topic. STO stands for Security Token Offerings and are technically token sales like ICO’s, but with the difference that the tokens are securities and thus backed by assets or debt-based. There is already a very dynamic STO eco-system. The expectation is that 2019 will see the infrastructure for STO’s being deployed and 2020 the year, where we will see STO’s gaining attention.
Top jurisdictions for crypto and blockchain projects in context of ICO’s and STO’s were:
- Singapore (Embedded in dynamic Asia, young workforce and strong focus on all things Fintech)
- Switzerland (Most experienced eco-system and regulator FINMA)
- France (Due to new legislation, introduced by the French government and the size of its economy)
Of course, there are other noteworthy jurisdictions you need to consider for token sales or DAO’s, like Malta for the introduction of the “technical agreement” as third legal person, Liechtenstein for its “passporting” of compliant blockchain services in the EU, Bermudas for its recent focus on custody intensive blockchain business and Gibraltar amongst others.
We recommend any party, interested in token sales, to read the excellent report “Initial Coin Offerings: The Top 25 Jurisdictions and their Comparative Regulatory Responses,” which has recently been published in Vol. 1, Nr. 1 of the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law & policy. The Author, Prof. Wulf Kaal, Professor at University of Saint Thomas School of Law and Director of the Private Investment Funds Institute in Minneapolis codes the regulatory responses of the top 25 ICO jurisdictions in the world and provides a comparative analysis of their respective regulatory actions.
Besides, we came in Zurich across an interesting art exposition at the Opera Gallery, featuring the artist Andy Denzler. His series “Urban Perspective” played with our visual experiences, which are shaped by our intensive usage of digital devices. He used afaik acrylic paint to come up with a “glitch” effect that is a popular filter to give digital artifacts some “digital patina.” This is interestingly contrasting with the selection of his motives of fragile humans and pastel colors.
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SRH Hochschule, Berlin: Blockchains 2018, Reality Check and Prospects
The year-long bear market has given us a great opportunity to catch our breath, sober up and critically assess where we are today and how far away the Web3 vision is.
Blockchains as of today are facing multiple challenges and limitations. These have technological, business, legal and cross-disciplinary characteristics.
Gleb Dudka presented current challenges of DLT to a master students class at the university SRH Hochschule Berlin. We believe the key to most of the existing challenges in blockchains is interoperability, enabling network effects and blockchain experimentation. Gleb made the case of Polkadot Network as the most prominent project to address those, especially in the enterprise setting. Substrate was also mentioned as tool for blockchain innovation.
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Technical University TU Berlin TRACY Workshop
On Dec 19th, we held together with Marco Schletz from the TU Berlin and United Nations a workshop about transparency and sustainability with TU Berlin master class students.
We presented and discuss various SDGs and challenges in supply chains in context of our project TRACY. The well prepared students gave us very valuable feedback.
Much going on. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all believers, hodlers and buidlers! May 2019 be more generous to crypto than 2018. Keep calm and BUIDL!
Hasta pronto. Yours, ASTRATUM
ASTRATUM is a blockchain boutique, developing value in the Distributed Economy.
Corporate Innovation: We develop innovative next generation solutions, blockchain strategies, help investors to deal with crypto assets and bring with “blockchain dine & talks” the world of crypto and blockchain and executives and managers together.
Our team rely on experts with outstanding professional experience and the necessary skillset to address the interdisciplinary challenges, coming with the cryptoeconomy. We believe that decentralized tech like blockchain is a game changer, and that a blue ocean strategy is the best approach to develop meaningful innovation. We also believe that Distributed Business is the future.
Ventures: Besides corporate innovation, we develop together with partners our own ventures. For our ventures, we are collaborating with investors and team up with exceptional individuals or teams.
We are proud to be founding member of the Blockchain Association Germany (Bundesverband Blockchain) and member of European Council of ICO Self-regulation as well as the Distributed Sky Alliance. ASTRATUM is also Industry Partner of the Technical University TU Berlin and runs since 2016 blockchain events and since early 2017 a meetup about cryptoeconomics in Berlin with nearly 700 members.
