An Impromptu Binance Labs Devcon4 Meetup in Prague
Last week, Binance Labs hosted our first meetup in Prague. Over 350 attendees gathered in a World War II-era bunker for two engaging panel discussions. For those who are not familiar with us, Binance Labs is the venture arm of Binance with the mission to realize the full potential of blockchain technology.
Devcon4 is the annual conference for the Ethereum community organized by the Ethereum Foundation. This time, the community gathered in Prague for a week of exciting presentations, announcements, workshops, and parties (one in a castle, no less). The official sessions at Devcon usually end around 5pm, and each night after the main sessions, there would be 5–10 off-conference events, that people can choose to attend, organized by various projects or organizations. Here is a screenshot of a weekly calendar view from socialeventsdevcon4@gmail.com, a very helpful aggregation of all the events happening at devcon4:
We thought Binance Labs could do our part in providing a platform to foster collaboration and discussions from developers with different perspectives. Encouraged by some attendees that we met, we decided to organize a meetup.
As we had limited time to get our act together, we were only able to announce our meetup details to the public a day before the actual event. Several folks actually asked us if we were trying to do a stealth meetup, as it wasn’t listed on any public event boards. But we definitely were not trying to be secretive! The truth is that the idea of contributing an event to Devcon4 was only conceived during the weekend. We had less than two days to prepare for it, and we really needed every hour before the announcement to narrow down all of the details.
For those of you who know about the Binance ecosystem, you might have heard that we have a very devoted and capable group of “ secret army” called Binance Angels. For this event, we relied on three of our best Angels: Batu, Lukas, and Mario. The three of them flew into Prague from different parts of Germany on Monday, scouted out locations in Prague with little prior knowledge of the city and even less idea on how the meetup would eventually turn out. It is still magical to me how they were able to pull everything together in three days, but Batu, Lukas, and Mario found their ways to secure a space, cater food and drinks, enlist a photographer and market the meetup to attendees of Devcon4, while also attending devcon4 at the same time!
The main reason that we were able to attract a full house (and overflow audience in the cafe next door) is due to the two sessions of really exceptional panelists. In the first panel, we brought together technologists working on different parts of next-gen blockchain technologies . For the second panel, we went back to the basics and reflect on the why we are working on blockchain in the first place, and what ideologies should guide us.
Here are our panelist line-up:
Looking Forward in Blockchain Innovations:
Ben Edgington, Researcher at PegaSys
Eli Ben-Sasson, Chief Scientist at Starkware
Emin Gün Sirer, Founder of Ava
Fredrik Harrysson, CTO at Parity
Nicolas Bacca, CTO at Ledger
Arthur Falls, Director of Communications at DFINITY (Moderator)
Ethereum as a Political Movement
Amir Taaki, Autonomous Polytech
Vlad Zamfir, Ethereum Foundation
Ashley Tyson, Web3 Foundation (Moderator)
We felt very honored that our distinguished panelists generously gave their time and shared their thoughts that evening. We would also like to thank our friend Shawn, Mike and Ashley who were invaluable in helping with putting together the panels. (Read more about the panel discussions here.)
We appreciate everyone who came out to spend the evening with us. It was a magical evening in a unique bunker where everyone felt the spirit of the blockchain revolution. At Binance Labs, we hope to continue our support for more exchange of ideas and perspectives in the blockchain community.
