It’s a Wonderful Life in Blockchain
I would have never believed that I would leave a technology conference reminiscing about a classic black and white movie. But there I was riding the train out of SF, catching quick glances of fleeting buildings and joyously playing scenes in my mind from the film It’s a Wonderful Life.
For the few that haven’t seen the movie, it follows James Bailey, a family businessman entrenched in the struggle to sustain his enterprise in the face of a greedy banker. Thankfully, through the selfless help of his fellow townspeople, James was able to avert financial crisis and truly realize his own impact to the community at the town.
While reflecting on the Caltrain, I discovered parallels in the movie’s community of townsfolk and the people I met at SF Blockchain Week. During SF Blockchain Week, each person I met was paradoxically similar and different. Everybody stood up for their beliefs in the world of blockchain whether it was the practicality of scalability solutions, the limits of blockchain applications, or reconciling decentralized architectures with traditional centralized models. At many points, people’s beliefs clashed with each other, but unlike the polarizing discussions held in other spheres, the blockchain community had a great sense of unity; everybody was open-minded to novel ideas. People took pride in their work and stood up for their beliefs, but the community took greater pride in supporting a space of open intellectual thought.
This is the community I want to be a part of.
Before I go any deeper into my experience at SF Blockchain Week, for the reader who missed it, I wanted to give a brief summary of the events.
SF Blockchain ran from October 5th to October 12th and my experience consisted of 3 core events:
- EthSF: an EthGlobal held hackathon that brought together a ton of great companies and people in the Ethereum blockchain space to create and ideate on ideas with Ethereum.
- SF Blockchain Week Epicenter: a 2 day event where great talent from varying companies, academic institutions, and careers came together to bring out their thoughts on the blockchain industry and highlight their visions for the industry.
- Cryptoeconomics and Security Conference: an event held by Dekrypt Capital focused around more technical topics than Epicenter
EthSF
From the minute I flew in, I was consumed with excitement to meet the companies I’d been following online. At the hackathon, I was fortunate to have teamed up with awesome college developers from NTU Singapore and Rice University, from whom I learned about the amazing blockchain initiatives on their campuses.
I had the good fortune of chatting with most of the companies and hackers participating in the event. Although it would take a multi-part blog to capture all the awesome conversations I had at EthSF, I wanted to share some of my favorites here.
When I asked Set Protocol’s Andrew Soong about his advice on a career in blockchain, I was pleasantly surprised by how strongly he felt about the need for startup efforts to arise from college campuses. He brought up the industry’s need for young and new talent to help push the future of applications on top of the infrastructural companies founded today.
After hearing Nadav Hollander, Dharma Protocol’s CEO, speak on their company and their vision, I was blown away by their ambition and their focus on a unique but pervasive financial asset class: debt. Nadav highlighted the challenges of tokenizing debt and the future features and events that need to occur for tokenized debt to become a staple financial asset in the blockchain space. Nadav was extremely excited about the future of different players in the blockchain debt economy and looks forward to the varying projects that can be build with their protocol.
The Epicenter
After catching my breath from the intensity of EthSF, I headed over to Hilton Union Square to meet up with Nach, Blockchain at Michigan president, and Lyn Wan, a Michigan alum who works in the blockchain space.
Avichal Garg, a partner at Electric Capital, spoke on the collapse of trust over the recent decade. He brought up fascinating data points on the growing distrust of varying nation’s populace on media, their government, and large corporations. Blockchain, to him, is a step in the right direction to potentially rectify an era of distrust. By creating applications and products that focus more on the user and their ownership of their data and wealth, we can see a new era of organizations and reformed governments that have been avenues to interact with their respective populaces. Avichal, as an investor, is eager to find the next generation of companies and foundations who are tackling this problem head on.
On day two, our group joined a small Meetup for breakfast and chat with the CEOs of Civic, Brave, and Solana. They brought up fascinating points on consumer’s relationship with their digital products and how technology can rectify the imbalance between today’s users and big tech companies.
At that Meetup, I was able to meet someone close to my age: a recent grad from the University of Chicago named Calvin Chu. Calvin brought up the concept of a spectrum to highlight a company’s organizational design. On one side stands a centralized organization, similar to companies today, and on the other side stand a decentralized organization empowered by governance mechanisms. He highlighted the challenges that organizations face on the extreme sides of the spectrum, and the need for organizations to adopt the ideologies of organizations opposite to themselves in the centralized-decentralized spectrum. His points on the subject bring out a fascinating discussion on the future of companies, fundraising, and organizations within blockchain and beyond.
CESC
At the Cryptoeconomics and Security Conference, I further explored governance during a talk with Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon. With hundreds of enthusiasts listening in, Buterin and Poon spoke about blockchain governance, the future of Ethereum layer 2 solutions, and the varying initiatives under the Plasma umbrella. It was fascinating to hear Vitalik’s thoughts on the current state of governance caused by unique problems in the blockchain industry, and upon reflection, his words highlighted its dynamic nature. Many blockchain applications are still under development; blockchain technology is not a silver bullet, and it faces just as many challenges, if not more, as other ground breaking industries.
Later into the day, we heard a great talk by Glen Weyl, author of the book Radical Markets, about his thoughts on leveraging blockchain to create hyper-liquid societies. His ideas profoundly challenged traditional thinking on capitalism and markets. While many can and will disagree with his ideas, his work has stirred up many, myself included, intellectually on the premise on radical designs for markets. Right after his talk, he was joined by Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist & computer philosophy writer, to chat about the concepts of digital identity and rights, and their thoughts on the internet’s development and what led to today’s market of big tech companies. The conversations highlighted the asymmetric relationship of users and companies.
Moving Forward
Attending SF Blockchain Week was such a humbling experience. I was astonished by the talent and the open-mindedness of the people I met at the event; everybody recognizes the dynamic nature of the industry and that nobody really has a right answer. Feeling empowered to pave my own path in this new space, I look forward to seeing just how much progress we’ll make till next year.
Thanks to Blockchain at Michigan, ConsenSys, and Lyn Wan of NewDo Blockchain Lab for making this experience possible for me.
-David Sun
