Blockchains, Breakthroughs, and Humanoid Robots: Highlights from Ethereal SF
A recap of blockchain’s big weekend in San Francisco, as the decentralized world descended on The Bay Area for the second Ethereal Summit.
With the early morning October sun arching over the San Francisco Bay, the entry line for Ethereal SF stretched around the Terra Gallery well before the event commenced this past Friday. Inside, the auditorium, hued in purple and lilac, was packed; bodies lining the walls and smushed into the rear of the room. The energy was palpable, and even fervent bouts of shushing struggled to stymy the excitement from rippling through the audience as Ethereal co-creators Amanda Gutterman, Saraswathi Subarraman, and Jesse Grushack kicked off proceedings.
Ethereal veers from conference convention, even in the emergent blockchain space, by placing an emphasis on the social and human elements of the tech and movement. Fittingly, the audience was a varied mix of developers and ideators, capitalists and disruptors, tech veterans and wide-eyed neophytes of all walks of life. The discussions on show ranged in topic from finance markets to AI robots to how to deal with misogynist trolls on Reddit (hint: don’t feed them!).
The morning sessions focused on the mechanics of finance, investment, and global inclusion. The rise of decentralized exchanges like Airswap and Shapeshift’s Prism took center stage as they lead the charge away from centralized exchanges, many of which are prone to the same pitfalls of the conventional finance markets to which their model is beholden. Advice and guidance was offered from notable cognoscente figures like champion serial investor Gil Penchina (whose Pryze platform is being built in collaboration with ConsenSys), Sheila Warren of the World Economic Forum, and Spencer Montgomery, who heads up blockchain development at Microsoft.
Of utmost importance as we define this space and the world of the future in a more representative image is encouraging the equality of voices heard within our community. Ethereal SF hosted a program with 50% female speakers, with Bancor’s Galia Benartzi, ConsenSys Ventures Managing Partner Kavita Gupta, and female-presenting humanoid robot Sophia Hanson all playing central roles in this edition. ConsenSys aims to lead from the front in not just tech and business development, but in creating a social ecosystem that works for us all.
Steve Waterhouse, lead on the freshly-announced Orchid Protocol, traced the path of government surveillance from Julius Caesar to Edward Snowden, offering the sobering reflection that “the internet is a modern day panopticon,” before introducing Orchid, a modular anonymization tool that dApps and projects can utilize to secure the free movement of its users online.
Despite the Fire Marshal’s concerns about the ever-swelling size of the audience, Ethereal picked up with the same pacy tempo after lunch. Harrison Hines of Token Foundry, the advisory and consulting arm of ConsenSys, laid out best practices for token launches. “Over 2000 ICOs were launched in September alone,” he stated, before listing the myriad methods through which Token Foundry ensures the long-term success, fairness, transparency, and efficacy of its partner projects. With the universe of blockchain rapidly expanding, it’s outfits like Token Foundry that will look to ensure we stay the course on creating impactful projects and initiatives that cut through the increasingly voluminous noise of this industry.
Downstairs at the Hackathon, teams of students from UC Berkeley whittled away at the finishing touches of their projects. Three finalists were able to present their projects, themed around the notion of “governance,” before the winning prize was awarded to the team behind Donneth, a lithely-designed accounting application. Congratulations to the Donneth team and everyone who participated!
Joseph Poon, co-creator of the hotly anticipated Plasma platform alongside Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, hopped on stage to break down the function of the utility. In addition to sharding, Plasma will unlock the scaling potential of the Ethereum network with public-private blockchain connectivity, what he called “nested blockchains” or “blockchains in blockchains.” He predicted this will be a major conversation in 2018, before adding: “The goal here is not billions of transactions, but billions of users.”
In what must be a first, and something that could only happen in San Francisco, Ethereal SF debuted a meditation station or Zen Zone, an outside area away from the hubbub and an opportunity for a quiet, meditative moment with massages and sound baths. You gotta remember to make a moment for yourself, even when you’re trying to change the world!
Peter Diamandis, founder of Xprize and Asteroid Mining startup Planetary Resources, roused the audience with an optimistic rallying cry: “We are living in the most extraordinary time in human history…We are going to create more wealth in the next ten years than we have in the past century…It’s extraordinary. But with extraordinary power comes extraordinary responsibility.”
Ben Goertzel, bedecked in a shirt printed with a Salvador Dali painting and a zebra-print cowboy hat, wowed the audience first by introducing Sophia Hanson, the world’s most expressive humanoid robot — and now a fully fledged robot citizen of Saudi Arabia — and then with an announcement about SingularityNET. Goertzel’s goal is the development of “artificial general intelligence,” or robots that can actually think creatively to solve problems, and SingularityNET aims to do this by creating a cloud of artificial intelligence knowledge built on the blockchain, “an ecosystem of brains,” that when connected, will offer a real chance at interoperability between the as-yet disconnected AI brains around the world.
The program climaxed with a keynote address by Ethereum and ConsenSys co-founder Joseph Lubin, whose insights are always eagerly awaited by the worldwide blockchain community. In an update to his sprawling and emotional address at the first Ethereal in May, Lubin laid out the expansive suite of projects currently in production at ConsenSys’ Brooklyn office and beyond, alongside the remarkable breadth of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. With ConsenSys applications in fields ranging from healthcare to creative rights management, worldwide energy grids and countless essential infrastructural platforms, Lubin noted that self-sovereign digital identity is at the center of everything, a development that ConsenSys project uPort is tackling head on.
“None of the ideas here are entirely new, what’s exciting is that they’re now possible,” Lubin noted, before adding that decentralized applications and economies built on the blockchain have the potential to rewrite the relationships between businesses and consumers from adversarial to collaborative, while offering billions of people around the world a chance to achieve their own version of happiness. His tone was ambitious, but focused, a revolutionary firmly based in reality, and his words were a rousing reminder of how much work still needs to be done for blockchain technology to fulfill its astounding potential.
Technology over the past two decades has flattered to deceive in regards to its impact on the world. Although we have made remarkable strides forward in the capability of our products, the world they have created reflects the same inequalities and misgivings that have held us back for centuries. What was made clear at Ethereal SF, however, is that blockchain provides a chance to define a movement that represents all of us as equals: man, woman, wealthy, poor, human, robot, whomever. Even more than all the outlandish token launch valuations, incredible protocol advances, and noisy media hype, that is the notion that presents the most important takeaway from Ethereal SF.
At the close of the day’s proceedings, the next Ethereal Brooklyn was announced for May 2018, a two-day festival of blockchain culture that will incorporate talks, panels, installations, music, and art, with an expanded program that will show the blockchain world what “scaling” really means…
Until then, check out EtherealSummit.com, on Facebook, and Twitter.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of ConsenSys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum,please visit our website.
