ETH East: Tokyo Drifting through Japan Blockchain Week
Notes from Unblock Japan, b.tokyo, and the latest on Civil, Codefi, and decentralised finance.
by Riley Kim, ConsenSys Asia-Pacific PR Lead.
Konnichiwa! Hajimemashite! Douzo Yoroshiku!
Good day, glad to meet you for the first time, and I look forward to your guidance. I can also count to 100 in Japanese, but this is pretty much the extent of my knowledge of the language. Sumimasen to my Sensei.
Straight over from Seoul, we got to Tokyo for Japan Blockchain Week. Like South Korea, Japan wields considerable influence in the cryptocurrency market: figures from July indicated the Japanese yen was responsible for 11% of bitcoin trades. ConsenSys has always been keenly observing Japan, including John Lilic, our colleague who works out of our Manila office and helps drive business growth in Asia and around the world.
As with many of us at ConsenSys, John wears more than one hat, and has been actively promoting the company and Ethereum in Japan. Here are his blog posts from 2016 that showcase the diverse community and scenic views from the Land of the Rising Sun: The Rise of Ethereum Part 1 and Part 2, and his presentation (in Japanese) at Slush Tokyo 2018.
Be in Tokyo
We kick off with b.tokyo, hosted by N.Avenue and Coindesk Japan, focusing on the idea of “Value Revolution” to lead us into a new era. Matthew Iles, CEO and founder of Civil, took to discussing how tokenisation could incentivise the evolution of media.
Civil is a community-owned journalism network backed by ConsenSys. For the unawares, Venture Beat summarizes well what Civil does and hopes to achieve. In essence, Civil is deploying a blockchain token registry to build up a list of credible news sites. Using the economics of a token curation registry, the Civil community of reporters will apply their collective journalistic eye to help ensure legitimate and good reporting.
A challenge system is built-in, so that the members can call out inaccuracies. However, the beauty of token economics also helps prevent frivolous abuse, as members must stake their tokens and flagged entries are then voted on by the community. The desired outcome is a virtuous self-sustaining cycle of credible and trustworthy reporting, with the aim of reallocating incentives back to newsrooms.
This raison d’etre is behind Iles’ comments at his panel, which was moderated by Kuniyoshi Mabuchi (Director of Facebook Japan), alongside fellow panelist Julien Genestoux (CEO of Unlock) that works to empower and compensate content creators fairly.
The opening question around Civil and Unlock’s motivations saw different points of departure that converge on the same goal. Genestoux looks at how the existing metric of measurement, which is clicks, resulted in click-bait behaviour. This ranged from relatively benign practices of making readers click through multiple pages for one piece of content, to outright fake news. To him, the value of a good piece of content should originate from the reader or user.
In founding Civil, Iles wanted to solve what he sees as the problem of today’s internet — that it is utterly broken. What started as a platform for the people to accommodate diverse thoughts and opinions has become a tool to mislead and confuse. He sees blockchain and distributed technology as a paradigm shift to break us out of an environment controlled by the few and back to one that’s owned by many.
On the issue of incentives, Iles called out the internet giants (ahem.. Google…. cough cough… Facebook). Their business models rely on users spending the most time possible on their channels in order to obtain and sell the most user data possible to advertisers. He puts it plainly that “the accuracy of the content is not of concern.” Iles is concerned by the lack of recognition of how serious things are — beyond acknowledging the bad of internet scams — governments and societies are in conflicts because of fake news. Iles remains optimistic that blockchain and decentralisation will be powerful tools for responsible journalism, and reverse the decline of good reporting where newsrooms shutter after losing revenue and valuable readership to internet giants.
Fast, Furious, Frictionless
True to the adage that Asia never sleeps, we were at Unblock Tokyo on a Saturday morning. Organised by regional media group Asia Blockchain Review, the programming held at local community space BINARYSTAR was a full day of content discussing protocol and applications to fast track the ecosystem. Again, a full Saturday : )
Kazuaki Ishiguro, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance’s Head of Japan, succinctly brought home the point that businesses and consumers want the same thing — a simpler financial transaction experience.
This helped the guests in attendance have a better appreciation of DeFi (decentralised finance) and why the concept has been trending over the past six months, as Ejaaz Amahadeen, Global Token Design Lead from ConsenSys Codefi had his fireside chat with Nicole Nguyen, regional head of Asia Blockchain Review.
The audience easily related with our existing system of financial transactions that can operate ‘normally’ — we are all very familiar with the process. The premise of DeFi is a growing set of financial transactions and capabilities developing on blockchain, primarily Ethereum, that supports all these transactions with programmable smart contracts and dApps.
Nguyen asked if DeFi is merely hype — a fair ask with how buzzwords have been tossed around following booms and busts cycles like ICOs and now possibly IEOs. In response, Ejaaz laid out the wider background that not only does it make sense to put some of our financial onto decentralised platforms, DeFi itself has already been operating and generating value for a good few years — e.g in the form of MakerDAO’s DAI stablecoin, which has accrued $350 million in staked ETH.
With newer entries such as dydx and Compound providing services like lending on decentralised platforms, there are now approximately over 60 DeFi applications up and running. On the surface, that count may seem small when compared to the ICOs of 2017, but in actuality the value created by DeFi substantially outweighs other products and applications (and with less smoke!).
For a well-researched look at the proposition of ETH and how players such as dydx and Compound meld into the wider Ethereum space, check out this post by David Hoffman.
Another exchange which I found especially useful was the question of how do we involve the institutional financial stakeholders? The DeFi conversation cannot exclude standing institutions if it is to gain wider adoption. Ejaaz takes on two perspectives here: firstly, the blockchain community has always been excited about new ways to access financial services, and the reception for DeFi has been encouraging. As for institutions, their interests are piqued, but they want to learn how best to interact with a system of decentralised finance. This is perfectly justified as conventional institutions place a premium on brand safety and risk management.
It then becomes a shared responsibility to advance the interaction. In order to enable that, it is important to deploy tools that help ease the process and risk management to allow the transition. ConsenSys Codefi was born to fulfill the need for infrastructure tools to help clients enjoy their DeFi transformation with less friction. Some of our ongoing work remain confidential, but Ejaaz was able to share what Codefi has done for France’s Mata Capital to open up their real estate investment fund into a greater liquidity pool, and also in the UK to assist Her Majesty’s Land Registry in transferring property titles and deeds using DeFi.
Nobert Gehrke, who runs FinTech Japan, generously transcribed the session here.
ConsenSys Japan Enterprise Showcase
In the spirit of keeping things fast, ConsenSys Japan held a pre-Devcon enterprise ethereum showcase of select platforms and product suites, including Kaleido, PegaSys, MythX, and of course Codefi. This was made possible with the help of our local ecosystem partner HashHub. We were delighted ConsenSys founder Joe Lubin gave an opening note, and also to have Nomura Research Institute join us at the event.
A recent IDC report indicated that Japan country will be the fastest growing market for blockchain in the world over the next four years. This special meetup is designed for the local business community, catering to their requirements as Japanese enterprises experiment more and more on the best use case for them, with over 100 participants from technology, financial services, think-tank and media attending
We also had on Yoshihito Aso, the lead engineer from the capital markets platform “ibet.” ibet links issuers with investors and is backed by Japanese financial group Nomura Holdings and Nomura Research Institute.
If you are based in Tokyo but weren’t able to attend, please do reach out to me or our Japan team! Every business is at a different stage and each industry poses unique challenges and opportunities — we would love to do a special session for you.
Fun Facts
The economy of post-war Japan soared as automobiles to appliances were exported around the world. Brands like Sony, Hitachi, Toyota became household names and the nation became known as an industrial powerhouse balanced with a distinct culture from its arts to anime.
Today it is the world’s third largest economy, although as with many other developed nations, Japan has seen its economy slowing alongside an aging demographic. In response, the government has increased efforts into reviving growth on all fronts as the country ushers in the new Reiwa (fortunate harmony) Era under Emperor Naruhito, while hosting a swath of international events.
DevCon5, the annual conference for Ethereum developers was held in Osaka, the second-largest city in Japan that also held the G-20 Summit in June this year.
The Rugby World Cup is happening right now across the country, and the national team Brave Blossoms has been on a winning streak. This will be followed by the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics next year, expected to generate tons of publicity, tourism and business opportunities.
In case you missed it, here is Japan Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s hugely popular special appearance as Super Mario during the closing ceremony of the 2016 Rio Games.
Random Rumblings
Enjoy this pic of a trail of supercars I took at Ginza after Unblock Tokyo — you know this is real because of my bad photography skills in capturing almost neither cars nor context. Also, is Fast & Furious 3: Tokyo Drift the most understated of the series?
Bonus rant — I haven’t seen Hobbs & Shaw, and might not ever. I’m sorry but that’s a hard fork.
Next up: Osaka for DevCon5!
🌸 🌸 🌸
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.
